Editorial: Energy reliability still hard to provide, promise when cold weather hits

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Gov. Greg Abbott has repeatedly promised that the energy transmission problems that plagued Texas during the 2021 freeze have been fixed. This week’s outages have proved him wrong.

The “polar vortex” cold wave that has swept through the country hit Texas Monday, pushing temperatures in the Rio Grande Valley into the high 20s on Monday night and early Tuesday. Fortunately, the chill was brief, and by Wednesday local weather was more moderate.

Unfortunately, intermittent blackouts plagued the region, leaving thousands of Valley residents without electricity when many of them needed it most. Similar outages were reported across the state, including the Houston, Dallas and Marshall areas.

In most cases power was restored within a few hours. Any outage, however, warrants concern, especially when they force residents to deal with uncommonly cold conditions — conditions that in extreme cases can be deadly.

Losses of electricity at any time are more than a nuisance for many people, regardless of the weather. Many people rely on electric devices such as oxygen concentrators and health monitors and lost power can put their health at risk.

The reliability of Texas’ energy grid has been an issue since the hard freeze of February 2021 that left much of the state powerless for as long as two weeks. As many as 700 people died as a result, according to some reports.

Afterward, many members of the ironically named Energy Reliability Council of Texas resigned or were replaced, and Abbott promised improvements that would ensure that such a power crisis would never happen again. Since then, he and ERCOT have repeatedly issued assurances that extreme hot or cold conditions would not cause energy blackouts.

This week, they did, although most significant outages were regional and not statewide.

That’s little comfort, however, to residents of the Valley and elsewhere who were left in the cold.

To be sure, the state doesn’t bear sole responsibility for keeping the lights on. Individual power companies and municipal utilities also need to maintain local power lines and other energy infrastructure to keep the current running to our homes.

And while under normal conditions much of the electricity we use is generated locally, the state grid creates a network that connects all power generators and helps move it from areas that have a surplus to those who need more than they can produce. Of course, the system is taxed when statewide conditions raise demand higher than the supply.

Reviews following the 2021 freeze found that the state grid was woefully outdated and ill-equipped to employ the statewide energy network. Reports revealed that many electricity producers had stopped building new generators, or started supplying power to other states, because ERCOT simply couldn’t handle additional current through its existing infrastructure.

This week’s cold snap wasn’t extreme — we barely got at or slightly below freezing in the Valley. The failure of our energy network to handle this chill doesn’t inspire much confidence in our ability to handle harsher conditions, no matter what assurances our governor might try to offer.

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