AUSTIN: Like frozen Texas rollers under one of the worst power outages in U.S. history, the Republican governor Greg Abbott it has blamed grid operators and icy wind turbines, but has gone easier on another culprit: an oil and gas industry that is the dominant business of the state and its main political contributor.
And as the toll intensified on Saturday from a week of historic winter storms, which killed more than 20 people in Texas, electrical network who is proudly isolated from the rest of the country ignores warnings known to the state GOP leaders for years.
“He’s almost like a murder suspect who blames his right hand for committing the crime,” Democratic State Rep. James Talarico said. His Austin suburban home lost electricity for 40 hours and had no taps running Thursday, when about one in four people in Texas woke up under instructions to boil water.
Like most of the state’s 30 million residents, Talarico’s power is controlled by the network administrators of Texas Electric Reliability Council, which Abbott left again Thursday after more than 4 million people at one time were suffering stops at low freezing temperatures.
But this is not where the responsibility ends, as the power plants that power the grid were left out of line by the extreme cold and natural gas producers did not protect the wellheads or freezing lines. “ERCOT is a comfortable guy to whip,” Talarico said.
The crisis has put the fossil fuel industry producing the Texas Capitol with money in the spotlight so Abbott has not had to navigate when he ran America’s second-largest state through other disasters, including hurricanes and the ongoing pandemic. For the first time Thursday, Abbott asked Texas to order power plants to be wintered.
Oil and gas built and enriched Texas, and with it its politicians, including those who became president. But none has reaped the campaign’s contributions to the Abbott scale, which in six years has raised more than $ 150 million from donors, more than any governor in U.S. history.
Texas ’energy interests are its most important sponsors political rise, and has not ruled out White house executed in 2024. More than $ 26 million of its contributions come from the oil and gas industry, more than any other economic sector, according to an analysis by the National Institute of Money in Politics.
When the Texas grid first began to double on Monday, Abbott reacted overnight after continuing Fox News and blame solar and wind producers, at a time when natural gas, coal and the core energy systems they were responsible for almost twice as many stops.
After pressing on these comments, Abbott took a softer tone and acknowledged that all sources of power had been compromised. Frozen natural gas lines also left millions of people without electricity in Mexico.
Abbott accused ERCOT of misleading the public with messages that the network was ready for the storm.
“It’s especially unacceptable when you realize what ERCOT said in the state of Texas,” Abbott said.
ERCOT is overseen by the Texas Public Utility Commission, all three of which are appointed by Abbott. While ERCOT manages most of Texas ’power grid, the Texas commission and legislature made key policy decisions that have taken into account the ongoing crisis.
After the state’s last major freeze, during the 2011 Super Bowl in Arlington, Texas, a federal analysis found that energy producers ’procedures for wintering their equipment“ were inadequate or not being followed properly. ” in many cases. The report repeatedly cites another Texas freeze, in 1989, as a clear warning.
Protecting power generators from a harsh winter climate is critical in colder climates. In Iowa, where wind farms supply 40% of the state’s electricity, windmills have been spinning all week despite temperatures dropping as low as minus 17 degrees (minus 27 degrees Celsius) to Dec. Monks. In Texas, network officials say they can’t talk about why power generators here don’t do the same thing.
A decade ago, the Texas Failure Report listed several ways to overwinter an oil well or natural gas device and the estimated costs: installing a cold-weather production unit ($ 23,000), collect ventilated gas from an injection pump to supply a heater ($ 675) or build a fiberglass hut to shut down production equipment ($ 1,500).
Wintering of 50,000 wells (just under a third of the total number of active natural gas wells in Texas) was estimated in 2011 at a cost of up to $ 1.75 billion, a figure that would almost certainly be more today. high due to inflation. In comparison, Texas ’oil and natural gas industry paid $ 13.9 billion in taxes and royalties last year alone, according to data from the Texas Oil & Gas Association.
Republican Ryan Sitton, a former commissioner of the so-called Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates the state’s oil and gas industry, said a problem with strengthening power plants is the cost to power customers. As for Abbott at ERCOT, Sitton said, “Creating research is easy. Doing good research and taking charge of the results is where the rubber meets the road.”
He said the interests of oil and gas, which generously funded his own political campaigns, do not hold the power the public imagines.
“They make donations, sure. But unless the entire energy industry speaks with a unified voice, which almost never happens, there’s not as much influence,” Sitton said.