House energy leaders promise probe of Texas power crisis, warn against vilifying resources

Leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee vowed to investigate recent widespread power outages across Texas and neighboring states that have left millions of households without electricity. But committee Democrats warned against vilifying particular energy sources, with capacity losses from the frigid winter weather spanning all resources.

"Some Republicans and conservative media outlets are peddling alternate realities," Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone, Democrat-New Jersey, said during a Feb. 18 hearing on decarbonizing the energy sector. "They are shamefully turning a crisis into an anti-renewables campaign, and they are conveniently leaving out the fact that the majority of the failures have come from fossil fuel infrastructure."

As of Feb. 18, more than 40 GW of generation in the Electric Reliability Council Of Texas was out of service amid an extreme cold snap across Texas and other southern US states in recent days. About 23.5 GW of the downed capacity in ERCOT is thermal generation, with the rest being wind and solar power facilities.

Although natural gas-fired plants represent most of the outages, some public officials, including Texas' Republican Governor Greg Abbott, singled out wind and solar plants' operational issues as key factors in the Texas energy crisis. Abbott later clarified that "every source of power that the state of Texas has, has been compromised," including gas-fueled plants.

"The fact is the power outages in Texas and other states throughout the Midwest and South are not a failure of any single generation technology," Pallone said. "Every technology has been affected, including nuclear and coal. What failed was a sector that didn't consider fully our changing climate and the extreme weather that comes with it. It was a failure to fully recognize that the 100-year storm of yesterday may now be the every 10-year storm of today."

Pallone said single-state grid operator ERCOT's "severely limited interconnection" with the rest of the country "probably didn't help matters." He also said "nothing changed" after a similar storm hit Texas and the Southwest in 2011, prompting a slate of recommendations from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corp.

"This committee will investigate the Texas crisis further and we'll see what other action we have to take based on that [FERC] report as well as what we find out today," Pallone promised.

Representative Bobby Rush, Democrat-Illinois, who chairs the Energy and Commerce Committee's energy subcommittee, said the uncharacteristically cold weather represents a "climate crisis in the state of Texas." He added, "I do intend to have hearings in the future around the failure of our energy sector to protect American citizens in the state of Texas."

Legislation coming

In the coming weeks, committee Democrats will introduce a new version of the Climate Leadership and Environmental Action for our Nation's Future Act, or CLEAN Future Act, which Pallone said will serve as "the basis for comprehensive climate action this year" from Congress. The measure, which Democrats released a draft version of in 2020, lays out a path for achieving a "100% clean economy" by 2050, including through a federal clean electricity standard.

Republicans on the committee said they agreed with the goal of bringing about a cleaner energy future but that Texas' power woes highlight the need for a transition that prioritizes grid resilience and reliability.

"We can look to America's clean energy future, but we cannot afford to rapidly transition our energy system without assurance of its reliability," said Representative Michael Burgess, Republican-Texas, who stood in at the Feb. 18 hearing for energy subcommittee ranking member Fred Upton, Republican-Michigan. "We cannot support policies that destroy entire industries or increase America's dependence on foreign sources of energy and critical minerals. I hope we can find a bipartisan consensus and keep those priorities in mind."

Burgess, however, noted that "many types of power production across all fuel types were challenged and went offline" in the Southwest in recent days.