Almost 70% of ERCOT customers lost power during winter storm, study finds
To accurately represent the impacted population, the school surveyed residents older than 18 living in the 213 counties managed by the ERCOT. It pulled in 1,500 responses during mid-March and matched a sampling frame of the genders, ages, ethnicities, races and education levels reflective of the counties.
Black Texans were “modestly more likely” to have lost power than white Texans, according to the study.
“I’m hoping the people start recognizing that these kinds of things are going to be happening more frequently,” said Watson, a former Democratic state senator. “We need to avoid the politics of things like climate change and instead focus on the reality of what’s happening and not allow people to be shivering in their homes in Texas without power and without water.”
Hypothermia caused the deaths of a majority of people who died from the storm, but Texas health officials also said motor vehicle wrecks, “carbon monoxide poisoning, medical equipment failure, exacerbation of chronic illness, lack of home oxygen, falls and fire” all contributed to deaths.
The UH report also gathered public opinion on state policies and public officials. ERCOT and the Public Utility Commission, which oversees the grid operator, garnered low approvals of 6% and 10%, respectively.
Several ERCOT board members have resigned and its CEO was fired in the aftermath of the storm. All three PUC board members have also quit or announced their resignations since the storm.
In marathon legislative hearings, Texas lawmakers grilled public regulators and energy grid officials about how power outages happened and why Texans weren’t given more warnings about the danger.
But policy observers blamed the power system failure on the legislators and state agencies, who they say did not properly heed the warnings of previous storms or account for more extreme weather events warned of by climate scientists. Instead, Texas prioritized the free market.
A Texas Senate committee advanced a wide-ranging bill Thursday that would, among other things, mandate that power and natural gas companies upgrade their facilities to withstand severe weather. It would also create a statewide emergency alert system for future large-scale power outages.
A majority of Texans in UH’s survey supported requiring energy facilities to weatherize their equipment and face inspections from the PUC. The support for these policies were bipartisan. The alert system would help the 63% of Texans in the ERCOT area who relied on neighbors and friends for information, according to the UH study.
Executives at billionaire Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Energy have been lobbying Texas lawmakers to support an $8 billion plan to build 10 new natural gas power plants that would provide energy during peak consumption hours when demand is highest. The company wants lawmakers to create a revenue stream to Berkshire through an additional charge on Texans’ power bills.
Watson, who served in the state Senate from 2007 to 2020, was involved in legislative conversations about extreme winter weather after a harsh winter storm hit in 2011 and left Texans without power.
“In 2011, when we were asking questions about that winter storm, we were receiving promises and commitments that winterization would occur so that sort of thing wouldn’t happen again,” he said. “Clearly, those things still need to be done.”
Neelam Bohra is a junior at the University of Texas at Austin and a spring reporting fellow at the Texas Tribune.This story is published courtesy of the Texas Tribune, a nonpartisan, nonprofit media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government, and statewide issues.
