64°
63º | 78°
67° | 81°
Texas residents have been advised to reduce air conditioning and energy usage due to increasing temperatures following a warning from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), according to Austin News.
However, Houston business owners such as Elvira Schaefer, CFO of Roland's Swiss Bakery, a wholesale bakery that provides bread and breakfast products to hospitals, hotels and restaurants, believe this problem should never have occurred in a nation as developed as the U.S.
"We should not have problems like this in the U.S.A.," Schaefer told the Houston Daily. "This is like we live in a third world country."
While Schaefer stated that ERCOT's request for residents to save energy was not a business concern as Roland's Bakery is closed during ERCOT's suggested timeframe, she did offer one option for Texas' energy concerns.
"Cut the board's salary for every time we don't have electricity and use this money to improve the grid," Schaefer said.
In a report by the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, ERCOT claims that coal, nuclear and gas generators were responsible for 80% of the power outages in June, knocking out enough energy to power 2 million homes. However, data from the Energy Information Administration revealed that wind power did play a significant role in the June shortages, with wind generation falling by 66% in June while gas power generation increased by approximately 50% and coal and nuclear energy production remained the same.
Dr. Brent Bennett, policy director for Life:Powered, a Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) initiative, stated that Texas must prioritize reliable energy over renewable energy to ensure that “California-style blackouts do not become the norm,” according to a report by TPPF.
"Texas simply doesn’t have enough reliable electricity generators – power plants that can be counted on to produce consistently and to ramp up during peak demand," Bennett stated in the report. "Over the last five years, the Lone Star State has prematurely retired more than 5,000 MW (megawatts) in natural gas and clean coal while its population and economy grew significantly."
The TPPF report also indicated that the February grid crisis in Texas was caused by a variety of factors, including years of multibillion-dollar subsidies for renewable energy, no requirement for these sources to bear the intermittency costs they impose on the rest of the grid and the inability of scarcity pricing and limited ancillary services to offset the 50% variability in wind and solar reliability when they are most in demand.
In a report by the Lone Star Standard, Bill Peacock, policy director at the Energy Alliance, outlined the unreliability of intermittent generators like wind and solar, explaining how the winter storm not only led to increased demand but also produced weather conditions that rendered these renewable energy generators unable to operate at their already reduced expected output.
Peacock also argued against subsidies such as the Chapter 313 tax abatements in a report by Austin News, saying that such programs waste taxpayer money to support large businesses while destabilizing the grid and causing electricity production to be unpredictable. Peacock further stated that California's reliance on renewables have caused blackouts and that Winter Storm Uri was caused by similar events in Texas.
An analysis by Chuck DeVore, vice president of TPPF, reflects this report, suggesting that subsidies in the form of federal tax credits and state property tax cuts have skewed the Texas electricity market to the point where "wind generators, some owned by foreign governments, can pay the grid to take their power and still make money."