Life:Powered director links Winter Storm Uri disaster to years of poor planning, policies

Winter Storm Uri didn’t happen in a vacuum. It was the inevitable result of years of poor planning and policies, according to Jason Isaac, director of the Life:Powered initiative at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

Uri, which occurred over the President's Day holiday weekend in February, brought record low temperatures, snow and a prolonged loss of power to millions of Texans.

The state’s grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), imposed “controlled outages” lasting several days, which kept Texans cold and in the dark.

Isaac, in a Prager U video detailing what went wrong to cause the Texas Freeze of 2021, said that “decades of misguided policies that have left the Lone Star State with an unreliable energy infrastructure” are to blame.

He said while Texans suffered needlessly, there is a silver lining in those storm clouds.

“It's a cautionary tale that the rest of the country needs to learn from,” Isaac said.

ERCOT officials said the state came within minutes from a total grid collapse before the rolling blackouts were imposed. A grid collapse could have left Texas without power for months.

At the time of the storm, a growing portion of Texas’ power consumption had become reliant on intermittent generation from wind and solar power. A recent Energy Alliance report suggests that this shift happened largely due to lawmakers creating lucrative incentives to produce wind and solar power about two decades ago. According to the report, this system of subsidies greatly benefitted wind and solar companies at the expense of more reliable energy providers.

By 2021, ERCOT reported that 28.6% of Texas’ installed generating capacity was from wind and solar. In 2020, 22.8% of the state's energy use came from wind power.

“The wind and solar companies are protected from the laws of supply and demand,” Isaac said. “They can't lose, and the fossil fuel plants can't compete. That's how out of whack the Texas electricity market has become.”

Isaac said although fossil fuel companies also receive incentives, their assistance pales in comparison.

“Renewable energy advocates love to point this out, but here's what they neglect to mention;  compared to fossil fuel companies, for every unit of electricity generated, Washington subsidizes wind 17 times and solar 75 times more,” Isaac said.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation describes its mission as "to build and promote conservative public policies." 

Over the last decade, federal subsidies for wind and solar energy totaled $71.2 billion. Subsidies for natural gas, nuclear energy and coal combined totaled $53.3 billion.

Price and energy distortions caused by the rapid growth of renewable energy generators are significantly decreasing the reliability of the Texas energy grid, research from the Energy Alliance shows. In its focus on the reliability and affordability of electricity, the Energy Alliance has been a consistent opponent of government subsidies to wind and solar companies in Texas.

Texas has subsidized wind and solar energy with $19 billion since 2006, according to research from the group. Texans pay for this through increasing electric bills and rising property taxes.

Some analysts believe that due to the heavy subsidization and incentive structures supporting wind and solar energy production, the energy market in Texas has become significantly distorted.

Subsidies have created artificially low or negative wholesale prices that push more reliable energy sources out of the market, while decreasing the deliverability of electricity. Charles McConnell, executive director of the Energy and Environment Initiative at Rice University, called the effect of these subsidies for wind and solar “devastating [to] the competitive marketplace for power in Texas.”

A new U.S. Energy Department analysis shows the United States can scale up production of solar panels, which currently provide 3% of the nation’s electricity, to 45% over the next three decades. The U.S. would double its installed solar power every year for the next four years, compared with 2020, and double it again by 2030.

Congressional Democrats and President Joe Biden call for increasingly strict regulations of thermal energy producers as well as expanding subsidies for wind and solar.

The tax credits associated with rewarding the private sector are integral to the massive expansion of wind and solar across the country, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told Yahoo Finance.

“Wind and solar get so much in subsidies they're guaranteed a profit” Isaac said. “And unlike fossil fuel producers, they're not even required to provide reliable power. It's no wonder fossil fuel plants are closing, and nuclear plants are not being built.”