Texas Tribune: Texas senators blast regulator for power grid winterization loophole lawmakers wrote into law

Sept. 28 — The law says the state’s natural gas system won’t be required to prepare for extreme weather until 2022 at the earliest and allows companies to opt out of weatherization requirements.

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CBS Austin: Texas lawmakers grill power grid officials over winter readiness

Sept. 28 — Months after the law requiring all electricity utilities to weatherize their plants went into effect, Texas state senators want to know how close companies are to being compliant with the new regulation and barraged industry officials with questions over this during a committee hearing Tuesday.

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ABC TV 13 (Houston): Gov. Abbott announces 6 Texas Energy Reliability Council appointees to handle weather emergencies

Sept. 28 — On Tuesday, Gov. Greg Abbott announced six appointees to the Texas Energy Reliability Council, which was established in June as part of a larger bill aimed at addressing preventing energy issues during emergency situations in the wake of the February 2021 winter storm.

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ABC 8 (DALLAS): Texas Railroad Commissioners have financial stakes in the oil and gas companies that they regulate, report says

Sept. 28 — The Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates the state’s oil and gas industry, faces a call for reform in wake of February’s power grid failure that knocked out power across the state, took hundreds of lives and left the state billions of dollars in the hole.

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Texas Public Radio: Report Alleges Conflicts Of Interest Among Texas Oil And Gas Regulators

Sept.  28 — Texas oil and gas regulators make big bucks from the industries they oversee and fail to recuse themselves when arbitrating conflicts or determining penalties for companies they’ve invested in, according to a new report.

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KXAN: Renewable energy costs continue to plummet — is it time to make the switch?

Sept. 27 — The findings from this most recent report have exceeded previous predictions that the climate crisis is here and more present than ever before. Warnings were issued in the report that cited if little-to-no action continues, we may pass an irreversible tipping point that could spell disaster and extinction of many species.

 

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Utility Dive: Solar trade woes cast a pall over Biden’s climate goals

Sept. 28 — President Joe Biden’s climate goals are conflicting with his aim to bolster American manufacturing of solar panels — an industry the U.S. largely lost to China when he was vice president and one that can’t be rebuilt quickly.

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CBS Austin: Feds blame ERCOT’s lack of outside power sources for massive February outages

Sept. 23 — Texas was not alone freezing in the dark back in February. Thursday, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) held a preliminary hearing on the power crisis that hit the southern US during an extended cold snap. They counted 4,124 outages or generators failing to start due to things like what they called “freezing issues and fuel issues.” In fact, together freezing issues and fuel issues accounted for 75 percent of the unplanned generator outages.

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Utility Dive: FERC Chair Glick wants mandatory winterization standards for power plants following Texas grid failure

Sept. 24 — Stronger weatherization standards for the gas and electric sectors are needed to maintain reliability and avoid repeating a grid failure that left millions in Texas and the Midwest without power during a February cold snap, according to a joint report by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC).

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NBC DFW: Issues That Led to Catastrophic Winter Power Outages Similar to 2011, Regulators Say

Sept. 23 — The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission released preliminary findings on Thursday from its investigation into the power outages that put millions of Texans in the dark last February. That investigation revealed the problems that crippled the state were mostly the same problems that triggered big outages a decade before.

 

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