The shutoff moratorium was in place for the better part of 2020 due to the crushing economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, and three now-resigned PUC commissioners reinstated it in response to the further financial hardships caused by the February winter storm. The moratorium will be lifted on June 18, two days before a forecasted hotter-than-normal summer arrives, and shutoffs can resume in the final week of the month.
/
We want to feature the voices of the people most impacted by electricity shut offs. If this news affects you, reach out to
dominic@tpr.org or leave a voicemail at (210) 615-8982.
Despite
hotter-than-normal summer temperatures in the forecast, private electricity companies are pressuring the Public Utility Commission of Texas, or PUC, to allow power shutoffs for people who haven’t paid their bills.
Many Texans are behind on electricity bills: nearly 170,000 in San Antonio and about 50,000 in Austin areas where electricity is provided by city-owned utilities. The average past-due amount is about $600.
NRG and Vistra the massive conglomerates whose subsidiaries dominate the state’s deregulated electricity market, which includes Houston and Dallas did not answer TPR s questions about how many of their customers owe money.
Tuesday, May 25: How to build a better grid
In each instance, lawmakers left
the state’s lightly regulated energy markets alone, choosing cheap electricity over a more stable system. As a result, experts say, the power grid that Texans depend on to heat and cool their homes and run their businesses has become less and less reliable and more susceptible to weather-related emergencies.
“Everyone has been in denial,” said Alison Silverstein, a consultant who works with the U.S. Department of Energy and formerly served as a senior adviser at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. “They treat each individual extreme event as a one-off, a high-impact, low-frequency event, which means, ‘I hope it doesn’t happen again.’”
Fotolia
In efforts to prevent a repeat of the February disaster that left millions without electricity, Texas policymakers continue to disagree over the cause and appropriate mitigation efforts. The blackouts from the storm led to spikes in power prices and the deaths of at least 151 people.
Republican leadership was quick to criticize renewables for the role they played in the blackouts, with Gov. Greg Abbott, R, claiming on national television that renewables caused the outages. They cannot be dispatched by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) and therefore cannot be relied upon, said state Sen. Kelly Hancock, R, who chairs the Senate Business and Commerce committee. Hancock sponsored Senate Bill (SB) 1278, which would impose reliability costs on intermittent generation.