Lights Don't Stay On as Texas Gov Vowed
as Frozen Tree Limbs Take Fall for Outages
Capitol Inside
February 2, 2023
A winter storm that decked the state in ice on Wednesday gave Governor Greg Abbott a lesson in the art of making promises that you have no way to keep after leaving several hundred thousand residents stranded in the dark and cold without electricity.
"I can guarantee the lights will stay on," Abbott assured Texans in November 2021 as a result of legislation that he signed to repair a long-neglected Texas power grid that failed in the peak of a record freeze that year.
But that didn't turn out to be the case for more than 412,000 who had no power in their homes on Thursday morning - an increase of 13 percent over the number of Texas customers who had no electricity when they went to bed at midnight.
Abbott scrambled to cover his tracks with Twitter posts on Wednesday night that commended the grid for holding up with a sufficient power supply in reserve during the first day of the icy weather. The governor tweeted a supply and demand graph to validate the point.
Abbott said that falling tree limbs were to blame for residential outages. Austin accounted for 40 percent of the Texas homes that lost power in the past 24 hours - and officials here confirmed the gubernatorial diagnosis to be accurate.
Almost 167,000 homes in Austin had no electricity at midnight after the lights started going out early Wednesday morning before dawn. Nearly one-third of the municipal utility Austin Energy's customers had no lights or heat Wednesday and Thursday as the Capital City sustained the biggest singular hit. The local electric company hopes to have power fully restored by Friday night.
The governor appeared to make the case that the state performed its job admirably because the grid did not crash for most of a week like it did in the deadly Winter Uri freeze in February 2021. But the current weather event has been nothing compared to Uri by any conceivable standard.
Temperatures have hovered in the low 30s in the Austin area where the ice on streets and sidewalks had melted by mid-morning the past two days. Texas was buried under several feet of snow and ice two years ago when a typical 10-minute hike would take an hour of passage over a dangerous frozen tundra like this area has never witnessed.
There would seem to be no excuse for another grid failure in weather that's extremely mild by Winter Storm Uri standards. The current weather should be another wake up call for the climate change deniers in the GOP. The grid's performance this week is irrelevant as far as a barometer for the state's short-term future. How it will fare in really bad weather remains a mystery - and the governor demonstrated again this week that he isn't qualified to predict it.
Abbott told Texans to contact local power providers - not the state - about problems experienced with the icing. He should expect political backlash nonetheless. Most Texans don't distinguish between the different governments that are responsible for getting power to their homes. The governor by the same token didn't distinguish between state and local regulators who oversee the flow of electricity to residents when he made the blanket vow on the state's illumination that he had no way to keep.
But Abbott is the only place where the buck can stop in the minds of the vast majority of people who see the electric system as all tied into one. Regardless of state or local culpability, the lights didn't stay on as promised.
Hotels in the downtown area were filling up with travelers from nearby neighborhoods that were still blacked out late Thursday morning. The inconvenience for those who could afford it seemed ironic in light of how easy it was to get around the city in cars and on foot with no threat of hitting ice.
more to come ... |
