Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, when he was the secretary of energy for former President Donald Trump, frequently touted his state’s famously free market electricity system for enabling Texas to be an “all of the above” energy powerhouse that he wanted the United States to exemplify.
That system collapsed in the face of extreme winter weather last week, forcing Perry and other Texans to reckon with the need for reforms, including potentially mandating power plant operators to invest in upgrades to protect their facilities and equipment from the cold.
“I look at this as an opportunity for us to do better to learn from it,” Perry told the Washington Examiner in an interview. “Is a mandate of weatherization the answer by itself? Probably not. But it’s a legitimate conversation we need to have.”
TED CRUZ OPEN TO MANDATES FOR GRID IMPROVEMENTS AFTER TEXAS POWER CRISIS
Perry said he regrets the derision he received for commenting amid the storm that Texans would accept being without electricity for a few days to “keep the federal government out of their business.”
“No one got the tongue-in-cheek on that,” Perry said. “I am sorry they are a little slow on the uptake.”
But Perry said his larger point remains that Texas policymakers and regulators should be trusted to grapple with the post-mortem without “relying on the federal government.”
“Our Lone Star State independence is still very much alive and well,” Perry said. “We can muscle on through events that happen.”
He said Texans would likely resist calls, including from President Biden’s new Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, for the state to abandon its independent grid model and link up with the national grid to enable it to import power from neighboring states in emergencies.
At its peak, almost half of the grid operator’s generation, mostly natural gas, was forced offline due to the extreme cold, according to data released by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas earlier this week.
“I am not sure we could have gotten that much power from the country if we had multiple connections,” Perry said. “Don’t knee-jerk react and look back on it in five years and say, ‘I wish we had not been so drastic in deciding to join the national grid because all we got out of it was more regulation.’”
Perry is more willing to discuss the concept of weatherization mandates, as long as the Texas Legislature can define the cost and how it’s paid for.
That’s not a “simple question” for Texas, Perry said, given that installing protection against the cold as is normal in the Northeast and Midwest can make it harder for operators to run in the summer, when the state’s power demand from air conditioning is usually the highest.
Texas has a unique power market structure that is designed to keep prices low but which critics say fails to incentivize power plants to pay for upgrades without being forced to.
“Will a weatherization of a Texas generating facility in response to this most likely once-in-a-lifetime event be a wise expenditure of money?” Perry said. “Does it cause you problems in August, when temperatures are 100-plus degrees? The analogy is we are going to make you wear a sweater, and you have to wear that all year long.”
Perry was evasive about his own responsibility when the state previously declined federal regulators’ recommendations to impose mandates after a similar, less severe cold weather event in 2011.
Perry, who was governor at the time, said he “can’t answer” why Texas did not follow the recommendations and directed blame to power generators that chose not to spend on protections.
“At the end of the day, you are the generator, and you have a public responsibility for the welfare and the safety of people,” Perry said.
Rep. Marc Veasey, a Democratic congressman from Texas, said he blamed the state’s Republican leaders like Perry for failing to impose mandates, which he called a “tragic mistake.”
Veasey was a representative in the state House at the time.
“There was a laissez-faire attitude because it was one-party rule for so long, they felt they could get away with whatever they wanted to,” Veasey told the Washington Examiner. “That is why when there was an attempt to put in place safety measures, they were ignored.”
Veasey is skeptical Gov. Greg Abbott and the Texas state Legislature, controlled by Republicans, will follow through on promises this time and adopt reforms.
“When you hear, ‘We will take a look and have hearings,’ that means nothing is going to happen,” he said. “Until I hear differently and see differently, it looks like it’s going to be status quo.”
Perry said he tried to address grid resilience issues when he was Trump’s energy secretary.
As Texas governor, he was a major champion of wind.
He signed a bill in 2005 to enable a build-out of electric transmission lines to bring wind power stranded in rural parts of the state to urban areas such as Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas.
But under Trump, who had a pro-fossil fuel agenda, Perry proposed a controversial measure encouraging federal energy regulators to subsidize financially struggling coal and nuclear plants in the name of resilience, claiming these plants deserve higher payments for their ability to store fuel on-site as backup in the event of a disaster.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission rejected that measure, arguing it wasn’t necessary.
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Perry acknowledged that coal and nuclear plants, along with natural gas, all were affected in a “negative way” from the Texas cold snap.
He said he welcomed a decision by FERC’s new Democratic chairman, Richard Glick, after the Texas crisis to open a new proceeding on grid resilience, this time focused on the risks climate change and worsening extreme weather events pose to electric reliability.
“What we need to be doing is looking at every legitimate, thoughtful way to have a diverse energy portfolio,” Perry said, citing his Energy Department’s efforts to advance small nuclear reactors and battery storage. “What are new innovations that can alleviate as many of these effects of a massive weather event?”
