A Republican federal energy regulator is pushing back on members of his party blaming frozen wind turbines for the power crisis in Texas.
“Everyone just shut the f— up, and let the experts sort out what’s happening,” Neil Chatterjee, a commissioner of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, told the Washington Examiner.
Chatterjee, however, also criticized liberals and environmentalists who he said are “trying to sweep under the rug” that renewables suffered outages too.
“Both sides are playing games,” Chatterjee said. “This gets back to the politicization of everything energy. We have this situation occur, much like rolling blackouts in California, and everyone retreats to their corners and views this through a fuel source partisan lens. Let’s have everyone calm down for a moment, and why don’t we take the politics out of this?”
Chatterjee, a former energy adviser to Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell, recently drew attention for being demoted as FERC chairman by the Trump administration after promoting support for carbon pricing and clean energy.
At the beginning of his tenure in 2017, Chatterjee, a Kentuckian close to the state’s coal industry, was sympathetic to former President Donald Trump’s pro-fossil fuel agenda.
FERC, which regulates interstate transmission of electricity, opened a docket in 2018, when it was controlled by Republicans, to examine the state of the nation’s grid resilience, or the ability of the U.S. power system as it transitions to cleaner energy sources to bounce back from a major disruption. The docket has been dormant since then.
FERC’s Democratic chairman, Richard Glick, promoted by President Biden, could dismiss the issue at the commission’s next meeting Thursday. Critics saw the launch of the docket as a mechanism to boost fossil fuels at the behest of the Trump administration.
While Chatterjee said he regrets the resilience issue became politicized, he said the problems in Texas should ignite the conversation again.
As of this morning in Texas, around 46,000 MW of power generation remained offline, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, the state’s grid operator. More than half of that, 28,000 MW, are gas, coal, and nuclear. The remaining 18,000 MW offline are wind and solar, the grid operator said.
Factors behind those incidents include frozen wind turbines, a squeeze on natural gas supplies, and frozen instruments at coal and nuclear plants.
Texas operates its own power grid and is not overseen by FERC, a level of independence that some critics said deserves review in light of the state’s failures this week.
Chatterjee, however, avoided assigning blame.
“I have no evidence to show me this was anything more than an extreme weather event coupled with unexpected high demand that caught people off guard and all fuel sources failed,” Chatterjee said. “I am not in position to judge what policy decisions or market designs contributed to this, and I don’t think anyone has that answer today.”
