At Capitol hearings, blame for Texas outages is spread all around

In their first effort at getting to the bottom of an energy calamity that left millions of Texans in the dark amid subfreezing temperatures last week and potentially contributed to dozens of deaths, state lawmakers Thursday heard from utility executives, grid operators and regulators — and found fingers pointing in lots of directions.

With a dash of introspection — all the players expressed sadness at the tragedy that unfolded in Texas, and some even hinted they bore some of the blame — the exchanges between lawmakers and witnesses in simultaneous hearings by Texas House and Senate committees doled out plenty of criticism:

• An official with the state grid operator said the bulk of the outages came from the impact of the weather, and said there is currently no legal authority to force companies to winterize.

• The chief executive of a Houston-based utility said that his company had warned state officials, including Gov. Greg Abbott's chief of staff, that the grid was vulnerable and that they had to do a better job communicating with the public. 

• State Rep. Eddie Lucio III, D-Brownsville, pointed out to several power generator executives that they had failed to communicate with ratepayers as the calamity was unfolding.

In some ways, the simultaneous hearings amounted to a legislative version of a TV procedural in which suspects are grilled by police in separate interrogation rooms.

Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, told Bill Magness, CEO of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the grid operator, that his testimony was being contradicted in another hearing taking place simultaneously in the House.

Creighton said representatives of power generation companies “have been pointing the finger at (grid) mismanagement” during the House hearing.

Magness said he hadn't seen any of the data that the generators were using to make the assertion.

“They have not shared that with me,” he said. “I’ve only heard it from members of the Legislature.”

Magness acknowledged, however, that “we weren’t talking enough” to those affected by the outages. “We were solving problems, but we should have been talking more to people.”

Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, asked Magness if he is to blame for the catastrophic outages.

“Would it be accurate to say that it’s your job to prevent us from having a catastrophe like we had in the last 10 days?” Whitmire said. “I’m looking for where does the buck stop. Is it you? Is it the (Public Utility Commission)? Certainly, is it the Legislature?”

Magness said he feels “a great deal of responsibility and remorse about the entire event,” but he did not directly answer the question.

“I believe the operators on our team did everything they could have,” he said. “As I sit here now, I don’t think I would have” done anything differently amid the crisis, although he added that more analysis of the event could change his assessment.

He noted that ERCOT was able to head off a complete meltdown on the grid. “We held it together, (but) at a lot of pain to a lot of people," he said.

Appearing before the joint meeting of the House Energy Resources and State Affairs committees, Vistra Energy CEO Curt Morgan said that as many as five days before power outages, officials at his company contacted Luis Saenz, Abbott's chief of staff, utility regulators and key state lawmakers about their concerns about the readiness of the grid and the prospect of coming outages.

"This wasn’t to cover our you-know-what," Morgan told Texas House members. "There wasn’t a broader communication to the public that we were running into a bigger situation. There wasn’t that broad communication to say, 'We could be in rolling blackouts on Monday.'"

The Statesman has issued a public information request for any communications between officials at Houston-based Vistra, which has 3.2 million customers, and the governor's office.

Morgan, whose company has come under criticism for faltering during the storm, told lawmakers that “we reached out to some of you here and said this is coming,” making calls to officials starting Feb. 10 or Feb. 11. Power outages that left millions of Texans dark and cold began in the early morning of Feb. 15.

“I was surprised by lack of urgency from officials,” Morgan said. “The level of urgency wasn’t there, in my opinion.”

Abbott spokeswoman Renae Eze told the Statesman via email that Abbott "was gravely concerned about the magnitude of the storm" and several days before the storm warned Texans in a press conference that "the severity of the cold weather that is about to be experienced here in the coming days is unprecedented in Texas history."

On February 12, she noted, the governor issued an emergency declaration for impending severe weather in all 254 counties in Texas.  

She said Abbott also made personal calls to the CEOs of two of the largest natural gas users in the state, Freeport LNG and Cheniere LNG, asking them to curtail their usage before the storm, to which they agreed.

Like the governor, she pointed blame at ERCOT, the grid operator. 

Magness, for his part, said that while his agency attempts to educate power generators and transmission companies as to "best practices" for winterizing their infrastructure, ERCOT has been given no authority by lawmakers to force them to do so.

The upshot is generators “can skimp on that if they want to," said state Sen. Donna Campbell, R-New Braunfels. “They can decide to take up your recommendations or guidelines, or not."

Some state lawmakers acknowledged Thursday that the Legislature itself shouldered some responsibility for the energy failures last week.

State Rep. Charlie Geren, R-Fort Worth, said “some of the blame lies right here in this building” — the Capitol — after the Legislature failed to take stronger action in the wake of weather-related outages in February 2011.

State Rep. Donna Howard, D-Austin, said, “I’m hoping we’re finally at the point now where we’re going to be making these requirements” — on such things as winterizing power generating facilities.

By and large, lawmakers said they were trying to get to the bottom of an event that left harm across the state.

State Rep. Chris Paddie, R-Marshall, chair of the House State Affairs Committee, said that to call the events of last week unacceptable "would be a severe understatement.”

“It was an unmitigated catastrophe that will take years to unwind,” he said.

The deaths of at least 32 Texans are suspected of being linked to the storms and frigid temperatures, The Washington Post reported last week.

“The question I want answered is, ‘Was Mother Nature to blame, or man, or both?’” said state Rep. Craig Goldman, R-Fort Worth, chair of the House Energy Resources Committee.

In tearful opening remarks in the joint House committee meeting, state Rep. Ana Hernandez, D-Houston, said the families who lost loved ones during the power outages should be front of mind for lawmakers as they interview regulators and others.

"We must remember that no cost was greater than that experienced by these grieving families," said Hernandez, vice chairwoman of the House State Affairs Committee. "We owe it to them and every Texan to ensure this never happens again."

Sen. Kelly Hancock, chairman of the Senate Business and Commerce Committee, kicked off the hearing in his committee with a stark personal note regarding his daughter, who he said is nine months pregnant.

“You don’t want to have discussions about giving birth in a bathtub in this day and age,” said Hancock, R-North Richland Hills.