Focus at Four: Energy legislation, the future of Texas power and Beryl fallout
BRYAN, Texas (KBTX) – Power problems in Texas have once again dominated the headlines.
The most recent issue of storm recovery was from Hurricane Beryl, particularly in the Houston area, where millions went without power for days following the storm.
Doug Lewin, the president of Stoic Energy and the author of the Texas Energy and Power Newsletter, joined First News at Four on Thursday and said the issues are systematic.
“Texas is in the bottom third of states for outages on almost any metric. Whether you’re talking about during extreme weather during what are called ‘blue sky days,’ or you don’t have any extreme weather, we have more outages during those days than most other states. If you’re looking at the frequency like the number of outages, the duration, how long they last, just about any metric; we do very poorly. Our bills are also among the highest of any state,” Lewin said.
Stoic Energy reported that lawmakers could help with the issue with regulation.
“The old utility business model, and these to be clear, these are utilities like Center Point, Encore, AEP- the ones that are, you know, Texas deregulated. We’ve really got to start attaching some metrics and saying, ‘hey, if you hit these metrics like for instance, reliability, resiliency, you can get paid more,’ and conversely, if you don’t hit those metrics, if you don’t achieve the outcomes set forth by policymakers, then you will make less,” explained Lewin.
The future of Texas energy, Lewin hopes, will be solar.
“I try not to make too many predictions on these things, ‘cause the future, you know, surprises all of us. But I would say overall what we are seeing in the trend lines and what has actually happened over the last couple of years, Texas has attracted a whole lot of solar and storage development. Wind has actually slowed down quite a bit,” Lewin added.
