House bill would connect Texas’s ERCOT with national grid

Reps. Greg Casar (D-Texas) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) have introduced legislation that would connect Texas’s self-contained grid with the rest of the nation, three years after extreme winter weather knocked out the grid and killed hundreds of Texans.

Casar and Ocasio-Cortez announced the legislation Wednesday, the third anniversary of the winter storm. The Connect the Grid Act would place the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) under the purview of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). It would also require the Energy Department and FERC to conduct a study on the benefits of connection with Mexico.

Casar said that if the bill had been law at the time, “We could have kept millions out of people out of these mass power outages if we connect the grid to the rest of the country … it’s called supporting one another, it’s something we believe in in Texas and it’s something we believe in in the United States of America.”

The Texas Democrat noted that parts of Texas that are close enough to state borders to have interstate connections, such as El Paso in the west and Beaumont in the east, were able to avoid much of the loss of power caused by the storm. 

During the storm, “we saw the impact on everyday Texans, on everyday Americans, the people who are most vulnerable,” Ocasio-Cortez added.

While both Casar and Rep. Troy Carter (D-La.) took shots at Gov. Greg Abbott (R) for his management of ERCOT and at Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) for flying to Cancun, Mexico, with his family during the storm, Ocasio-Cortez also took aim at Texas grid operators for profiting off of the storm. The people killed during the storm, she said, “died not just because of what happened on a climate level, because of what happened at a structural and leadership level … it happened because of greed.”

Casar also noted that Texas leads the nation in the production of wind and solar energy, meaning interconnecting the state with the rest of the country could lower overall national carbon emissions. 

A Senate version of the measure is sponsored by Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), who has frequently collaborated with Ocasio-Cortez on environmental legislation. Its House cosponsors include numerous allies of Ocasio-Cortez and Casar within the progressive wing of the caucus, including Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.). The bill is unlikely to receive a vote in the GOP-majority House.