“We can have Texas pride based on our football and barbecue. It doesn’t have to be based on us having blackouts in an isolated grid,” Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) told The Hill.
Casar is co-sponsor of the Connect the Grid Act, which has drawn together the bulk of Texas House Democrats and progressive figures like Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Pramila Jaypal (D-Wash.).
The bill — which Casar was promoting in Austin on Wednesday alongside civil society and union groups — has two main components.
First, it would definitively state that Texas’s grid is under federal supervision — a jurisdiction the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) says it currently doesn’t have.
Second, it would direct FERC to oversee
a massive process of building transmission lines to connect surrounding power markets to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), as the state grid is known.
The need to connect the Texas grid to the national one is “particularly acute,” according to an October 2023 report from the Department of Energy.
Linking the Texas grid to the national network would save the state
$4 billion on average each year — and around $27 billion in the case of extreme weather, according to a report from the University of Texas (UT) at Austin.
The UT report found that power would be particularly useful in a case like 2021’s Winter Storm Uri, which killed hundreds and cost the state $100 billion.
“You want a grid that is bigger than the weather,” UT engineering professor Michael Webber told an Austin public radio station.
“Even if it’s just a few thousand megawatts of transmission capacity, that can make a difference.”
The UT report found that the nation needs about 55 more gigawatts of power to weather the winter storms of the 2030s if the grids aren’t bridged.
That’s just 2 percent more than if they aren’t connected — which would avoid building the power equivalent of 25 of California’s controversial Diablo Canyon nuclear reactors.
However, the bill will need to garner a lot of Republican support — which is an uphill battle.
The proposal “would be fine if it was cheaper
than building new power plants here,” said Brent Bennett, who runs the energy practice at the conservative advocacy group Texas Public Policy Foundation.
“But transmission is hard to build and expensive,” Bennett told The Hill. “We have solar, wind and gas here — we don’t need to build other transmission lines.”
Bennett argued that despite the messaging around reliability, the economic benefits of connecting the grid would stem from the ability of Texas producers to “export wind and solar.”
That’s a point Casar agrees with, at least in part: The prospect of exporting Texas wind and solar power is a significant part of the appeal — and key to his hopes of winning over rural Republican lawmakers.
“The economic benefits of this bill would flow to all Texas consumers, but they would overwhelmingly flow to rural Texas — because there is a lot of pent-up electric demand across the country for wind and solar,” Casar said.
“We have lots of sunny and windy days in rural Texas, which is ready to become part of the clean energy economy. But right now, they can only sell inside of the state of Texas,” he added.
