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Four Million Texans Without Power
00:02:22
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| The Great Texas Freeze of 2021, given by Jason Isaac, a fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. | |
| Let's hear a minute or so of the beginning. | |
| The week of Valentine's Day, 2021, the temperature dropped below zero. | |
| Nobody could remember it being this cold for this long. | |
| This was Texas, not Siberia. | |
| But Texas is the energy state. | |
| There was nothing to fear. | |
| Just go home, turn on the heat, and hunker down. | |
| That's how it should have gone. | |
| Instead, over five days, four million Texans lost power during what turned out to be the coldest winter storm in half a century. | |
| Hundreds died, including an 11-year-old boy who froze to death in his sleep. | |
| The state's electric grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, ERCOT, later reported the state was just four minutes away from total grid collapse. | |
| The media was quick to blame the state government for not being fully prepared and not acting fast enough. | |
| This may be true, but ERCOT's mistakes were symptoms, not the cause of the problem. | |
| The real cause is decades of misguided policies that have left the Lone Star State with an unreliable energy infrastructure. | |
| It's a cautionary tale that the rest of the country needs to learn from. | |
| Alright, let's hold it there and go to my guest, Jason Isaac. | |
| And thank you for coming on the show, Jason. | |
| It's, listening to it again, I realize four million Texans did not have power, is that correct? | |
| That's correct, for several days, mind you, several days. | |
| With freezing temperatures? | |
| Yeah, the coldest temperatures we'd seen for that long of a period for over 50 years. | |
| Right. | |
| Well, before you tell us why it happened, am I right in being somewhat puzzled by the lack of curiosity in America as to how that happened? | |
|
Market Distorting Policies Pushed
00:02:25
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| Yeah, I think you are. | |
| It's interesting, and I'm in the swamp right now in Washington, D.C., and I've had a lot of members of Congress come up and ask me still about the February freeze and what caused it. | |
| And I let them know that the problem is rooted in market-distorting policies that started in Washington, D.C. And then Texas even passed more of its own to prop up these unreliable electric providers to say that we're number one. | |
| And in Texas, we like to say we're number one. | |
| Everything's bigger in Texas, and unfortunately, we are the number one state for wind-generated electricity. | |
| It's a third of our grid now. | |
| 33% of our grid is unreliable, variable, renewable electric generation. | |
| And we've suffered the cost of that in February. | |
| And we found out what's going to happen. | |
| And it's things that have been happening in Germany, things that have been happening in California. | |
| And I think people in Texas woke up and realized that cold weather is much more dangerous than warm weather. | |
| Yeah. | |
| That's right. | |
| Well, far more people continue to die of cold weather in the world than from warm weather. | |
| So, if what you're saying is accurate, then should this happen again in three years, then the exact same thing will happen again in three years. | |
| Yeah, absolutely. | |
| And what's being pushed in Washington, D.C. with this... | |
| Build China Back Better program, the reconciliation package. | |
| It's going to happen all across the grid if this package gets passed. | |
| What has happened in Texas? | |
| Now, I don't think it's going to happen in Texas again because the governor, we had some legislation that we supported and advocated for this past legislative session in Texas. | |
| The governor followed through with a strong executive order telling the Public Utility Commission of Texas to direct... | |
| The cost of unreliable electric generation on the generators themselves, not on the ratepayers. | |
| And it's all pushed down to the ratepayers now. | |
| And so it'll be nice that the generators are going to be the ones that have to pay for reliable electricity. | |
| All right, hold it there for a moment. | |
| This is an incredibly important subject. | |
| ReliefFactor.com, 800-500-8384, my friends. | |