Texas must upgrade its power grid. To do it, it needs a new and better focus.

Bernard L. Weinstein
·3 min read
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Last month’s Hurricane Beryl was one of the most severe early season storms to hit Houston and the Gulf Coast this century. Packing 90 mile-per-hour winds, Beryl knocked out power to more than 2.2 million customers and caused property damage of nearly $4 billion as well as several dozen deaths.

CenterPoint Energy, the principal provider of electricity to areas hit by Beryl, has been roundly disparaged by pundits and politicians for its lack of planning and slow response in restoring power. But much of this criticism is undeserved. Well in advance of the storm making landfall in Texas, the company took steps to activate its emergency response plan and instituted 24-hour coverage of the storm’s progress.

Orange insulating material covers power lines on East Riverside Drive to protect them from ice and damage caused by the sub-freezing temperatures forecast in Austin on February 2, 2022. (Credit: Sara Diggins/American-Statesman/File)
Orange insulating material covers power lines on East Riverside Drive to protect them from ice and damage caused by the sub-freezing temperatures forecast in Austin on February 2, 2022. (Credit: Sara Diggins/American-Statesman/File)

CenterPoint also coordinated before the storm with about 2,500 utility crew members from outside the region and then brought in nearly 10,000 more after the hurricane moved through Houston. What is more, within two days of the outages, power had been restored to 1.1 million customers and by the ninth day after the storm, virtually all users were back online.

Another wake-up call for Texas and its power grid

Hurricane Beryl and its aftermath is yet the latest signal that Texas must pay more attention to power grid resiliency and reliability. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, Texas had 210 weather-related power outages between 2000 and 2023, far more than any other state. Memories still abound from the “Great Freeze” of February 2021 that caused a massive power outage leaving 4.5 million homes without electricity at its peak and resulted in 246 deaths and $300 billion of property damage.

Much has been done over the past three years to “harden” the grid, in particular the winterization of power plants and wind turbines. But the emphasis has been almost exclusively on generation, not transmission and distribution. With a host of federal and state incentives in place, investment in wind, solar, batteries and gas-fired power plants is proceeding apace. Last year, the state’s 15,000 wind turbines produced 120,000 gigawatt hours of electricity; solar output was up nearly 50 percent; installed battery storage grew to 11 gigawatts; and just recently the Texas Energy Fund announced it had received applications for 56 gigawatts of new gas-fired generation.

The need to prioritize 'power lines and poles'

Going forward, Texas’ legislators, regulators and the state’s utilities need to focus on “power lines and poles,” not just generation. Indeed ERCOT, the state’s power system operator, warned in April that transmission and distribution line upgrades are critical to ensuring grid integrity and providing access to the state’s growing wind, solar, and battery resources.  ERCOT is also worried about a repeat of the “traffic jam” last September when demand jumped in North Texas but inadequate transmission prevented available power in South Texas from being shipped northward.  In response, wholesale prices spiked and ERCOT put out an emergency call to cut power use.

Texas has been the fastest-growing state in terms of population and jobs for more than two decades. For years, we’ve led the nation in corporate relocations and expansions. The Texas economy has expanded at a rate averaging 3 percent annually over the past 10 years compared to 2.3 percent for the U.S. as a whole. And the state is second to Virginia in the number of power-hungry data centers and projected to become number one in server farms within a few years.  None of this would have happened, absent available and reliable electricity.

Upgrading the Texas power grid will not be cheap, and it would appear that federal help is not on the way. But paying for these upgrades through both customer and public financing is imperative if the “Texas Miracle” is to be sustained.

Weinstein is retired associate director of the Maguire Energy Institute at Southern Methodist University, a professor emeritus of applied economics at the University of North Texas, and a fellow of Goodenough College, London.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Hurricane Beryl showed upgrading Texas power grid is critical