Texas energy and environmental analysts and advocates are urging President Joe Biden to formally declare a state of climate emergency in order to shore up the state’s precarious grid.
Biden made modest steps to address the climate crisis at Somerset’s closed coal-fired power station. However, he did not declare a national emergency.
Such a declaration would unlock new executive powers that could help ensure increased reliability for Texas’s faltering power grid, while reining in runaway methane emissions from oil and gas infrastructure in the Permian Basin, analysts and advocates based in Texas tell Truthout. Moreover, they say, new executive power to reinstate a crude oil export ban could also potentially lower domestic gas prices while supporting Gulf Coast communities of color, often dubbed “sacrifice zones,” struggling with the impacts of increased fracked gas refining.
The executive actions President Biden announcedLast week, the administration announced it will boost the domestic offshore wind industry in both the Gulf of Mexico (and the Southeast). The administration announced it would also spend $2.3 Billion to help communities withstand longer-lasting heat waves. This will be done through programs administered by FEMA, Department of Health and Human Services and others.
Like much of Europe and millions of Americans across the nation, Texans continue to bake under longer-lasting heat advisories during a summer on pace to be the hottest on record — a fact scientists say is linked to the climate crisis.
The searing heat has driven electricity demand to record highs, nearly imperiling Texas’s shaky power grid, which remains independent of the nation’s two other national grids, the Western Interconnection and the Eastern Interconnection, even after an emergency blackout during Winter Storm Uri in February of 2021 left as many as 700Texans die, millions without power or water for days.
The state’s grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), said demand for electricity briefly topped 80,000 megawattsLast week’s weather was better than any of the worst-case summer forecasts ERCOT had predicted.
ERCOT urged Texans to limit power use in the sweltering afternoons of February 2021, when many are still suffering from trauma from the blackout of February 2021.
Now, ERCOT is ordering the state’s aging power plants to delay maintenance and exceed their pollution limitsIn order to keep running around the clock, power must be generated. Energy experts warnThe record-breaking pace is further taxing an already stretched system.
ERCOT has been in existence before put out a misleading press release blaming wind energy for the grid’s shortfalls despite the fact that the amount of wind generation was within state projections for a summer day while gas, coal and nuclear underperformed. However, energy analysts have highlighted the role that solar energy and battery-storage have played in this. perhaps the most central role in keeping the state’s power grid afloat this summer.
A climate emergency declaration now could prove crucial in bailing out the state’s precarious power grid. According to reporting from Brian Kahn, such a declaration would not only invoke additional emergency powers such as those invoked by President Biden’s Defense Production Act (DPA) to fund additional production of solar panels, it could also provide a cash infusion for clean energy technology if federal agencies direct more money to the DPA beyond its limited budget of $545 million.
As an additional tool in a climate emergency, President Biden could also use the $650 billion federal procurement budget to implement climate resilience projects under the Stafford Act. This directs and coordinates FEMA. Together, the DPA, procurement budget and Stafford Act could allow the government massive purchasing power, freeing up billions for clean energy, electric vehicles and, crucially, battery-storage technology that could stabilize Texas’s power grid and save Texans from rolling blackouts during future record-setting, climate-fueled summer heat waves.
“Having more storage on the grid is absolutely one of the most important things we could do to increase grid reliability and resiliency,” said Doug Lewin, an energy consultant and president of Stoic Energy based in Austin, Texas, in an interview with Truthout.
It would require bulk storage in a variety of forms, including battery storage that is the size of a football field and distributed storage using standalone batteries. He said that electric vehicle storage in combination with other storage options, such as iron air and vanadium flux batteries, will be crucial to creating a reliable power grid.
“Storage would be a much better way to meet peak [demand] than these ‘50s-era [power]Plants that have very few pollution controls but were grandfathered in are often given [that] they were operating before the Clean Air Act passed,” Lewin told Truthout.
Lewin explained that solar storage, when combined with the state legislature or the state Public Utilities Commission, (PUC) which directs energy transmission distribution in the state, to develop concrete action plans for energy efficiency, is one of the most important tools for grid reliability during an intensifying climate crisis. Texas will continue to achieve energy efficiency levels that are 80 percent lower than average among the 27 states currently working towards efficiency goals, unless the PUC intervenes.
“A call for [energy]Energy efficiency is not conservation. Conservation is not reducing your energy consumption but getting the same output. Efficiency is: You’re getting the same outcome, the same result, while using less energy,” Lewin told Truthout. “Conservation is deprivation … and there’s a real question as to how much conservation ERCOT and the PUC can call for before the general public starts saying, ‘Forget this. I’m not doing it.’”
According to Texas Sierra Club Chapter Director Dave Cortez, both energy efficiency and increased storage would also help to drive down the spiking energy bills Texans have faced after several cold snaps last winter, as well as this summer’s heat wave. “These [fossil-fuel powered] plants are being run into the ground, and we simply can’t count on them,” he told Truthout. “It’s not a reliable system, and it leaves all of us exposed to extremely high prices for electricity.”
Cortez warned that after this summer’s heat wave is over, millions of Texans could be saddled with extremely high debt due to skyrocketing electricity bills. He stated that regulators and politicians need to make plans now to prevent utility shutdowns, just like they did during the pandemic.
Beyond shoring up Texas’s grid, Cortez and other Texas environmental and energy advocates are urging President Biden to invoke emergency powers to suspend offshore oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico and to ensure that The final 2023-2028 Oil and Gas Leasing ProgramNo new oil and gas leasing is allowed off the coasts of the United States, Alaska and the Gulf.
Advocates say that reimposing the 40-year-old crude oil export restriction that Congress lifted in 2015 would not only help curb skyrocketing methane emission from leaking and venting oil and gas infrastructures in the Permian basinin, but also potentially lower gas prices. While restricting exports will likely cause prices to drop in the United States, it could also lead to a flood of the domestic market. Refiners could counter this trend with lower output and higher prices.
A report by Oil Change International estimates that methane emissions from Permian will exceed 9.5 billion tonnes of CO2-equivalent by 2050, as fracked gas extraction continues. expected to increase 50 percentOver the next decade, to meet global demand (as well as domestic demand). That’s in direct opposition to the 40 percent decline climate scientists say is needed to keep warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Permian oil is also transported via pipelines to the Gulf Coast, where it is refined in toxic petrochemical plant for export to the global market. If the dozens of planned oil, petrochemical and so-called liquefied natural gas (LNG) export projects under federal jurisdiction are built, Gulf Coast communities and ecosystems will continue to suffer the disproportionate impacts of added pollution — and then take added hits during climate-fueled hurricanes.
During the Winter Storm Uri blackout, Cortez says, “We saw gas companies continuing to export gas even though there was a supply shortage of gas to our power plants…. Fundamentally, the communities along the Gulf Coast that are already struggling … not just [with] skyrocketing bills, in terms of their electricity and difficulty keeping their home livable, cool and affordable; they’ve been pummeled by extreme storms from South Texas in the Rio Grande Valley all the way to New Orleans.”
John Beard was a climate activist and a former worker at Exxon’s Port Arthur plant. He later established the Port Arthur Community Action Network. Beard also urged President Biden for decisive action to stop new oil and natural gas leases and LNG projects near the Gulf. “Fortune favors the bold, and we look for our president to provide the leadership to be the climate president he said that he was going to be,” Beard says. “What has happened is now the president has been put in a position where basically he has to put up or shut up. He can no longer tell us about these things and not take the action necessary.”
Cortez stated that President Biden did announce a few executive actions last week. TruthoutThis administration is simply putting more money into existing programs for climate resiliency and energy, rather than providing new ones. Cortez remains optimistic about a Department of the Interior effort to expand offshore Wind Power at two sites in the Gulf and one off the coast of Texas.
The Sierra Club and other environmental groups are pressing the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management for strong worker and labor training standards and safety standards to the off-shore wind leases Biden announced last Wednesday. They also need strong protections for endangered wildlife.
“We want to see Texans get the maximum benefit from investments in offshore wind, and right now, because it’s Texas and Louisiana and other horrific Gulf Coast state governments, there’s no guarantees that these are going to be family supporting, good-paying jobs,” Cortez says.
He advocated for training at Texas high schools and community colleges in areas that depend on the building trades — places like Brownsville, Port Arthur, Beaumont and Corpus Christi. Cortez believes that strong labor standards would ensure long-lasting and stable careers for thousands of workers who are responsible for building and manufacturing the parts needed to service offshore wind farms in federal waters. No such plans are currently in place.
Cortez believes that a just transition must be accompanied by a radical shift toward an energy democracy in which working-class people can actually make decisions about how they get their water and power. This is especially important after Winter Storm Uri ushered a huge wealth transfer from working class Texans to multibillion dollar energy corporations like Energy Transfer Partners and Encore. These corporations continue to line the pockets state lawmakers like Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Governor. Dan Patrick.
“Our government is still captured by the oil and gas industry, and that’s what allowed the oil export ban to be lifted in the first place,” Cortez says. “That’s what allowed [former President Barack]Obama to approve Keystone XL construction in Texas. And that’s still what’s costing all of us so much at the pump, and is allowing this broken system to remain in place.”
