Politics, Not Climate Change, Is Behind Texas’s Electric Power Problems

The idea that the electric grid can rely on green energy to keep the lights on isn’t just a pipedream, it’s an increasingly expensive nightmare.

Power lines in Dallas on June 12, 2022. Shelby Tauber/Reuters

Commentary

The manager of the vast majority of Texas’s power grid, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), sent out multiple “voluntary conservation notice(s)” this summer—more than I can ever remember, and I’m a native Texan, having lived here for 53 of my 60 years on Earth.