What are Texas power companies hiding in Tarnation?

Get to the bottom of last month’s death Power outages in Texas will take time and careful research. But the operator of the State network makes it is difficult to get answers.

Houston local train station KHOU reported last week that “many” requests for information about the Texas blackout crisis that media companies have filed with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, have been repeatedly blocked by the power companies claiming that the information is too sensitive to be made public.

Among the information requested by media companies, KHOU reported, there was more context on the companies’ bloat plans. Following a 2011 freeze that caused another smaller electrical crisis, regulators told utilities that they should tamper with their grid, but didn’t really check to see if anyone had followed their instructions (who, to be clear, were volunteers). As the February crisis made clear, it appears that power companies did not follow them advice.

It’s not just media companies that are cold. State Senator Carol Alvarado told KHOU that she had requested travel expenses for members of the ERCOT board, many of whom lived out of state, as a result of the crisis – but his office received information dating back three years, useless to any sort of investigation into what happened.

“We are processing requests under the PUC rules as quickly as possible and are waiting for the Texas Attorney General to issue an opinion on the application of the Texas Public Information Act,” a spokesperson for Texas said. ‘ERCOT to KHOU.

The February cold snap plunged the Texas grid and electricity providers into a series of scandals so protracted it’s hard to imagine what exactly they could fear becoming public. The CEO of ERCOT was kicked out of the company earlier this month, when all of the Texas Public Utility Commission commissioners also resigned following the power cuts, including the last permanent commissioner who was picked up on a call Two weeks ago, promising foreign bankers, who raised hundreds of millions of dollars from the crisis, are said to be working to help them keep their money.

ERCOT is accused of having artificially inflated prices during the crisis and overburdened energy companies $ 16 billion. Griddy, one of the state’s wholesale electricity providers, faces a Billion dollar lawsuit more claims he chipped away at prices and another suit of the state attorney general for false advertising. (Both Griddy and the largest energy cooperative in the state, Electric Brazos, have filed for bankruptcy.) Many residents, meanwhile, have been left with five-digit banknotes which may end up being incorporated into energy prices for decades to come.

“It’s such a sump,” said Ed Hirs, an energy economist at the University of Houston. “I’m happy to be on the record [saying] this.”

Hirs said there are a few pages in ERCOT’s lengthy user manual that skim over what is considered “protected” information that could harm public services if made public. But he suspects that the reluctance of companies to make information public is much simpler.

“I think what’s driving this is all the major law firms in the state and the country has aligned itself to sue ERCOT and many utilities in the network,” Hirs said. “Right now, law firms are looking for companies that have profited from the debacle, and they are looking for those with a positive track record.”

The costumes have already started to arrive. In addition to the two aforementioned lawsuits against Griddy, the family of a Dallas man who died of hypothermia at his home during the power outages filed a complaint in mid-March against ERCOT and Oncor Energy Delivery, the electricity supplier in its region. At least 111 people died during the storm. The impending legal crisis on several levels, Hirs noted, could prove to be incredibly costly for ERCOT and the electricity providers.

But there is a reason beyond the lawsuits that put all of this information on hold. Hirs said corporate transparency is needed for the Texas legislature to take on the arduous task of figuring out how to right the ship, assign liability and prevent another disaster like this from happening.

“With this lack of information, you really must ask yourself how the legislator can solve these problems?” Hirs said. “You really have to analyze these elements [requested documents] and determine which of the three possibilities has occurred: [power companies] all incredibly incompetent, were they dishonest or was it a combination? “

The Energy and Policy Institute, which monitors utilities and energy companies, also requested documents from PUCT showing where energy companies have decided to keep lights on as a priority and where they are shutting off electricity. The organization’s executive director David Pomerantz said in an email that while many utilities are publicly reluctant to expose information and cite security concerns, it is not a valid excuse.

“To the extent that there are security concerns or other valid issues, the PUCT could selectively delete sensitive information while providing the public with the vast majority of data requested by us and others, which would help the public and policymakers to better understand what happened and how to prevent similar disasters from happening again, ”Pomerantz said. “Note that being embarrassed about doing your job poorly is not a valid reason to disobey state laws on open records.

And while Texas may be in the spotlight now, the reluctance to release information that could hurt them is baked into. the way electric utilities operate in the United States.

“This refusal to comply with state public records laws is not unique to Texas,” Pomerantz said. “Many utility regulators, to their credit, are very good at complying with the law and providing the public with the documents to which we are entitled so that we can better understand how our government works – but many other commissioners to public services seem to think that the laws do not apply to them and prefer to operate under cover of secrecy.