The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee is planning to investigate a power outage crisis caused by extremely frigid weather that is gripping Texas and other electric grids in the Midwest and Southeast.
Sen. Joe Manchin, the Democratic chairman of the committee, intends to hold a hearing to examine grid reliability and resilience, his spokesman told the Washington Examiner.
“Chairman Manchin is staying abreast of the situation in Texas and other impacted areas across the country that left millions of people without power,” said Sam Runyon, a spokesman for Manchin on the energy committee. “The Committee intends to hold a hearing to examine grid reliability with resilience and affordability front of mind to assess how best to prevent this from happening in the future.”
The hearing is the latest example of how Congress intends to highlight the power crisis in the next weeks and months, with bipartisan interest in assuring that the grid is up to withstanding extreme weather events that scientists say are becoming more frequent because of climate change.
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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters during her weekly briefing this morning that the Energy and Commerce Committee will look into the Texas power outages “to see how things could have turned out better and will turn out better in the future.” The latest crisis comes after California last year resorted to rolling blackouts under duress from the extreme heat.
Rep. Bobby Rush, the Illinois Democrat who leads the House Energy and Commerce’s energy subcommittee, also promised hearings on the crisis in Texas, where the outages were the worst.
The Texas grid operator (known as the Electric Reliability Council of Texas or ERCOT) said this morning that power would be able to be restored to a majority of the state’s customers.
The grid operator cautioned that it may need to again impose rotating outages in the next couple of days “to keep the grid stable.”
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The state’s energy infrastructure failed this week as record-breaking winter weather caused unprecedented heating demand and the freezing of equipment from power plants, gas pipelines, and production wells.
