UPDATE:
"Walker, who was appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott and makes $201,000 a year, was grilled for hours Thursday by House and Senate lawmakers about the failures in the state’s energy system last week.
Lawmakers were irked that Walker said her commission had no authority to regulate the energy system – when in fact the Legislature had given it explicit power to do so following a previous winter storm in 2011 that also led to rolling blackouts.
Anchía had one of the key moments of Thursday’s hearings when he took Walker to task for denying that the commission had that power. He pointed to state laws that gave the PUC regulatory authority over the state’s energy market structure, previously passed laws that clarified that authority, and the commission’s own mission statement.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2021/02/26/texas-lawmakers-calls-for-resignations-from-puc-following-hearings-on-power-outages/%3FoutputType=amp
What IS PUC and what do they do?
The Public Utility Commission of Texas regulates the state’s electric, telecommunication, and water and sewer utilities, implements respective legislation, and offers customer assistance in resolving consumer complaints.
Dee Ann Walker testified in a two day hearing and PUC concludes that there was a dereliction of duty. By the way she never issued an apology. Also a total of 8 commoners of ERCOT have resigmed, one of them was yesterday. In another meeting with ERCOT:
“Under questioning from Rep. Eddie Lucio, D-Brownsville, executives who make and sell power to Texans admit they could have done a better job telling residents the severity of the likely outages. Earlier in the day, Vistra’s CEO told lawmakers his company reached out to ERCOT to warn then the outages were going to be severe and ERCOT’s forecast was wrong. Vistra says ERCOT never replied.”
In a meeting Andrew DeVries said:
“California rolling blackouts were an order of magnitude smaller than the [Texas] ones with California being short [1 GW]-2 GW for two hot evenings last summer vs. [Texas] that is short around 15 [GW]-25 GW for essentially two days straight,” DeVries wrote.
"The analyst added that unlike California where the battery storage pipeline is seen as “an easy solution,” batteries “won’t even come close to addressing the polar vortex in [Texas] that knocked [about] 15 GW of natural gas plants offline and another [approximately] 5 GW of wind turbines.”
Here is a well written article explaining how natural gas, and other energy combined work with the power grid.
" My name is Curt Morgan. I’m the CEO of Vistra Corp. We are an Irving, Texas-based integrated retail electricity and power generation business, and we trace our Texas roots back 140 years through our predecessor companies. We serve more than 2.3 million retail customers in Texas through our brands, which include, among others, TXU Energy, Ambit, and TriEagle. Our power generation subsidiary, Luminant, is the largest generator in Texas, powered by a diverse portfolio of natural gas, nuclear, coal, solar, and battery energy storage facilities."
Testimony of Vistra Corp., Curt Morgan, CEO
Vistra Energy exec delivers opening statement about power outages | wfaa.com
As of now 32 people have lost their lives. As far as I can tell from reading testimony from and watching the hearings with ERCOT, PUC, LUMINANT/VISTRA (Largest power Provider) I feel ERCOT shares most of the blame not all of the blame. As of date I was watching San Antonio News and rural power in 2 counties were still out. Ice not only brought down lines but the supporting poles that support the lines were brought down in a domino effect, and in addition their water is still out. Generators were in use in the interview I watched. I live in Texas and was effected by the storm and blackout. I was fortunate because I had a generater and prepared.
I read that VISTRA/Luminant set aside 12 million dollars for assistance for help with utility bills. Also GRIDDY, the electric company billing people thousands of dollars was shut down and customers moved to other providers.