Texas Governor Greg Abbott listens to Lt. Lt. Governor Dan Patrick listens to Greg Abbott, right, at a news conference... [+] in Austin, Texas on Thursday, September 17, 2020. (AP Photo/Eric Gay). ASSOCIATED PRESSTexas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick urged Governor Greg Abbott to add legislation to address the state's increasingly unstable power grid to his request for a special session. Patrick specifically wants the legislature address the grid problem it neglected to address in the regular session. This is the apparent shortage of dispatchable backup generator capacity.Patrick's office is the de facto leader of the state Senate. He noted that Senate Bill 3 was originally passed by an overwhelming majority vote. However, stronger language was removed from the bill by the House State Affairs Committee before final passage. Patrick asks for that language to be restored.Notable is the endorsement of the Lt. The Lt. Governor appears to also endorse the basic plan submitted by Warren Buffetts Berkshire Hathaway to the legislature in April for the state's mandate to build additional dispatchable backup generator capacity. He makes the same arguments that I have made in previous articles on the subject.Patrick suggests that another option is to create a managed capacity market, where additional plants can be built to provide backup power. In Texas, investors are currently motivated to build plants that can be brought online by raising prices. This model worked well in Texas for many years. However, it was destroyed by the winter storm. There would be an additional charge to cover the cost of building extra plants in order to increase our energy production capacity. Businesses would be free to bid for more capacity. However, it should be affordable and transparent. It shouldn't be tailored to any company.SB 3 contained language that would have required such a plan. This language was approved unanimously by the Texas Senate. However, it was never allowed to be considered by the full House.Governor Governor Abbott and other top Texas Republicans have been forming a narrative that claimed that the legislature had somehow fixed grid problems during the regular session. Patrick's op/ed shows how not everyone in Texas is happy with this line of thinking. It is not surprising that Patrick, the first senior officeholder in Texas, has departed from the narrative.It is important to remember that the Texas grid was 100% created by the Texas Republican Party. Since 1996, no Democrat has won a statewide race in Texas. The market was deregulated and the huge buildout of wind energy incentivized through the 1999 and 2001 legislatures. Since then, the grid has been instabilized and there are no Democrat fingerprints on it.A political strategy that emphasizes nothing to see here, everything is well with the grid and hoping for luck on completely unpredictable Texas weather patterns between now 2022 and Election Day 2022, is very risky. Democrats could benefit from a major heat wave this August or next year, as well as another winter storm that causes another round of power outages. It should not surprise that many Texas Republicans don't like this strategic approach to the grid.Today's op/ed by the 2nd highest elected official in the state implicitly acknowledges that the grid is not as good as it was, as Gov. Abbott stated a few weeks ago that the grid is better than ever and that it was not fixed by the legislature during its regular session. This is a problem because the Governor seems to want to exclude the grid from his request for a special session.It will be fascinating to see what Gov. In the days ahead, Abbott will respond.
