BRYAN, TX — Nearly five months since Texans witnessed first-hand the fragile state of the Texas power grid. Yet there’s still no clear plan while Governor Abbott is demanding the Public Utility Commission board to take action on renewable energy companies.
According to the Texas Tribune just ahead of the special session Governor Abbott wrote a letter to the PUC board. This letter was more like a list of expectations he would like them to complete.
One of the requests was to penalize renewable energy companies if they were unable to provide power to the grid.
“It sounds like a way to assign blame,” Adam Burke, owner of Texas Green Energy.
Adam Burke the owner of Texas Green Energy sees a different problem.
“Our demand is increasing so it’s a fairly simple problem,” added Burke. “ We simply need more capacity wherever. We need more electricity wherever it comes from,”
Luckily Tony Provin a Bryan-College Station resident did not lose power during the winter storm, but he can’t say the same for some of his neighbors.
“You go 700-feet away across one of the streets and they experience those blackouts,” said Tony Provin, solar energy consumer.
Provin decided to make his investment not too long before the storm made landfall.
”We were really looking at it from it when we added the solar aspect to our homestead of reducing our reliance on the grid,” Provin shared.
Now a little over half a year, he is happy to report no regrets.
"Looking back on it, I think it was a great decision on our point,” said Provin.
A few other points Governor Abbott made in that letter were to give companies incentives to ensure a reliable source of power. Also, he’d like to see a clear schedule when power plants are forced to go offline making sure so many are not off at the same time.