 Good evening and welcome to Public Affairs Public Access on Houston Media Source TV. I'm Gene Pruice with the League of Women Voters of Houston. The middle of February 2021 saw a blistering record winter weather across Texas and Houston with the arrival of winter storm Uri. The harsh winter temperatures took several lives across Texas, disrupted much of the state's infrastructure, electrical service, internet, telephone, water delivery, and icy roads also played a role in limiting repairs and restarting lost power to many areas across Houston. Tonight we'll learn how Northwest Houston was affected. We'll talk to Houston City Councilmember Amy Peck from District A to tell us about how winter or weather affected her district. We'll also learn about the state and how it gets its electricity. We'll visit with Manti Cummings of Interjia Veleta to discuss the future of wind energy in Texas. And Dr. Gavin Dillingham of Houston's Advanced Research Center, HARK, will talk about energy and a Texas power grid. Before the COVID pandemic, our show was broadcast live, but for the past year we've been pre-recording our interviews. Tonight's interviews were recorded earlier this week. First we talked with Houston's District A City Councilmember Amy Peck. With me this evening is Councilmember Amy Peck. She's from District A in Northwest Houston in Spring Branch where I live. She's my district member, so my district representative. So thank you very much for appearing to be on the show. What did you see during winter storm, Yuri? What were some of the problems, some of the concerns that grew out of what happened in Houston? Well, first, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. In District A, we saw very similar things to the rest of the city, to the rest of the state. People were without electricity, without water for extended periods of time. Myself included. And I think that people weren't as prepared for this as you might be for a hurricane. And so we saw people who were without water, and we were trying to get water to people. Because you just don't think that you're going to be without water for a winter storm. So it's something that a lot of us have never lived through. And so people were without necessities for a very long period of time. I think the weather people had told us, a storm is coming, and it's going to be cold. But I don't think anybody anticipated what 20 degrees is. I've lived in other parts of the state, and I've been to other places where it was much colder, right? As you're saying, we weren't expecting that. We weren't prepared for that here in Houston. Have you talked to other members of the council to gauge how they were reacting to it? Yeah, it sounds like in other parts of the city, talking to other council members, people were in very similar situations throughout the city. In District A, it seemed like no one had water, working water in whole neighborhoods. It wasn't pockets of people who had burst of pipes here or there. We were without water in District A. And I know some other districts had similar situations as well. But I think that people just weren't prepared for this storm because you would never expect that the electricity would go out for the entire state of Texas. No one ever expected that to happen. It shouldn't have happened, and it needs to never happen again. Well, I've been trying to educate myself to be honest. I had no idea what ERCOT was, or I'd never heard the word before. I don't think the idea of the grid. And I think it was a harsh education for a lot of folks who are trying to find out what exactly happened. As far as Houston is concerned, and city council, what, from your perspective, are some of the things that maybe we can learn? What are some of the takeaways we might learn from the storm? Well, I think for the city of Houston, one of the big takeaways for me is to make sure that our technology or equipment or infrastructure is in place to handle water concerns. So the electricity issue, that's a state issue. Of course, it's my concern. Any concern for my constituents becomes my concern. So although I don't have direct jurisdiction, regulatory authority over the electricity, but what we do have direct oversight over is the water. And it seemed like there was failure in that system. And the generators, the backup generators, there's still a lot of questions that need to be asked, that I will be asking as far as did the city not do enough to weatherize and put precautions in place to make sure that this wouldn't happen. Is this just something that no one could have ever expected? I have a lot of questions going forward and have asked for a TTI committee meeting about this and the chair and vice chair of that committee. They've already been working on that even before I asked for that meeting. So there's a lot of questions to be asked about this. So can you tell us what that TTI means? It's the Transportation, Technology and Infrastructure Committee. OK, and what are they responsible for? So they're responsible for a lot of different things, technology, infrastructure, the drinking water operations, which would fall under that committee. So I've asked for a committee to kind of go over what happened, what wasn't working, what was working, what can we do in the future to make sure that this doesn't happen again? Because we've seen hurricanes come and go where the entire city didn't lose water like they did in this situation. So we need to make sure that, you know, the chances of this happening again anytime soon, probably it won't. But we need to be prepared for anything at this point. I think if the year 2020 has taught us anything is that we need to be prepared for anything and everything to happen and make sure that we are ready. Now, you're no stranger to constituent services and reaching out and answering. And and I have to compliment you. You were very active on Facebook and the neighborhood Facebook groups responding to concerns and and panicked messages. And people have said about not having electricity or not having water. And, you know, you were I know your office was taking some of that information in and you were in Brenda Stardig's office when she was council member here. So you're no stranger to dealing with constituents and helping constituents out. But were you prepared at all? I mean, you came into office in January of 20 when you were elected. And then we had in March, a few months later, pandemic. And then we had other issues as well. We had concerns about the election. We had and then, you know, we were getting vaccines, but we have the mass quarters, people are upset about that. And then we have now the problem with the winter storm. It seems like there's been a lot of plagues hitting the city of Houston and the nation as well. What were some of the the high points and low points you saw? That you would like to address in the upcoming two years you're on the you're on the council. Well, first of all, you're right. It has been one thing after another after another. Just first coming into office, we started with a bang. Literally, we had the Watson grinding explosion that was about two weeks after taking office. And it's just been one thing after another disaster after disaster. But we're dealing with it. I think my background working for the previous councilmember councilmember started has prepared me working with constituents, as you said earlier. And it's it's been tough. But what we've been trying to do in the district day office is to focus on those things that when all of this is done, there's still going to be those issues that I ran for in the first place to try to fix infrastructure issues, quality of life, crime, those kinds of things that we are trying to solve in district day. And so we are focused on those things and the covid and all these other things have just added to our list. It hasn't taken away from those those core issues that we're trying to address. We've just added added a lot to our plate right now. If if I'm sitting in District I, District H or District C and I've got issues, what can my city representative do? My councilmember representative, what what should I direct toward their office? If I feel that I'm still having problems, not enough water, electricity is still spotty. What should I do? Well, I would suggest that if anyone has any concerns still, and we are still getting concerns into my office to please contact us. It might not be under my director's section, but we can get you to the right place. So even if it's something that has to do with electricity, if it's something on the state level, we can contact, you know, your state representatives on your behalf, make sure you get connected with them. If it's a plumbing issue and you maybe you don't have the funds to pay for it or, you know, you just have concerns about it in some way. Let us help you. Let us get you connected to the right people. We can find organizations most likely that that can assist you with any kind of concern. So while it might not be under my direct jurisdiction, we work very hard in the district day office to connect people to the right places. I take my role as being a public servant very seriously. And so it might not be my role, but it's it's my problem. If it's the problem of my constituents, what were some of the bright things you've seen in the past year as a city council member of things that make you proud of what you're doing and of the district you represent? I am so proud of district A. It has been a tough year for district A. I mean, really for all of Houston, but really for district A as well. And every time something happens, the community comes together and supports each other. And that is district A. That is that is what we do. That's what we've always done, what we continue to do. And I've just seen so many neighbors helping each other, not just with the winter storm, but just in general, even with covid helping on social media, helping people find each other jobs and resources. And just people have really come together to help each other out. We've had so many food distributions, not just from the winter storm, but just because of covid and just water distributions, all kinds of things that people, the community, they've come out to help us with. They have contacted our office. What can we do to help? What can we what what volunteer opportunities do you have? We want to give back and we've seen so many people come and support our community. We recently served almost 5,000 meals this past weekend to the community. That was with Representative Lacey Hull's office as well. She was she helped us so much, put that together and, you know, we served almost 5,000 meals and it wasn't just the two of us. It was so many volunteers who came, neighbors helping each other. It's been it's been tough, but it's also been really wonderful to see everyone come together and I've just been so proud of our community. So if there's any need that you have, contact us. We'll find support for you. That's what we're here for. That's what we do. So please contact us not just in March, but in any month we're here to serve. Well, I really appreciate it. And again, thank you for all the things you did. And as as somebody in your district, I was very impressed the amount of assistance and the visibility you showed. You were always on our neighborhood Facebook pages. And I know you're not the only council member who does that, but you're the one that I was most concerned about because I live in your district where the power was off. People were saying contact Amy's office because you had you had said, let us know if there's anything we can do. And I really appreciate that. One of the things when I get to interview candidates, one of the things that I'm always impressed with, I know a lot of times people complain about government, but our city and local elected representatives, you know, we we really get a good batch of people who really want to serve. And I thank you for being one of those people. Well, thank you. I really appreciate that. Like I said, I take this role as being a public servant very seriously. And I think the way that people are contacting their elected representatives are changing. And that's why we try to use social media as much as possible. And, you know, sometimes we have to ask them to contact their office and get more details on things. But we do try to have a presence there to make sure that anyone knows that they can contact me and I respond myself on social media. So, you know, we're we're just we're here and we're ready to serve no matter how you contact us. Well, thank you again very much. And how did they get in contact with your district office? What's the best way to do when they have questions and problems? Well, if anyone needs to contact us, you can send us an email district A at Houston TX dot gov. Or you can call us eight three two three nine three three zero one zero. We're pretty easy to get a hold of. You can just Google my name, find a way to get a hold of us. We want to hear from you. We're happy to hear from the community. So please do contact us. Member Peck, thank you very much for your time. And thank you for your responsiveness and for all you've done in this last year. It's really been a time that we needed a good city council member. And I thank you for being that person. Thank you so much. I appreciate that. Wind energy is a modern spend on an old way of harnessing energy. Tonight, our guest is Monty Cummings of Energia Veleta, who dropped in to discuss wind energy and its future here in the Lone Star State. OK, Monty Cummings, I want to welcome you to Public Affairs, Public Access on Houston Media Source TV. Thank you very much for being with us. You are with. Energia Veleta, that's actually your company that you started. Tell us a little bit about how you got into wind energy. Well, it was about 20 years ago, Jane, and thank you for the invitation. It's a real pleasure to be here to talk about electricity and renewable energy taxes in Mexico as a professional. I'm a CPA and at one point in time, I had a boutique consulting firm in an oil and gas company, friends and customers of mine asked me how the production tax credit for renewable energy worked under Section 45 D of the Internal Revenue Code. I gave them a brief explanation of how that worked along and presented my consulting invoice along with it. And they said, tell me more. And we kept talking about it and made a couple of presentations to other industry leaders who have also been in Texas and natural gas and electricity are intricately intertwined, which we will talk about a little bit more in this. And because of their activity in the oil and gas patch, we looked at it and decided that developing a wind energy project is very similar to developing an oil and gas prospect. In that you lock up a resource rich laden area to get the rights to develop it, get all your permits and connect up to the export pipeline, as it were, get a customer and generate the energy. So we decided to do that. And our first prospect, we started working on in 2003, was on the Kennedy Ranch just south of Corpus Christi's 400,000 acre ranch founded by Mifflin Kennedy, the mentor to Richard King and the King Ranch, but this is the Kennedy Ranch. And our first one, it developed our first wind energy project. And seven years later, it became operational. The Pinnascar Wind Farm Project in Kennedy County, Texas. That was how I was introduced in by being a CPA. And at that point in time, there also the Texas electrical industry was restructured in 1999 with Senate Bill two, which divided the energy industry from vertically integrated entities to generation companies, transmission companies and load serving entities. And because of that, there was a requirement to purchase a certain percentage of renewable energy in order to be a a load serving entity. And that also was a driver of the start of wind energy in Texas, along with the production tax credit and the requirement of retail energy companies to buy a certain percentage of their electricity from renewable sources. So a lot of the the foundation for wind energy and why it started expanding is based in part on legislative mandate. Correct, the the initial portion of it was a man. Well, you know, if you want to go back further than that, you know, from the federal level, you know, the the Public Utility Act that required load serving entities to buy from any generation source. This was George Bush, also Governor Jerry Brown gave out a tax credit for California State tax, a federal tax or install capacity. So, yes, the impetus started with governmental incentives to promote the use of renewable energies. And the ones we just mentioned about the the the the percentage production requirement in Texas was one that kickstarted the energy industry in Texas, as well as the ERCOT open access nondiscriminatory access range generator that wanted to connect to the electric grid also facilitated the uptake of wind energy in the early 2000s. So you're working on developing projects and have developed projects in South Texas and in the Pacific with Mexico. When I think of wind energy, I always think of West Texas because my wife's from West Texas, we traveled up there a lot and outside of Big Spring, sweet water in that area, there are just rows and rows of windmills. But wind energy is really all over the place. There are mills in windmills in the Gulf, too, right? And in the water, no. But on the Texas Gulf Coast is what I call it's the Napa Valley of wind energy. And I can give you some characteristics that would do that. You know, no doubt about the wind energy in Texas started in West Texas out by Fort Davis, some of the original plants started by Abilene Trent Mesa. The part about the panhandle, which is the windiest part of Texas, really didn't take off until there were transmission lines built to bring that energy from the panhandle to the Lamerilla Lubbockary downstate. Really, the Ercott grid transmission grid used to run about to Roscoe, which is just a little bit northeast of Sweetwater. And beyond that, that was all Southwest Power Pool. Also out towards Fort Stockton close to the Pecos River Valley on Woodward Mountain, King Mountain. Those were the original Texas renewable energy. Now, what happens is that it's windy as there at night and in the winter. And when does everybody need energy is during the summer in the afternoon. And that's the good fortune we had living on the Texas coast. And that's when it's always windy every afternoon, 15, 20 miles an hour, just because the air above the Chihuahuan Desert heats up and rises up. And the cold air from cold in comparison rushes off the Texas Gulf to take the place of that hot air that rises. And that's when we started working on this project in Kennedy County, which is right on the Texas Gulf Coast, which, you know, it's never really too windy. But then again, it's never really to not windy. So I mean, it's windy, you know, 300 three hundred ten days out of the year and the other 40 or 50. There's not it blows from the southeast most of the time. It's sitting on the existing transmission robust transmission grid that not that far distant from Houston, San Antonio, Austin, Rio Grande Valley, where major load centers are. So and there's plenty of wide open flat spaces to put these things. And so South Texas has really come on as the Texas Gulf Coast area as a important when it's to wind energy, what wine is to Napa Valley, what Georgia is for peaches. I want to confess my ignorance here. I really didn't know that much. I mean, I drove by windmills and I know that Texas Tech has a big wind energy management program. But I and probably a lot of other people really don't know how wind energy works. I mean, we know it turns turbines like hydroelectric. But how does energy get into the grid? OK, well, you know, I'll just make this one step back and talk all about just the generation of electricity in and of itself. There is this process called electromagnetic induction, electromagnetic induction, where you run some metal between a couple of magnets and nobody knows why. They just know it does. It generates electricity. And, you know, originally these were gasoline, diesel, coal-fired turbines that spun these turbines at a high rate to make electricity. And so with that, you know, Edison, you know, made his power plant in New York City and power became accepted all over, you know, the world. Now, with wind energy, it's the same. There's coal plants, you know, as you mentioned, there's hydroelectric plants that the moving water moves a turbine fast enough to where these magnets aren't spinning and create electricity from the electromagnetic induction, coal plants, which boil water in the steam coming off the water, turns the turbine. Same with natural gas plants, same with nuclear plants. Those are three where they're burner tips, where water boils. People call them thermal generation. Hydroelectric is not thermal generation, but natural gas, coal and nuclear are all thermal. Now, the same electromagnetic induction process happens with the wind energy. As the blades start turning, they run through a gearbox, a planetary gearbox, which takes the revolution of 20 revolutions per minute and runs it up to 3400 revolutions per minute and creates electricity. The electricity, just like that, once the electron is in the wire, all right, it's no different than an electron from natural gas, nuclear, or any other source, and it gets collected and distributed in the same manner. And it's generated by the same electromagnetic induction fueled by the kinetic energy of the wind and these blades, catching the wind, spinning it and then running through a gearbox to make it up to high speed, turbine, electric generation speeds. Now, that's how it works. Now, unlike other thermal, it's not as easy to control. You know, it's becoming easier to predict, but it's not as it's not. There's no on and off switch when it's it's when it's spinning and generating electricity, you want to take it. And that's the other thing about electricity. It's you make it about the same time you use it. There's no really economical way to store electricity at scale. Of course, there's batteries and we've made great improvements in battery technology for automobiles, for cell phones, but enough storage and a battery to power a city. We're just not there yet. And that's where hydroelectric facilities come in. In a sense, they're a battery storage in that when you don't let the water lose, you know, there's your storage facilities in hydro. So and just because of the nature of Texas, if you driven out to Lubbock, you know, we don't have much water, so there's not going to be. There is hydro, but it's not a significant contributor to the Texas electric grid. So the you had mentioned earlier, and I think you're coming back to this, is that a lot of the energy generation, whether it be nuclear, gas, carbon, water or solar, it works in there integratively, I guess, in an integrated method. And sometimes sun isn't available, sometimes wind is not available. Sometimes water can be stored. And as you mentioned, there's no batteries. How do you foresee the near future of wind energy contributing? Well, you know, I think we take a look at, you know, knowing your orientation towards history to take a look at where we've come from. We'll give you a good idea of where we think we're going to be going. You know, Texas, as it stands right now, if you just want to focus on Texas is the eighth largest wind. If it were another country, which some people seem like to think it could and should be, it would be the eighth largest wind energy country in the world. You know, there's US, China. I mean, it's up there with Germany, France, Spain. More than this is Texas alone. Texas, if it was another country, has more wind energy than, you know, 180 other countries. If you it's it's it would be the eighth largest wind energy installed capacity market in the world. Now, that's only going to continue. Why? Because it's the cheapest. You know, there's no the only cost you have in ongoing for wind energy is property taxes. You know, all your fuel costs, essentially the same with solar, all your fuel costs over the life of the project, you're investing in a capital cost upfront. You know, I've participated in auction processes competing against any one any any generation source, come one, come all. And wind energy and solar are the cheapest forms of energy right now. Now, that's great. But, you know, you don't build a system out of completely out of wind energy. One of the things that wind energy helped during our recent pull of vortex is that the diversity of the geography and geography of the system, Texas Gulf Coast wind kept contributing a significant amount of energy during that whole. So we would have been in worse shape had we not had wind energy where we think we're going to go, you know, certainly as a switch is made to low carbon sources, wind power will have an increasingly solar. What's one of the challenges of wind power is that it doesn't work well at the distributed level, meaning home energy out in the panhandle. They used to have wind chargers back before the Rural Electric Act came in, but using distributed generation on your home, I think that's going to be another area that we're going to need to take a serious look at, certainly increasing demand response and winterizing our homes has another role to play to reduce the energy. The reason why the energy demand was so high recently in the pull of vortex is that our homes here in Texas are just not built with the proper insulation to survive subzero temperatures for days at a time. So, I mean, yes, there is a patchwork of both generation resources, transmission upgrades, insulation of our residences and businesses that's all going to contribute into the transition to a lower carbon future, even including electric vehicles. So, you know, you're mentioning about it's not really effective on an individual basis. And I, you know, there's a little house that I think it may be a farm that I pass on the way to Lubbock from time to time. And I think it's outside of Pumpkin Center. And there's a big, well, not a big, but a good size windmill out there, kind of like the ones behind you. And I guess it powers their business or their home. But as you're saying, it's not good. It's not cost effective for just an individual, right? Well, you know, I can give you examples of school districts that have put wind turbines at their facilities. Shallow water school district, by Abilene, there's another one. And, you know, it's good for generating the cheapest amount of energy when it's windy. Now, whether that's going to be 100 percent of your energy usage. No, you're going to have to have to supplement it with solar. You're going to have to have to supplement it with natural gas. You're going to have to say that it's going to take a balanced portfolio of generation to not only provide for the cheapest energy, but also reliable energy and cheap and reliable. Many times are at opposition. You know, that's one of the problems with the Texas grid we recently experienced. Texas is great for making cheap energy. It's the cheap energy capital of North America. Now you want cheap natural gas? We got it. You want cheap wind? We got it. One of the reasons why is that the increased capital requirements needed to winterize or weatherize wind turbines, gas pipelines, coal fire plants, nuclear fire plants were not made in the interest of keeping the energy cheap. Now, as a result, we have a Harvey like catastrophe with the cascading failure of natural gas pipelines. Gas generation facilities, wind turbines, nuclear facilities, water pumping stations that run off of electricity. All of those combined, you know, people are saying this, the after effects of the polar vortex freeze is going to be more costly than Hurricane Harvey. So it's kind of a, you know, you want to pay me now. You want to pay me later. You know, we didn't do the pay me now on requiring wind turbines to have the de icing package. We didn't require the installation of well head freeze protections that that's where a lot of the natural gas got froze up. It's because the water comes up with the natural gas and freezing doesn't run down the pipeline. You know, we didn't require heating controls on feeder systems of the nuclear power plant. You know, it was cloudy and there was no sun. And everybody didn't have a their home insulated and had to turn the heating the way up. And we had the crash. So and now we're going to be paying the bill for not making those investments on the front end. So, you know, it was kind of a planning decision as in the interest of making the cheapest energy possible, which we were great at and Texas, you know, benefited greatly from industry growth, job creation, from having the cheapest energy. But now we're paying the price with the catastrophe catastrophic fall from the cascading failure of systems as a result of the polar vortex. You bring up some issues. In the discussion, and it reminds me of a lot of things that I see and hear on social media or from people who are talking about wind energy. It is cheap. But let me ask you let me ask you the the question that I see all the time. How many birds do these windmills kill? Much less than all the hunters in Texas combined. OK. You know, I've worked in this particular issue for more than 20 years. Our first wind energy facility was in along Baffin Bay, along the Laguna Madre, which is on the Central Flyway and at a choke point on the Central Flyway of all the migratory birds that come from Central US, East Coast US and winter in the tropics and are on the winter flyway on the way back. So we 80 percent of North American redhead ducks overwinners along the Laguna Madre. So in order to respond to that concern, you know, we mounted one of the most ambitious pre-construction avian mortality monitoring programs, we used radar, we used recording devices, hundreds of hours of biologists in the field. And using their field collected data and observation records applying the biostatistical techniques used there, they came up with the estimate that the wind farm in Kennedy County would kill two point some odd birds per year per turbine. And there are 300 turbines there. So there would be 600 bird deaths because of that. Now, as a follow on to that, we went on and continued a post-construction mortality monitoring program, which actually took the predictions and compared it to the actual results. One of the innovations being Texas, that we usually that field work is done by biologists. So they go out and look for bird carcasses around the bottom of the turbines. And and we found that bird dogs are much more reliable than biologists in finding bird carcasses, you know, and there's certain techniques of measuring predation and search your efficiency. That's where the bird dogs, because we would go out and see them and know that, you know, that there's a dead bird there. And did the biologists find it? No, did the bird dog find it? Yes. And the results of that almost mirrored the projections. Certainly, there are areas where, you know, there are species of concern. The prairie chicken up in the central flyway is one of concern. The the the bad rap, shall we say, started in California in Hawthorne and the Tahatchipi area, where as wind energy first started out, the towers were latticework towers and the turbines were of a small capacity, meaning that they the blades rotated at a very, very high speed. The Golden Condor native to the area thought those latticework towers for that the turbines were placed upon were a great place to make a nest. And as they're sitting there watching the rabbit run below the wind turbine, they take off and get hit by that blade that's spinning 300 revolutions per minute. So, I mean, there are certain areas that, you know, need to have extra precautions and developing in a responsible way. And I think at least in our Kennedy County, which is the absolute most sensitive area we've ever developed a wind project and I've done more than my share is is a shiny example of how you can do responsible. We also installed there a radar detection unit, a Merlin radar detection unit, much like they have at airports because jet engines and airports have the same effect on flying mammals, as they say. And as an incident or a flock of birds is detected on the radar units, they shut the turbines down. Bats is also an area of concern. And it's found that that's really not an impact issue. That's more of a low pressure issue in that they're they fly into a low pressure and their heads will explode. Now, the so I really don't. So birds is something that you need to take into consideration. You need to do your due diligence. And if you prepare the proper amount of stays and show that you're not going to have any negative impacts, well, then go right ahead and we and that's what we did. And that's how our pioneering pioneering work. There was followed by many other people to establish the other wind farms are along the Texas Gulf Coast. What do you see on the horizons? Changes are going to come about as a result of Winter Storm, Uri. OK, well, you know, first of all, on a broader perspective, I would think that we would need to anticipate that the Texas grid has been designed for extreme heat events and was not designed for extreme cold events. I would think that that needs to be brought into the planning and consideration of it. And that includes additional investment to to allow for those types of resources to be more available when we need them, which will require investment. So the first thing is, is to recognize that climate change is upon us now. We're seeing the effects of it and that, you know, denial of that was only going to continue our path down. Repeat the the the the the the mistakes and planning. We made this go around, you know, communication is another one. Certainly when Hurricane Harvey started scraping up the Texas coast, you know, every emergency management office, every elected official, every county judge was beaming out warnings of what's going to be coming. Prepare yourselves, fill up your bathtub, get your life, you know. And in this, I mean, you know, everybody was happy, happy Valentine's Day and the lights went out. You know, there was certainly no coordinated preview, emergency management notification of this. So that's certainly another area and figuring out adjustments to the electric market to allow for recovery of investment in these winterization necessities in order to survive completely another. Thank you for putting in Yuri that even sounds Russian. It's almost you're one of the Yuri, you've got a Javago, right? I mean, it's it's fitting. I mean, Dr. Javago was filmed in the cold and so were we. You know, so certainly market structures, other markets have a capacity payment where generators are paid just to be ready. And if they're not ready, there's a severe penalty. So the energy that needs to be looked at. Yeah, so those would be the three things that I would suggest. One is to integrate climate change into the planning horizon. Second, you know, have, you know, governmental entities be more aware of this and allow for market reforms in order for the investment to to in capital costs to winterize all forms of energy. You know, coal piles froze over nuclear plant of one of our four nuclear plants that have shut down because of one of the water feed system controls froze up. So and, you know, wind energy certainly could have done better, but so could have everybody else. And that's why we need to focus on what can we do better to do this and let's don't get caught with this being unexpected and let the public know what's going on. And your program here is a vital step in educating folks, bringing in keeping the discussion going as to what we need to do to have a carbon free grid as well as provide the reliability that we need for an ever increasing dependence upon electricity that our modern society has. You very much. And I appreciate you taking time to visit with us. My pleasure, Jean. Can I move any much? Thank you. Our final guest tonight is Dr. Gavin Dillingham with the Houston Advanced Research Center, Hark. And we'll ask him about clean energy and energy diversification in Texas. Tell us a little bit about that organization and what you do there. Sure. So the Hark Houston Advanced Research Center was founded in 1982. George Mitchell founded it as he was starting up the woodlands. He wanted to create kind of a research hub up in the woodlands and really wanted to have a focus on sustainability around that. He so he started Hark at that point. And at that time, we focused a lot more on kind of hard sciences and engineering. We actually housed some of the scientists who were working on the super collider up around Waxahatchee, had a fuel cell lab, did all sorts of just kind of highly technical R&D kind of work over the last started about 2000 or so. Hark switched to much more of an environmental and sustainability kind of focus and since then has been working on air, energy and water issues. So we have folks that focus on, you know, scientists that focus on air quality. Water scientists focusing on water, water availability, water quality to do a lot of work in the Gulf Coast and then just kind of the surrounding counties dealing in those issues as well as with ecosystem services and also and especially in the last few years, focusing more on stormwater management, flood risk mitigation type work. I lead the clean energy group. So I direct that group and there's a number of us there. And we focus on both kind of energy efficiency work as well as grid resilience, distributed energy resources. A lot of our work right now is with the Department of Energy where we do run about three programs now with them, providing technical assistance for things such as micro grids, developing different types of decision tools, looking at solar plus storage and low income communities and trying to figure out business models around that. But we do a good bit of work just kind of in both the energy efficiency and resilience space. We also work with cities and counties on climate action planning type stuff. So we've we've put together a few of those and helped the city launch their and actually wrote the city of Houston's Climate Action Plan for them there. So across a variety of different sustainability and climate focused areas at this time. These questions about clean air, about energy, about stormwater and about how Houston and other growing areas are going to deal with that become more and more important to the public at large. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. And we're seeing a significant trend in that area as far as, you know, just, you know, and I think, you know, we're seeing it both from the, you know, from just residents as well as organizations, companies, corporations within within the region. You know, after Hurricane Harvey, there was, you know, much of that recovery had to happen. But there was also a lot of question of what do we need to do with our infrastructure to improve its resilience to reduce the likelihood of flooding, because for some companies, or, you know, especially these some of these large global energy companies, there were discussions about concerns about recruiting and recruiting and retaining, you know, high quality, you know, knowledge workers and kind of recruiting younger workers to come work in the industry and such. And so, you know, there's very much, you know, as we're seeing, you know, changes in the number of events and the intensity of events, if it's hurricanes or flooding or extreme heat or those types of issues, there's very much a growing interest in that regard of how do we mitigate that risk and make Houston and the region in general, just, you know, improve its quality of life, make sure it's, you know, has, you know, that sustainability associated with it, make sure it's an attractive place to come and live and work in such. And so, yeah, it's very much on people's minds, and it's very much how do we start, you know, continuing to deal with these ongoing, you know, extreme weather events that seem to be happening on a more regular basis. There's ways in which we can reduce that and how do we start putting the investment in place to do that? Well, one of the weather events that is on everybody's mind right now is the question of a winter storm, Yuri. And, you know, we're just recovering from that. People are getting their electricity back. And people are asking questions. The legislature has met recently to look into the energy grid, ERCOT. Can you inform, like most people, I think, a lot of this is new information to us, and we don't know, you know, what we're hearing. We may not understand it fully. So can you explain a little bit about ERCOT and what that is and how it was formed? Sure. So ERCOT is what's called an independent system operator. And it's a quasi-governmental organization that was formed by the Public Utility Commission of Texas. And their primary goal is to schedule electricity to come onto the grid and to get it to the right location. So they're largely a scheduler in that regard. They do go out and make sure that, you know, that energy or generators are producing the power they need to produce, making sure there's enough power on the grid, and then making sure it gets routed to the right locations and such. But they're one piece of a very, very, you know, kind of large system here. So, you know, you have the state, you know, the governor and the legislature, they largely put together the rules that goes down to the Public Utility Commission of Texas. The PUC then puts together, you know, they work on the implementation of some of those rules as well as, you know, continue to add to them or make the appropriate regulatory changes and stuff. And then ERCOT, you know, reports to the Public Utility Commission there. And ERCOT works pretty much with the large ecosystem of different types of companies out there, especially when you look at ERCOT within the deregulated market context. And so within the state of Texas, you have, you know, part of the market's regulated, part of it's deregulated. ERCOT's responsible for the deregulated part of the state. And that's about 85 to 90 percent of the electricity use in the state. The other non or the other regulated sections would be actually in the woodlands, kind of the northern part of the woodlands, which is Intergy. Austin has Austin Energy, there's CPS and San Antonio, and then there's El Paso Electric and El Paso. Those are all regulated and have a bit different rules. Some of them still interact in the ERCOT market, but it's slightly different. So ERCOT's largely responsible for the deregulated market there. They work what's called Transmission Distribution Utilities. Those are like your center points for your Encore or your AEPs that are out there. And their responsibility is just the transmission distribution system. They get their power from the generators that are out there. The generators are independent power producers. They're large organizations such as Vistra or NRG or Calpine, or, you know, both on the thermoelectric side or on the wind and solar side of things, large utility scale systems. And so those generators produce the power that gets placed on the transmission distribution grid. The transmission distribution utilities get the power to the customers. And then also in the deregulated market, you have the retail electricity providers. They're the one that's buying the power on behalf of the customer. And they're kind of that liaison within that. So you have a lot of different pieces and parts working together in this regard, and there's actually, you can dive deeper into that of other entities, but at the high level, kind of the different pieces that are going on in that market. So with the League of Women Voters in this show, what we try to do is educate the public so that we can be better informed voters. And one of the things that I've seen recently is a lot of finger pointing. And so let me ask you, as someone who studies this, what goddess in trouble during Winter Storm Yuri? I'm not used to saying Winter Storm here in Houston. What got us to the point where we were? Right. It's great. I keep calling it Tropical Storm or Hurricane too. I mean, because we're so used to those versus Winter Storms. It was such a long one. So yeah, it's kind of the nature of the market that we're in right here. It's the ERCOT market or just the deregulated markets very much focused on providing the lowest cost energy. And what that means is that there's a focus on the lowest cost energy being provided to the grid and reliability. And that works great whenever there's blue sky conditions and everything's kind of within your conditions of operation there. It's not a grid that's designed for a tremendous amount of resilience. And that is just based on the nature of how the market was designed. There's no incentive necessarily to do what people have been talking about as far as the winterization or the weatherization of the grid here. And the reason for that is any kind of major changes you make to these, to if it's a wind turbine or if it's a natural gas plant or a coal plant or nuclear or solar, any kind of winterization or weatherization you do adds cost to that. And it makes them less competitive in the market. So there's no incentive necessarily to add these types of components to any kind of generator there. There's also aren't any resilience standards put in place and that would be the public utility commission that would have to come up with the resilience standards and enforce those. Those standards aren't put in place either because they just, once again, it adds to cost to the market, to the ability to produce this power at the cheapest rate. And it's wonderful. And Texas sells itself on low regulations and low cost of energy. And that works out wonderfully until you have these types of events hit us. And that starts showing the vulnerability of that type of approach. And so there needs to be efforts made and that's where this discussion is going right now of how do you incentivize some of this weatherization and winterization to happen within these plants in order to reduce the likelihood of this happening. And a lot of that really depends on some of the trade-offs. The grid has largely developed, the ERCOT system or just Texas system in general is developed to deal with extreme heat, deal with hot summer temperatures. That's what we typically find. And so the natural gas plants are not stuck within a structure. They're not housed in any way. They're out in the open and that's largely to help them with cooling. You add any kind of technology to the wind turbines that potentially could make them be able to sustain very cold temperatures, but it may make them less efficient during the hot summer periods and such. And so you're dealing with that trade-off and with that balance there. And so one of the other issues that we see is that when you look at the long-term system assessment, which is the kind of the planning that ERCOT does to look at what is future demand and what does future generation look like across the state? And this is what happens with what's called integrated resource planning in other states or just energy planning in general, is that traditionally they look at historical weather data. So they look back 20 years. Okay, this is 20 years with a pattern of weather patterns here and they projected ahead 20 years. And they said, okay, we're assuming that the weather is gonna continue to look like this. We'll throw some contingencies in there. We'll say, oh, what if there's a 2011 drought or whatever is this and whatever is that? And how will the system perform in that regard? What we're seeing now and what we study at HARK and we have a few scientists working on this is more looking at downscaled climate data. So we're looking at these grids, this very granular data that can look at about a seven kilometer by seven kilometer type grid here. And this has been working with actually with Texas Tech Climate Sciences Center to get this data. And we're looking at, okay, so we really know that previous weather patterns are not gonna be reflected in future weather patterns. That we're pretty certain on what that looks like and the trends are showing that direction. We're seeing a lot more intensity of these types of events, whether it's hurricanes or flooding or drought or extreme heat, we're seeing that tendency there. So we know that we need to look at different types of data. And so we're starting to look at these climate models more closely and looking at the impacts on the power generation systems. So if you have a natural gas plant or a coal plant, and some of the biggest concerns in Texas, although a lot of the discussions around winter, the winter storm, is really more on extreme heat and water availability and water temperature to cool these thermoelectric power plants and allow them to operate over time. And so now we can start using this downscaled climate data and say, okay, so out in the next five, 10, 15, 20 years, this is the likelihood that we're gonna be seeing a drought or we're gonna be seeing this extreme heat event. And this is how intense and potentially how long-lasting it's gonna lack. So it allows these planners to start running scenarios. It allows them to kind of see, okay, what are my options under these different scenarios? And you make decisions based on that. Right now, none of that is happening within ERCOT at all. And you end up developing your system and developing your plants and your market in a way that does not take into account any of that future risk. And that becomes problematic, especially as we see these changing weather events and weather patterns. Well, Dr. Gavin Dillingham, I want to thank you very much for your time and for your thought-provoking responses. I mean, given us a lot to think about. Absolutely, it was wonderful talking with you today. So thank you, Jim. Thank you. I want to thank our special guests on tonight's show, Houston City Council member Amy Peck, Monty Cummings of Interhenje of Aletha and Harks, Dr. Gavin Dillingham for telling us about how the city fared during the recent winter storm and about the future of energy here in Texas. And a big thank you to you for joining us tonight on Public Affairs Public Access show on Houston Media Source TV. I'm Gene Preuss for the Houston League of Women Voters. Have a good evening.