Rep. Dade Phelan (R-Kendall), speaker of the Texas House, appointed new members to the State Energy Plan Advisory Committee, KLST reported. The members are Bill Barnes, Mike Greene, Wendy King, and Julie Caruthers Parsley.
“I’m confident that these individuals will bring an invaluable perspective to this new committee and help make thoughtful recommendations to the legislature,” Phelan said, according to KLST. “The Texas House looks forward to learning more about the committee’s recommendations on how to improve our electric service in Texas.”
The first members of the committee, Daniel Hall, Castlen Moore Kennedy, Joel Mickey, and Phil Wilson, were appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott (R-Texas) in October 2021, according to a news release from the governor’s office.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R-Texas) in mid-February appointed Mark Ammerman, Jerome “Joey” Hall, Edwin Patrick Jenevein III, and Kenneth Stevens to the committee, according to a news release.
The appointments to the committee come at a time when efforts of the Public Utility Commission (PUC) of Texas to implement changes to the electric grid, in compliance with directions from the Texas legislature, are moving slowly, the Houston Chronicle reported.
PUC Commissioner Lori Cobbs warned that “what remains is a massive undertaking: redesigning the state’s power market in a way that promotes reliability while not overburdening rate-payers with the costs of changes,” the Houston Chronicle said.
One major problem for the PUC is that it has yet to deal with the harm caused to grid reliability and cost from the major influx of renewable energy generation onto the grid over the last several years, The Texan reported.
“Everyone has struggled to manage the glut of renewables that has appeared over the last 10 years,” PUC Chair Peter Lake told the Texan. "With the introduction of renewables and the intermittency and variability they’ve brought to the ERCOT grid, we have to adapt to that — it changed the equation, changed the landscape.”
With more renewable energy, the PUC will rely on partially unreliable sources of energy, The Texan reported.