February 19th, local time, Houston, Texas Mayor Sylvester Turner said in an interview that power outages caused by the Texas blizzard continued, and the lack of leadership of state government officials was the key.
Turner said that although many people think that the poor regulation of the Texas Electricity Reliability Board (ERCOT) is the cause of the state’s post-storm power supply difficulties, he still believes that the state’s leadership’s neglect of electricity is the real reason, and ERCOT is just a scapegoat.
Turner explained that he had introduced a bill in 2011 to ensure that ERCOT had enough energy capacity to prevent power outages, but the bill was never heard.
Turner said: “If that bill had been implemented in 2011, we would not have encountered this situation now.”
According to Texas Governor Greg Abbott, about 165,000 households in the state remained without electricity on the 19th.
In response, Turner said that the state’s power system urgently needs to be upgraded because the current design is not fully considered for electricity customers.
