In the middle of February 2021, an Arctic cold front wreaked havoc on Texas, causing a blackout that plunged more than 4 million customers into darkness and cold during single-digit temperatures. The crisis led to the deaths of nearly 200 people and an estimated $50 billion changed hands, saddling millions of customers, including ones in neighboring states, with unexpected excess costs.
What happened in Texas is an incredibly complex story involving many factors, from a simple lack of weatherization, to flaws in the state’s electricity market structure, to failed governance. And untangling that story, and identifying ways to prevent such a crisis from ever happening again, is a complex task. To help us with it, we invited several Energy Transition Show alumni—journalist Russell Gold of the Wall Street Journal, professor Emily Grubert of the Georgia Institute of Technology, and legal scholar Ari Peskoe of Harvard Law School—to join us in a four-way conversation that explores all the angles.
Guest #1: Ari Peskoe is a Senior Fellow in Electricity Law at the Harvard Law School Environmental Policy Initiative. He has written extensively about electricity regulation, on issues ranging from rooftop solar to Constitutional challenges to states’ energy laws.
On Twitter: @AriPeskoe
On the Web: Harvard Law School Environmental Policy Initiative
Guest #2:Emily Grubert is a civil engineer and environmental sociologist who studies how we can make better decisions about large infrastructure systems, particularly related to decarbonization of the US energy system. Specifically, she studies socioenvironmental impacts associated with future policy and infrastructure and how community and societal priorities can be better incorporated into multicriteria policy and project decisions. Grubert is an Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and, by courtesy, of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
On Twitter: @emilygrubert
On the Web: emilygrubert.org
Guest #3:Russell Gold is an award-winning investigative reporter and author. He has reported on energy at the Wall Street Journal since 2000, covering many of the major stories of the period including the rise of fracking, the Deepwater Horizon and the energy transition. His 2014 book, The Boom, was longlisted for the FT Goldman Sachs Business Book prize. Superpower was published in June 2019. He lives in Texas, with his wife and children.
On Twitter: @russellgold
On the Web: www.russellgold.net
Recording date: March 19, 2021
Air date: April 14, 2021
Geek rating: 8
Teaser photo credit: Snow covering grounds of the Texas Capitol on February 15, 2021By Jno.skinner – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=100196949
