House committee advances Senate weatherization bill, pushing it closer to full passage

AUSTIN, Texas — With less than two weeks left in this year's legislative session, a Texas House committee is prepared to advance a major Senate bill requiring all utilities to weatherize their plants, which was a top priority after the February winter storms shut off most of the state's power and killed around 200 Texans according to the latest estimations.

On Tuesday, House Committee on State Affairs Chair and state Rep. Chris Paddie, R-Marshall, opened the meeting by stating he plans to get Senate Bill 3 passed out of committee before adjourning, sending it to the full floor. However, members did not get the committee substitute until 1 A.M., and he wanted to give everyone a chance to read it before voting.

Paddie held off on calling the bill to a vote until the afternoon, after they returned from the floor. After a quick run-through of the committee substitute, the committee unanimously passed SB 3, sending it to the Calendars Committee, where it awaits being placed on the schedule to be discussed on the House floor.

"We have incorporated a tremendous amount of input from lots of stakeholders," Paddie said. "We know this is a critical piece of legislation. When we all came in at the beginning of this session, we all collectively made a commitment to address a lot of the challenges we identified in our early hearings, and I think we have a product now that largely does that."

If signed into law, Senate Bill 3 would require all electricity generators and providers, as well as natural gas facilities and pipelines in the state to weatherize. Violations of this law could result in a penalty of $1 million per day. Facilities that experience weatherization failures will have to get a third party to assess their plans and procedures.

Currently, plants are not required to be weatherized. Instead, the Public Utility Commission of Texas and ERCOT can only make recommendations, and perform spot checks to see if plants are following their plans, but they cannot levy punishments if these plans are not followed.

During the peak of the outages, almost half of the state's generation was thrown offline due to the extreme cold. This resulted in around 70 percent of Texans losing power, according to a report from the University of Houston.

During committee hearings immediately after the storms, since-ousted ERCOT CEO Bill Magness said the power grid was less than five minutes away from blackouts that could have lasted weeks or months.

In addition to requiring weatherization, SB 3 would establish an emergency alert system providing power outage alerts to Texans. Magness pointed to a lack of communication to customers on the possible severity of outages was the biggest mishap throughout the storms.

This bill mandates power providers would need to provide information to customers about their rolling blackout procedures.

The Texas Energy Reliability Council would also be tasked with improving communications and preparedness for natural gas availability for homes, hospitals, schools, churches, and anywhere else that needs it when natural gas is limited.

The Senate passed this bill unanimously at the end of March. However, SB 3 has been in the House committee since the beginning of April, and had a public hearing there in early May.

The full House floor has until next Tuesday, May 25, to give initial passage to the bill. That date is the deadline for the House pass all Senate bills on their supplemental calendar on second reading.