Adams: March 2021 Media Brief Staff Picks

For my March media brief artifacts, I thought back over the big energy events and stories that I had come across during the past few months, and one of the major events was the Texas grid failure. I was initially looking to write this up because of the media controversy over the role that different energy resources (fossil vs renewable) played in enabling this disaster to take place and/or helping grid regulators avoid a full-on blackout. In researching that topic, I found the discussion of how conservative politicians are using a notoriously biased and factually unreliable fossil-fuel think-tank for their talking points. This was all directly related to my work on the politics of energy transition in Austin, Texas, but I was also thinking about how to relate the grid failure to our work in energy rights. So, I turned to look at the failure in terms how the differential impact reflects social inequality. The Texas grid story is also important as the “rolling black outs” were not so rolling… and many LMI and communities of color had been left without power for days on end. This, according to regulators, was to ensure power supply to critical infrastructures (like hospitals, communications infrastructure, etc.), which makes sense, but it also points to the way critical infrastructures are distributed in ways that bake inequalities into the energy system and Texas’ strategies of emergency response. Another way of making this story relevant to Energy Rights was to look at the problem of energy debt. The price of energy soared during the blackouts as the demand for energy far outstripped the supply. Thus many utilities and even some customers are now saddled with unbelievable debt. So, I decided to look for news on how this debt is being understood in terms of responsibility (i.e. who is responsible for incurring it and who will be stuck with the bill). I hoped this could serve as an interesting point of comparison between COVID-19 induced energy debts and the debt incurred from the grid failure. Then I also wrote up the discussion of Texas Gas’s assault on Austin’s community climate plan because it was so pertinent to my work and because I thought it was interesting that this story had made its way into a Guardian article.