We now have some accountability clarification from the court system over the disaster that hit Texas two winters ago. It kind of put me in the mind of the judgement that really all sort of shocked us after Parkland.

You know – the one where police have “no duty to protect.”

…“Neither the Constitution, nor state law, impose a general duty upon police officers or other governmental officials to protect individual persons from harm — even when they know the harm will occur,” said Darren L. Hutchinson, a professor and associate dean at the University of Florida School of Law. “Police can watch someone attack you, refuse to intervene and not violate the Constitution.”

Well, once the February 2021 storm had spent days hanging around: after the TX power grid collapsed, and the state was done totin’ up the dead bodies (there were over 250 folks who lost their lives), and then brought out the adding machines for damages, well…people were pissed.

Lawyers and lawsuits starting flying, even as Texans tried to get through the winter without homes in livable condition. Hurricanes are bad enough, but a flooded house in below freezing wweather?

Oh, dear God. The Horror. There’s no sleeping in a tent in the yard until someone can find sheetrock.

…But a hissing noise greeted Nedd, 53, when she and her husband came back the next day to check on their house. Water spewed from a broken pipe in the collapsed ceiling, flooding every room on the first floor — their bedroom, the kitchen, the dining room and the living room.

“What is going on?” Nedd asked herself, in shock, stepping through the water.

The couple shut off the water to the house and swept out as much as they could. They would spend nearly a year and some $90,000 fixing the home, but they would never get back the ruined photos of a family cruise and their nephew as a baby; the computer equipment Nedd used for her consulting work was destroyed.

Lawyers representing storm victims like Nedd are working to file the final lawsuits related to the disaster as its two-year anniversary arrives this week — and the two-year statute of limitations for filing suit begins to expire. Thousands are accusing power companies, distribution companies, electric grid operators and others of failing to prepare properly for it, creating a catastrophe that caused property damage, countless injuries and hundreds of deaths. One expert estimated the cost of the freeze was as high as $300 billion.

The threat of hundreds of billions in lawsuits was enough to shake state lawmakers and the utilities out of – is complacency the word? – and begin making the changes and upgrades that should have been in place in case of the ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ event that inevitably surprises the crap out of everyone when it eventually happens. But just as inevitably always happens more than once-in-a-lifetime and still surprises the crap out of everyone who get paid really well to know better.

…The disaster prompted calls to reform the system. Legislators required power generators and natural gas producers to prepare their infrastructure better for the extreme cold, among other fixes. And lawmakers are now looking at whether to allow a major change to the way the state’s electricity market works, which involves a controversial attempt to send money to the types of power generators — such as those powered by natural gas, coal and nuclear — that can come on no matter the weather (unlike wind and solar energy).

Nedd and others see the lawsuits as another way to force change. The defendants would likely need to see that it costs more to fail than to do what’s needed to keep the power on, said Greg Cox, a plaintiffs’ liaison counsel. The various lawsuits are being directed to one judge in Harris County who will handle all of them.

The plaintiffs include a person whose house caught fire when power was restored, another who had both feet amputated after getting frostbite and a disabled person whose ceiling collapsed on him while he was in bed, Cox said.

The first of those lawsuits have made it to the Texas First Court of Appeals, and I guess the whole approach is going to need to be rejiggered. The justices on that bench have ruled that the big power companies have no responsibility to provide power to their customers during emergencies.

Whoda thunk it?

Almost three years since the deadly Texas blackout of 2021, a panel of judges from the First Court of Appeals in Houston has ruled that big power companies cannot be held liable for failure to provide electricity during the crisis. The reason is Texas’ deregulated energy market.

The decision seems likely to protect the companies from lawsuits filed against them after the blackout. It leaves the families of those who died unsure where next to seek justice.

…After years of legal process, a three-judge panel convened to decide on the merits of those lawsuits.

This week, Chief Justice Terry Adams issued the unanimous opinion of that panel that “Texas does not currently recognize a legal duty owed by wholesale power generators to retail customers to provide continuous electricity to the electric grid, and ultimately to the retail customers.”

The opinion states that big power generators “are now statutorily precluded by the legislature from having any direct relationship with retail customers of electricity.”

WOWSAHS

Nobody has any responsibility for anything anymore, huh?

Probably would have been better for customers to know that up-front instead of counting on the power companies and losing their homes, appendages, or flat-out freezing to death.

TAKE A NOTE FOR NEXT TIME, KIDDIES

And it’s all part and parcel of the way the TX legislature broke up the power company structures in an attempt – as someone here explained once – to circumvent the national grid. I’m sure that seemed really expedient at the time, but whoa, DAWG – are Texans ever paying for it now.

…That legal separation of power generation from transmission and retail electric sales in many parts of Texas resulted from energy market deregulation in the early 2000s. The aim was to reduce energy costs.

Before deregulation, power companies were “vertically integrated.” That means they controlled generators, transmission lines and sold the energy they produced and transported directly to a regional customer base. Parts of Texas, like Austin, with publicly owned utilities still operate under such a system.

But in other parts of the state, deregulation broke up those regional energy monopolies, creating competing energy-generating companies and retail electric providers that buy power wholesale from generators and then re-sell it to residential consumers.

…In the opinion, Justice Adams noted that, when designing the Texas energy market, state lawmakers “could have codified the retail customers’ asserted duty of continuous electricity on the part of wholesale power generators into law.”

So what the court is saying is that the legislature should have codified the continued responsibility of providing power to the consumer when they created these retail middlemen, but they didn’t. And that break is what insulates basically an entire industry from damage claims. The retail provider has no legal delineated responsibility to keep the juice on during a storm, and the generating plants who formerly did are now one step removed from that very same.

Leaving the retail customer literally in the cold, dark, and whatever happens when the power goes out.

This was a test run of the first five lawsuits and it has to be a breathtaking setback. And holy smokes – yes, they’re going to appeal, but what to do in the meantime?

…The state Supreme Court has already ruled that the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s power grid operator, enjoys sovereign immunity and cannot be sued over the blackout.

Now, this recent opinion leaves the question of who, if anyone, may be taken to court over deaths and losses incurred in the blackout.

The only for sure answer is toss it back to the legislature.

Adding injury to insult…

ERCOT CEO joins chorus of utilities warning of winter blackout risk in Texas, nation https://t.co/Qe7M4R3bsi

— Houston Chronicle (@HoustonChron) December 11, 2023

…here’s ERCOT out with more winter warning messaging fun.

The U.S. power grid is becoming increasingly prone to blackout amid rising electricity demand and power plant closures, a group of power officials and executives, including Electric Reliability Council of Texas President Pablo Vegas, warned Monday.

At an event hosted by the U.S. Energy Association, a trade group, Vegas said there simply wasn’t enough investment being put into developing the transmission lines, natural gas pipelines and other infrastructure upon which the power grid relies.

…The Texas Legislature earlier this year approved $7.2 billion in public funding for the construction of new natural gas-fired power plants, but there’s skepticism whether those plants will actually be built considering the relatively cheap cost of electricity in Texas.

One potential solution, Vegas said, could lie in harnessing all the new electric vehicles and home battery systems that are being sold to allow grid operators to use that electricity at times of need, a technology that is currently under study at ERCOT.

I LURVES the “harnessing EVs” and stealing the juice you have stored in your OWN home from your personal bought-and-paid-for battery array to keep the grid running when they can’t. Don’t you appreciate big government’s efforts on everyone’s behalf?

Who did you even outage proof your home for? Bet you thought it was for you the whole time.

One problem immediately that springs to mind? My friend Duke in Houston sent me screencaps of his community message board this summer. One of the neighbors reported what their energy company rep had said repeated outages in their area were being caused by.

All those new environmentally friendly EVs being plugged into an over-taxed, older neighborhood’s grid were blowing the transformers. YOICKS

They can’t even charge EVs efficiently, less mind steal that electricity back. Sounds like a brilliant plan. Never mind whatever your solar array is doing to keep your lights on.

And again – literally no one pays for any of this ongoing debacle but the folks on the receiving end.

No one loses a job, no one ever goes to jail, no one is publicly shamed.

Sound familiar?

*BEEGE UPDATE*: As I said in the comments, I was sorry if my intent wasn’t clear, so I wanted to update the title to better reflect what the entire post was about. The “clarification” is the culmination of the entire sequence of decisions affecting the retail consumer through the TX court system. Which is not just the recent decision I opened with – absolving TX’s big power plant companies of responsibility to provide power in emergencies – but the fact that the state’s own power grid operator ERCOT had been granted “sovereign immunity” months ago (as noted in the post above), which, combined, effectively strip the TX consumer of any recourse.

This was all news to me, as it was to the Houstonian who sent me the link, and it might just be news to a lot of Texans.