Jeff Dennis, managing director and general counsel for the Advanced Energy Economy association, provided a live tweet summary of FERC/NERC's presentation of the report, noting FERC Chair Richard Glick's opposition to political rhetoric that renewables were the source of the problems.
"Today’s FERC/NERC Staff report to the Commission made a clear case that these cold weather-driven outages of generating resources are not 'black swan' events, but increasingly regular occurrences and that they have interconnected impacts on both the electricity and natural gas fuel supplies," Dennis said in an email to Renewable Energy World. "FERC and NERC appear poised to implement mandatory reliability standards to ensure that generators are prepared for these events and that planners and operators anticipate them better in the future."
Renewable energy advocates are closely watching the Texas Public Utility Commission's grid redesign to see if the renewables are unfairly burdened with resiliency costs.
In August, the U.S. Partnership for Renewable Energy Finance – made up of a coalition of corporations that includes Google, Amazon Web Services, and Goldman Sachs – sent a letter urging Texas leaders to scrap anti-renewable energy proposals crafted in response to the storm.
The letter addressed to Gov. Greg Abbott, Public Utility Commission of Texas Chairman Peter Lake, and leaders in the state legislature, said current policy proposals are built on the false premise that renewable energy sources – like wind and solar – were to blame for the outages.
In July, Abbott directed the PUC to “allocate reliability costs to generation resources that cannot guarantee their own availability, such as wind or solar power” and to “streamline incentives within the ERCOT market to foster the development and maintenance of adequate and reliable sources of power, like natural gas, coal, and nuclear power.”