DALLAS — Most of Inside Texas Politics this week will focus on the failures during last week's brutal freeze. Let's start with what is indisputable.
There are at least three things that all sides agree on. Too many power plants were not ready. There's no standard winterization plan that they all must follow. And Texas is not very well connected to any other power grid.
State Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Plano, was one of the first state lawmakers demanding answers.
He said people must be held accountable for failing Texans, and legislators must fix the issues to keep it from happening again.
"This cannot be and should not be political," Leach said.
Congress also likely to look at Texas power outages
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has a daughter who lives in Houston. According to Speaker Pelosi, her daughter was without water and electricity last week too.
Pelosi has mentioned that a congressional committee will start exploring the Texas power outages.
Rep. Colin Allred, a Democrat who represents the northeast part of Dallas County, weighed in.
“The regulations and the protections have to be in place, and the planning has to be in place, that when something like this happens you can draw on emergency supplies. I think there’s going to have be a full review of what happened. And it can’t be a partisan thing.”
Allred said it was counterproductive for Republicans to blame Texas’ infrastructure catastrophe on renewable energy when renewable energy like wind and solar made up a third of the outages. The majority of the power plants that failed were fueled by natural gas, coal and nuclear, ERCOT said.
Did the winter storm impact the COVID-19 pandemic in Texas?
The winter storm took our minds off a lot - perhaps most importantly, the coronavirus pandemic.
Many Texans went to hotels. Others to family and friends' houses to get out of the cold. However, no one was really going out for six days.
Did the storm impact the pandemic?
Despite multiple days of power outages in Arctic temperatures, Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff said the San Antonio area still pushed through with thousands of vaccinations for the pandemic.
“I think over a two-day period, we vaccinated somewhere around 6,000 people this week.”