Today Kym Bolado and David Blackmon welcome Jason Modglin, President of the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers. Click here to hear the full broadcast.
Kym Bolado: So there have been these rolling blackouts. Jason, tell us, tell our listeners, what was the problem there? Why were they doing this? And what did they do to make it to where they were having to go to these blackouts in the first place?
Jason Modglin: They’ve pursued a political agenda there that is a strong desire to phase out all fossil fuels and, coupled with this philosophy of electrify everything, they’ve moved more and more to dependency on the electrical grid while at the same time reducing the supply from natural gas plants, from coal plants and even attacking some of the nuclear facilities there. That combination when you’re dealing with high heat … folks want to have their fans on because they have less air-conditioned facilities there, but they also want to cool their ice cream products. So, that results in a high demand for electricity, while at the same time they have been limited in their supply. Couple that with some wildfires, and the fact that they shut down some of their transmission facilities, and it’s a perfect storm approaching California.
They’ve notified millions of homes and businesses that they can’t expect electricity. And that’s resulted in factories and businesses looking elsewhere in this country in order to invest and have some certainty that their capital will be able to be running and operating 24/7 without shutdowns.
