Texas State Congressman Matt Shaheen (R, Dist 66 [which includes my county]) has tweeted access to a Request for Comment regarding last week’s snow and cold storm with various utilities’ associated failures to keep supplies of electricity, natural gas, and potable water flowing in major areas of the State.

Kudos to Shaheen for publicizing this RFP.

Below are my inputs.

1. All, without exception, ERCOT board members and senior executives (C-suite equivalents and their deputies) must reside within Texas. Half of the board members, a separate half of the C-suite, and a separate half of their deputies must reside in separate rural regions of Texas. Within that last, a C-suite executive and his deputy must not reside in the same region.
2. Each of these board members, senior executives, and their deputies must have demonstrated expertise and empirical experience in energy and potable water supply—e., they must be energy and water engineers. Personnel with legal expertise can serve as board consultants and as assistants to the senior executives’ deputies.
3. The State government must encourage—but not mandate—all utility providers to amortize their bills that result from the sort of event the storm of 15-19 Feb 21 represents over the succeeding 12 months. Single bills of $9,000-$17,000 (to the extent these numbers aren’t just press hype) shouldn’t occur; they should be spread over the succeeding year.
4. Exceptionally high single-month bills like those suggested in 3) above should be investigated for their legitimacy—but from the going-in assumption that they are legitimate free-market, high demand/limited supply prices. “Price gouging” is what must be proven.
5. All utility providers and their suppliers must winterize their systems against worst-case scenarios, with the minimum threshold being a 100-year temperature excursion, sustained for more than “a few” hours. The current winterizing was against only “bad” case scenarios. This winterizing must come solely at the expense of the individual utility, that utility’s customers, and each utility’s supplier(s). The costs should be amortizable over a reasonable period of time, and PUCT should allow the rate increases needed for cost recovery within that amortization schedule for those utilities within its jurisdiction. Other regulators must be required to do the same. The amortization schedules should be those initially proposed by the utilities/suppliers, and the regulators should be spring-loaded to accept them, rejecting a particular schedule only for concrete, measurable cause(s).
6. Utilities with out-of-state suppliers that can’t or won’t comply with 5) above should be encouraged to find Texas-domiciled suppliers with which to replace them. Failure to find substitutes should not absolve the impacted utility of its responsibilities or liabilities related to energy/water supply so long as they are making concrete, measurable, publicly viewable ongoing efforts to find Texas-domiciled replacements. The Texas government should support the search efforts with its own research facilities, but not with taxpayer funds.
7. Eliminate energy subsidies—both renewable and hydrocarbon

…and reusable shopping bags, generally. These are supposedly better for our environment than nominally single-use plastic or paper bags (though both, until they wear out, can serve other purposes than holding food or other goods—usually two or three reuses until they’re truly ready for the trash or the recycling bin).

The serious questions, though, and ones that have been missed until the current COVID-19 situation has exposed them empirically, are:

For whose environment, exactly, are reusable shopping bags better?

Who, exactly, are the ones doing the reusing?

The answer to the first is…germs.

The answer to the second is…germs.

And today, the threat to us short-sighted humans is COVID-19, right along with our old foes, bacteria. CDC has said that COVID-19 can remain viable on a large variety of surfaces for hours to days—surfaces like the burlap or canvas of some reusable bags—and especially on the plastic linings of many more reusable bags.

Researchers at the University of Arizona and Loma Linda University surveyed grocery shoppers and randomly tested their reusable bags. “Large numbers of bacteria were found in almost all bags and coliform bacteria in half,” they wrote in their 2011 study….

And this datum:

In 2013 millions of American piglets died amid an outbreak of novel swine enteric coronavirus disease, and after an investigation the US Department of Agriculture concluded that reusable feed totes were the most likely root cause.

This has been a problem of which we’ve been aware for some years.  And yet….

Does anyone really think these reusables aren’t harboring today’s COVID-19? Or the bug du jour of tomorrow’s outbreak?

Reusable bags have become strongly illustrative of unintended consequence.