Vanity Fair: “Texans hit with astronomical bills—even if they did everything they could to conserve energy—have plans whose electricity prices are not fixed and instead tied to variable wholesale prices. Obviously, that means that when demand increases, their bills rise, with the goal, according to architects of the system, being to “balance the market by encouraging consumers to reduce their usage and power suppliers to create more electricity.” But when the Texas power crisis hit, the state’s Public Utilities Commission raised the cap on electricity prices to $9 per kilowatt-hour, leaving many people with completely insane bills to pay. And all of this happened because Texas, which is the only state in the contiguous U.S. not on the national power grid, and which has been under Republican control for two decades, decided to ignore a warning from federal regulators issued 10 years ago that its power plants needed to be upgraded or they would not be able to churn out electricity in extremely cold conditions—the kind the state saw last week. In other words, people like Greg Abbott and Rick Perry and Ted Cruz are the ones to blame for constituents’ gigantic bills, though if you ask Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, Texans who’ve had to deplete their life’s savings should spend less time writing angry letters to elected officials and more time taking a long, hard look in the mirror.
In an interview with Fox News, Patrick told host Harris Faulkner, “I saw the story about the high bills. Let me explain that. We have in Texas, you can choose your energy plan and most people have a fixed rate. If they had a fixed rate per kilowatt-hour, their rates aren’t going up…. But the people who are getting those big bills are people who gambled on a very, very low rate…going forward, people need to read the fine print in those kinds of bills.””