Energy

Energy is the other issue nobody is talking about, and North Texas is roughly a decade from a serious shortfall. ERCOT’s chief executive told the Texas Senate Business and Commerce Committee this summer that statewide demand will reach roughly 175,000 megawatts within six years, driven by data centers, population growth, and industrial expansion. As with water, we are not building production and distribution infrastructure fast enough to meet what’s coming.

That growth in demand isn’t a problem to be scolded about. Rising energy consumption is what a rising standard of living looks like — air conditioning, medical technology, refrigeration, the computing that runs a modern economy. The answer to more consumption is more production, not rationing.

We also have to be honest about how fragile the system is. Our grid is vulnerable to overload. A severe geomagnetic disturbance — the kind of event NERC writes reliability standards for — could damage the large transformers the grid depends on, and those are custom-built, long-lead-time components that cannot be replaced in weeks. Our substations are largely insecure and vulnerable to sabotage, a risk that has stopped being theoretical in this country. And wind and solar, whatever their merits on an average day, are least reliable precisely during the major weather events when we need power most.

Here’s what I’ll push for.

I’ll work with local, state, and federal officials on more and stronger energy production and distribution infrastructure, and on hardening the grid we already have.

Nuclear produces the cleanest and most efficient baseload power available, and Texas has only two plants. I’ll champion additional nuclear capacity, including Small Modular Reactors — smaller, safer, sited locally, and able to serve a county or a campus rather than requiring a decade-long megaproject.

I’ll support renewables without relying on them. They earn a place in the mix; they cannot be the foundation of it.

I’ll advocate for micro-grids that let critical facilities keep operating when the larger grid is stressed.

And I’ll work to enable and empower residents and businesses to generate supplementary power at small scale — every kilowatt produced at the point of use is a kilowatt that doesn’t have to survive the trip across a strained transmission system.

Approached deliberately, decades ahead, this is solvable. Approached the way we’re approaching it now, it isn’t.