There's virtually no chance that Proposition 7 will fail. Constitutional amendments rarely do. Still, it's important that voters know what’s on the table — and, if it passes, what’s coming.

Prop. 7 would allocate $10 billion to the Texas Energy Fund, of which $7.2 billion would go to subsidies and low interest loans for new thermal plants in ERCOT, plus $1 billion for new plants outside of ERCOT. The other $1.8 billion will help pay the cost of microgrids that will provide backup power at critical facilities.

Oil and gas companies have been buying clean Texas energy for years. They do it because it’s good business. Renewable resources such as solar and wind power provide low cost electricity in areas like the Permian Basin, where oil and gas companies need power — lots of power — to run their operations.

Some oil and gas interests also have been funding right wing “think tanks” for years, in part to support policies that help their companies.

But the attack dogs they’ve funded are coming after the affordable energy they increasingly want — and need — to buy.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation is the prime example. Presenting itself as a guardian of oil and gas, TPPF is in the midst of a years-long crusade against the clean energy generators that are lowering customer bills and expanding the state’s energy leadership.

Unfortunately for their benefactors, the right wing fanatics they have so generously funded see the coming decade as a zero-sum cage match, with oil and gas on one side and renewables on the other.

But that doesn’t match the reality.

Late Sunday — after the Texas Legislature, at the 11th hour, passed monumental electricity grid bills that stitched together a range of energy proposals that many had assumed to be dead — a friend asked on Twitter, “Does this mean the grid is fixed?” 

No. Not even close.

Over the past 20 weeks, state leaders have, with frightening consistency, focused on the wrong energy-related issues. They wasted time and energy attacking Texas’ nation-leading clean energy sector — something most states and countries pine for — while ignoring consumer-centric solutions that would reduce bills and increase reliability.

The only good news as the 88th legislative session came to a close was the surprising lack of bad news. 

Bad bills that died (or got better)

A remarkable coalition of environmentalists, industry organizations and business groups — including more than 50 chambers of commerce, manufacturers, generators, oil & gas advocates, and others — stopped very real efforts to shut down the renewable energy industry in Texas. 

As attack after attack rolled out of the Texas Senate, the state House of Representatives consistently raised red flags about the effects of such legislation on consumers. House State Affairs Committee Chairman Todd Hunter — a pro-business, anti-nonsense Republican from Corpus Christi — often led the questioning on behalf of consumers. And most anti-renewable bills could not stand up to that scrutiny…

As the Texas Legislature enters the final sprint, big power generators are putting pressure on policymakers to approve a massive increase in their revenues — with as few consumer protections as possible. Some legislators seem compelled to go along for the ride.

The cap the generators want is effectively no cap at all: $9 billion per year. If they get their way, the Governor can take his Site Selection Magazine Governor’s Cup, put it on a bus, and send it straight to, say, Florida. 

Manufacturers and large employers have warned state leaders that this massive giveaway to generators will dramatically hurt their bottom lines. Residential and small commercial consumers can expect 30-40% bill increases if a cost cap doesn’t make it into law. The number of Texans who see their power shut-off — because they’ll no longer be able to afford their electric bills — would skyrocket…

Last winter, heading into the 88th Texas Legislative Session, there was one marquee bad idea to reshape the state’s electricity market.

The Performance Credit Mechanism, or PCM, was dreamed up by a mix of energy companies, Public Utility Commission Chairman Peter Lake, and a consultant that worked for both. It proposed steering billions of Texans’ dollars to thermal generators — in many cases simply to do what they already were doing. It would have dramatically increased power bills with no promise of additional reliability.

Legislators, especially in the Senate, made it clear they hated the idea. The PUC recommended it anyway, just days before the legislative session convened — essentially daring the legislature to create a different system.

In the months since, bad ideas have multiplied like rats. The state Senate has passed at least six bills that would raise consumer costs to previously unimaginable levels. Fortunately, many don’t seem to have gained traction in the House of Representatives, which has taken a far more consumer-centric approach to Texas’ energy challenges.

Make no mistake — those ideas are far from dead. There is more than enough time for Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick to, say, resurrect his proposal for the state to spend $18 billion on gas plants and, in the process, blow up the state’s competitive energy market. We’ll all keep a close eye on those zombie bills over the next month.

But today, let’s focus on the PCM (aka Pretty much a Capacity Market). Because, unlike the Senate’s bad ideas (which you can read more about in this great piece from Lynne Kiesling over at the Knowledge Problem), this one actually seems to have support in the House and from the Governor right now. The next four weeks will determine whether it’s catastrophically terrible, or merely not great, for Texas consumers…

Thanks to great reporting last week by Mose Buchele of KUT and Naureen Malik and Mitchell Ferman of Bloomberg, Texans finally know that, according to the LCRA’s own estimates, this gas plant building spree will cost almost double what Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and many senators said it would.

When the Texas House State Affairs Committee heard market reform bills for the first time last week, Chairman Todd Hunter implored witnesses to focus on the Texans who too often have been lost in the conversations about Texas’ energy future: “Now the one name I never hear is the word consumer or public or the taxpayer or the ratepayer. … Look at the impact on the public, the consumer, the ratepayer and the taxpayer.”

Good.

Because Texas consumers and ratepayers will certainly be missing from this week’s energy conversation on the other side of the Capitol. The Senate is poised to approve bills this week that could send electricity costs skyrocketing — no one knows by how much. And Senators, it seems, couldn’t care less…

The ERCOT energy only market is—to borrow Churchill’s comment about democracy—the worst form of an energy market, except for all the others. Texans expect their leaders to make changes to protect them and their property from future extreme weather events. Unfortunately, too many state leaders have fallen under the spell of capacity market solutions — most peddled by large power generation companies — that would waste billions of consumers’ dollars for little or no reliability benefit.

The Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) has already endorsed a version of a capacity market, albeit a wholly untried and unproven one with an eye-glazing name: Performance Credit Mechanism, or PCM. It sounds meritocratic, but it isn’t: the PCM’s distinguishing characteristic is that it would pay generators if they are available at certain times, not necessarily if they actually perform when needed.