U.S. Regulator Calls for Mandates to Avoid Another Texas Crisis

(Bloomberg) -- The top U.S. energy regulator said he is prepared to support “the imposition of new mandatory standards” to ensure that the power crisis gripping Texas doesn’t repeat itself.

“We’ll be in a joint inquiry to assess how this can be prevented next time extreme weather occur,” Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Rich Glick said during the agency’s monthly meeting Thursday. “We need to ensure the result of these inquiries don’t just sit on the shelf gathering dust.”

The agency previously released guidance calling for generators to prepare for extreme weather after a 2011 cold snap led to outages, but has no authority to order such changes in Texas’s power market, which falls outside federal jurisdiction by design.

Glick acknowledged that his agency has a limited role to play when it comes to Texas’s grid but emphasized it’s nevertheless responsible for “protecting the system reliability, including in Texas.”

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