Ex-ERCOT Chief Bill Magness testified that Governor Greg Abbott ordered him to keep energy prices at their highest capped amount while Texas was freezing.
February 24, 2022

The former head of the Texas power grid testified that after the state was plunged into a cold freeze from a grid wide power outage, Gov. Greg Abbott ordered power prices to stay at the maximum price caps to avoid more rolling blackouts, even as the state was locked in an outage.

Bill Magness, the former CEO of the Electric Reliabilty Council of Texas, made these allegations during a bankruptcy hearing.

Last year the governor's spokesman, Mark Miner said the governor was not “involved in any way” in the decision to keep prices at the maximum of $9,000 per megawatt hour – more than 150 times normal prices. He described a decision to send an aide to ERCOT's operations center in the middle of the crisis as based on the feeling the grid operator was spewing “disinformation."

Brazos, the now defunct Electric Power Cooperative, claims Abbott's decision led to a 1.9 billion dollar power bill that forced them into the situation they are in now.

When Texas was plunged into the deep freeze, Gov. Abbott had time to go on Fox News with Hannity and ridiculously blame the Green New Deal for all his problems.

Abbott said, “This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America."

This, while he knew he was jacking up prices for the entire state to ridiculously high levels while people were freezing from the failure of the power grid.

Need to tell a lie, go to Fox News.

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