Congressman Roy's Message to Constituents on Widespread Power Outages in Texas

Like millions of Texans in my district and throughout the state, I have been without electricity since early Monday morning. While my family and I are safely working through this situation, others are not so fortunate and experiencing long periods of freezing temperatures in their homes. That is why I and my team are doing everything that we can to get to the bottom of this and assist those in need right now.

My office is in contact with officials at the Department of Energy, ERCOT, Governor’s Office, and multiple local providers to see how additional federal deregulation or assistance could help get generation online faster. The top priority right now should be getting power back on for Texans all over the state. Please continue to take necessary precautions related to travel and general public safety from state and local emergency management officials.

To those still waiting for the lights and heat to come back on, you can find an outage map, utility company numbers, information about road closures and other information provided by the Texas Public Utility Commission here. If you need to find somewhere to keep warm, you can find a map of warming centers here.

That said, it is an embarrassment for the nation’s preeminent energy producer to suffer prolonged outages of this manner. Energy reliability is key to our state’s wellbeing and it therefore should be a priority — especially during extreme weather events that can endanger lives. I support calls by state leaders to investigate this issue further so we can avoid similar crises in the future, and I thank Governor Abbott for making ERCOT reform an emergency item for this legislative session.

But we already know some of what we must do to prevent this. Radical ideologies have politicized energy policy at the state and federal level in recent years.

This moment should serve as a warning; it is a moment where Texas can choose to utilize our God-given and unparalleled energy resources to solve a complex problem. We need to have earnest, reality-driven conversations about the resiliency of our power grid. If we ignore this warning and instead double down on unwise policies, we will leave ourselves vulnerable and dependent. If we continue to uncompetitively subsidize unreliable energy sources that malfunction in extreme weather, block necessary infrastructure improvements, and fail to build and improve energy delivery and storage systems, we will not only see future shortages; we will drive up energy costs at the same time.

As an elected official I will continue to prioritize energy reliability, affordability, and security in Congress.