Every summer, we hear concerns about rolling blackouts. Every winter, we remember the failures of Winter Storm Uri. But how did we get here? What are the biggest risks, what has actually changed, and what still needs to happen?

In this episode of the Energy Capital Podcast, I sat down with Mose Buchele, longtime energy and environment reporter at KUT and the host of The Disconnect, a podcast that has taken a deep dive into the history and politics behind the Texas grid.

Mose’s reporting has helped shape how Texans understand energy, and in this conversation, we pull from his years of investigative work to connect past decisions to today’s challenges.

One of the biggest takeaways from The Disconnect is that Texas’ grid problems didn’t start with Winter Storm Uri. In Season One, Mose and colleagues explored how a combination of regulatory neglect, an isolated grid, and a failure to coordinate gas and electricity markets set the stage for the catastrophe.

In Season Two, a fundamental question was asked: Who really controls Texas energy? The deregulated system we have today didn’t happen by accident, it was built by political and economic decisions that benefited certain industries and players. In our conversation, Mose and I discuss who makes money when the grid fails and why Texas has been slow to adopt reforms that would prevent another crisis.

But to really understand Texas energy, you have to go even further back. In Season Three, Mose has been unpacking the deep history of natural gas in Texas, starting with the wild stories of oil discoveries and the creation of the Railroad Commission—the agency that still oversees Texas’ oil and gas system today.

The decisions that shaped oil and gas policy 100 years ago still influence energy outcomes today. Texas’ decision to keep gas separate from electricity regulation may have made sense in the 1970s, but today, it leaves the grid vulnerable during extreme weather.

We also talked about ERCOT’s unique position as an independent grid, separate from the Eastern and Western Interconnections. This independence was originally designed to avoid federal oversight, but in today’s world of skyrocketing demand, extreme weather, and a shifting energy mix, is that strategy still serving Texas well? Should Texas interconnect with the national grid, or are there benefits to maintaining independence?

The Texas Energy and Power Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

So where does that leave us today? Mose and I break down what needs to happen next to ensure reliability as Texas faces skyrocketing demand from AI data centers, industrial growth, extreme heat, and population increases. The grid is changing, but is it changing fast enough?

Mose’s deep reporting and historical perspective make this a particularly insightful episode. If you want to truly understand how we got here and what happens next, this is an episode you won’t want to miss.

As always, please like, share, and leave a five-star review wherever you listen to podcasts. Your support helps bring these critical energy conversations to more people.

Timestamps

* 00:00 – Introduction

* 02:30 – The Disconnect Podcast: the origin and why Texas' energy history

* 04:30 – Season 3 focus and “Who is Dad Joiner?” aka The Max Bialystock of Oil

* 09:00 – The genesis of the Railroad Commission's and its role in oil regulation

* 12:04 – How OPEC learned from the Railroad Commission

* 17:00 – Why Texas was the last state to create a public utility commission, the Energy Crisis, and why gas utilities weren’t included in PUC regulation

* 28:00 – Historical causes of Winter Storm Uri, and why it was so severe

* 32:00 – The difference between “deregulation” to increase competition and lack of regulation of basic public safety

* 39:00 – The Midnight Connection and how Texas’ grid was almost connected to the rest of the country

* 43:30 – Understanding Black Start: what happens if the entire grid fails

* 47:30 – Post-winter storm improvements and ongoing need for improvement

* 50:31 – The Disconnect between gas and electric systems, the idea for a “gas desk”

* 54:30 - Who profited from Uri? Why is there little to no regulation of intrastate gas monopolies?

Resources

Mose Buchele and the The Disconnect Podcast:

* Mose Buchele on X and the KUT Website

* The Disconnect: Power, Politics and the Texas Blackout (Apple Podcast, Spotify)

* Season One: Explores Winter Storm Uri, deregulation, and the grid’s vulnerabilities.

* Season Two: Investigates who profits from Texas’ energy system and how market forces shape ERCOT.

* Bonus Episode in 2022 with yours truly: The Megawatt You Don’t Use

* Season Three: Traces the history of natural gas regulation in Texas and its impact on today’s grid challenges.

Winter Storm Uri & Market Failures

* The Great Texas Blackout Was Caused by a Failure to Ensure Supplies of Natural Gas, Charles Blanchard, Texas Monthly

* Why Gas Failed During Uri – An in-depth Texas Monthly feature explaining how gas supply failures triggered power outages.

* A look at the Texas grid three years after Winter Storm Uri: Three Years Gone, Texas Energy & Power Newsletter

* The Texas Grid Came Close to an Even Bigger Disaster During February Freeze, Rebecca Smith, WSJ

Natural Gas, The Railroad Commission, and OPEC

* “Is This Texas Oil Icon a Price-Fixing Saudi Collaborator or a Political Scapegoat?” Scott Sheffield role in Price Fixing in Texas

* Texas Railroad Commission (RRC) – The regulatory agency responsible for oil and gas, originally created to oversee railroads but later shaped energy markets.

* The Extraction State: A History of Natural Gas in America by Charles Blanchard

* For more, listen to Season 3 of The Disconnect!

ERCOT’s Market Structure & Texas Grid Independence

* The Midnight Connection Episode – The Disconnect podcast episode detailing Texas’ attempt to interconnect with the national grid and why it failed.

* Disconnect Bonus Episode: The Black Start

* The Energy Capital Podcast, Episode 1 with Former PUC Commissioner Will McAdams

More on Texas History

* Profile of Oscar Wyatt and Lovaca Gas during the energy crisis in Texas Monthly in May 1975 by Paul Burka: Power Politics: How one company’s wheeling and dealing brought the energy crisis into your life

Transcript

Mose Buchele (00:00.0)

This system of control that began here in Austin and in Texas was adopted by other countries and eventually taken over by OPEC, which still uses the blueprint for it today in the way that those member nations will decide on allowables and supply in order to fix the global energy prices.

Doug Lewin (00:22.402)

Why does Texas have its own power grid? How did a Texas wildcatter, who wasn't even trying to find oil, spark a global energy revolution? How did a Texas agency originally set up to regulate railroads create the blueprint for OPEC's oil supply strategy that caused the 1970s energy crisis? If you want to understand why the Texas energy system works the way it does, you have to go deep into the history.

Over the last four years, KUT senior reporter Moe's, Bouchelle and colleagues at KUT have created an awesome series that does exactly that. It's called The Disconnect, Power, Politics and the Texas Blackout. It unpacks the forces that have shaped and continue to shape Texas grid, gas markets and energy policy. Moe's created an award winning series telling the hidden stories behind Texas energy from the railroad commissions cartel like power over oil markets in the 1930s to the Midnight Connection, the secret power line that could have changed Texas grid history by connecting us to the rest of the country. The first season was a deep dive into winter storm Uri and the history of deregulation in the state, something we talked about in this podcast. The second season tracked the changes that had been made and those that hadn't. They had me on for a bonus episode called the Megawatt You Save focused on energy efficiency. This current season, which just launched in February 2025, focuses on one of the least regulated industries in America, natural gas within the state borders of Texas. And what that means for grid reliability in the Lone Star State. It's fantastic. I've loved all the seasons of The Disconnect, but honestly, this one might be the best. I love this conversation with Moe's. It's about energy, yes, but it's also about power, politics, money, and the decisions made decades ago that still shape our lives today. Stick around because by the end of this episode, you will look at Texas energy or Texas history the same way again. Make sure you like, share, and subscribe to the Energy Capital Podcast and to The Disconnect. It's one of my favorite podcasts on all topics, not just energy, and I'm confident you'll like it too. Thanks for listening. Hope you enjoyed this episode of the Energy Capital Podcast.

Mose Buchele welcome to the Energy Capital Podcast. Hey man, this is great. Thanks for doing this. Obviously I'm a big fan of the disconnect. Let's just start, just share with the audience, what is the disconnect and how it got started.

Mose Buchele (02:31.63)

Thanks so much, Doug.

All right, so this is a podcast project that started actually really kind of during the big blackout in 2021. We're talking here at KUT studios. We were all here trying to figure out what was going on. Bunch of reporters trying to understand the power grid, all the issues at play. And even as it was happening, it kind of became clear that this is something that was going to take more than just some kind of breaking news updates, right? You had to explain all these complicated things about the way electric infrastructure works, about the way

Mose Buchele (03:11.086)

the energy markets work about a million different things and there's this deep history to it. And so we think, well, that sounds like the kind of thing that could be tackled in a podcast. We do audio storytelling really well and we do explanatory journalism really well, which is I think a big part of this is just explaining to people how these things work. And that was kind of the impetus. yeah, we're now on our third season. It started in 2021 and we've been releasing them as we've kind of seen the need and had the capacity.

Doug Lewin (03:42.498)

Yeah, it's one of the things I love about podcasts and it's, think why they're like so well suited actually to our time is because we're so used to now like getting news in tiny little snippets, right? 140 or 280 characters and little 60 second videos. But usually you wanna, especially with a story like this, like you wanna know more and you guys have really, really done it well. This mix of human storytelling, like really understanding the human side of things.

Doug Lewin (04:10.062)

And explaining the regulatory and the history, is so complicated and so rich. You guys are doing a great job.

Mose Buchele (04:16.942)

Thanks, I appreciate that. it is, it's a real undertaking, but even like the, you know, it's a political story, it's a science story, it's a financial story. And obviously the reason we all care about it early is because it's a human story. And so yeah, all of that comes into play and it's been hard to tackle, but it's been also really, you know, incredibly interesting and rewarding. Yeah.

Doug Lewin (04:39.094)

Awesome. So we're gonna talk about all the seasons, but I wanna start with season three. When we release this episode, you'll sort of be like, sort of part of the way through of releasing the episodes in season three. And you're really now diving into natural gas, which talk about a complicated history with all sorts of characters. I think if it's all right, I actually want you to start with.

Doug Lewin (05:03.64)

Just to give folks a flavor of what they'll get if they do listen to these episodes. And again, I highly encourage folks to listen to them. They're so great. Who is dad joining?

Mose Buchele (05:13.28)

Okay, this is where, as a disclaimer, we start this with a lot of history. And it's history I love, and it is, I think, just endlessly engaging and fascinating. if you're tuning into here in the first episode, like what is happening right now in terms of new developments, you're going to have to wait for a while.

Doug Lewin (05:34.862)

We'll get into this as we go, but if, you know, for folks that are wondering about this also, you can go, if you want to start with season one, you kind of go back to how Winter Storm Urie happened. we're going to get there. I want to work backwards because this one is current and it is something that Mo's even as, and I think it's safe for me to call myself an energy nerd. I know a lot of this history. There are so many rich details in your podcast that I didn't know.

Doug Lewin (06:03.534)

But you don't, and this is what I hope comes through to the audience and people will tell friends and family, it's like, it doesn't feel like you're getting a history lesson. It's entertaining, it's engaging. Oh my gosh. Tell us about that,

Mose Buchele (06:14.734)

So Dad Joyner was the father of the East Texas oil field, which was up at that point, the biggest oil field ever discovered in the United States. And he was by most accounts, kind of a con man. guy, there were a lot of these kinds of operators that were moving around the oil patch at this time, who were finding ways to raise money for projects and then spend that money and not always find oil in the process.

Doug Lewin (06:45.614)

You know who he reminded me of? I had recently been visiting my my dad. And one of the things I do when I visit my dad is we watch silly movies and we were watching the producers. I knew that's right. Max Bialystok, like dad joiner is an oil patch version of Max Bialystok.

Mose Buchele (07:01.014)

The entire idea is that you raise money on a project and you get to keep that money as long as it fails. So there you go. That's the, that is the producers in a nutshell, right? And, and so his, you know, his whole thing was that he would, in partnership with a guy named Doc Lloyd, who has one of my, one of the people I spoke to said, practice medicine without, without the formality of a medical license, they would create geological surveys that would suggest that there might be oil to be found in one place or another. And on the basis of these surveys, which really didn't appear to have much, you know, actual geology, but underneath them, they would raise money to be paid back once the oil was discovered. Now, if the oil is never discovered, then you get to keep the money. And this is the way it worked for them for years and years. And it's a, it's a fascinating story because of the personalities involved and the people involved, also because it suggests that this oil field, which revolutionized the world of energy, and had ramifications that we still feel to this day, it was found because someone was intentionally not looking for oil. And so it took somebody not looking to actually uncover this vast reservoir of energy in East Texas. And then from there, you could argue the story even gets weirder.

Doug Lewin (08:19.822)

Yeah so folks can go and should go and listen to the, to the episode and get more of this. like basically you, you end up in a situation where a woman who is like, I guess an investor or her land, she's got land there. She starts to become suspicious. She thinks, no, there really is oil. They do end up discovering oil. is very bad for dad joiner. And it ends up being, like you said, historically significant, globally significant oil field. And it happens in 1930. So we're heading into a decade, obviously, where the second world war is gonna start. And like this oil field really plays a major role going forward. But you get into the railroad commission and how this is, think, a history folks don't understand and is highly, highly relevant to today because what you had was everybody drilling all over the place to the point where prices dropped to what, like a, it was like 10 cents a barrel or something like that at some point. And so you start to get into what is called prorationing, right? So the railroad commission, can you talk a little bit about how that actually made the railroad commission popular. You would think by telling people don't drill, you're gonna get a lot of companies mad at you, but it actually had kind of the opposite effect, right?

Mose Buchele (09:47.81)

Absolutely. And again, this is history that is helpful in understanding the role of the commission today. For example, what we had was an agency called the Railroad Commission that was founded to regulate railroads, as the name would suggest.

Doug Lewin (10:03.662)

Governor Hogg is that what she right? Yeah, yeah.

Mose Buchele (10:06.092)

Yeah. And it was a huge deal back then. There was a big populist movement, particularly farmers and ranchers were really, really upset with the monopoly power that railroads exercised over their commodities. And so they were going to their elected leaders and saying, you got to crack down on these guys. Railroad commission is born. But through a series of kind of historical circumstances, the Railroad Commission ended up gaining more authority over pipelines than railroads, over oil and gas pipelines. And so suddenly you had this agency called the Railroad Commission, which is still called today, beginning to exercise authority over oil and gas. If you fast forward to the 1930s, to the Depression era, when the East Texas field was uncovered, you have then this agency with this hot potato thrown in its lap.

People are drilling for oil like crazy and it's cratering the price of oil. There's just an oversupply of oil on the market. This is very bad for, especially for the large integrated kind of big oil companies. A lot of them from the Northeast that think standard oil, right? That depend on a stable market and a kind of more consistent expectation of return because they're making huge upfront investments on what they're doing. And so then these, this part, this faction,

Mose Buchele (11:33.006)

of the oil industry goes to Austin and says, well, we've got to do something about this. This is how the, what you pro rationing or pro rationing people, I've heard it called different things is, is born. It is the concept that the government will, will regulate the supply set allowables for how much oil or gas can be produced in order to stabilize the market. And that will, that will allow for a, kind of oil or whatever commodities not get too too low, maybe not get too high too if that's gonna have bad effects on the market.

Doug Lewin (12:10.862)

It's effectively a cartel, right? It's exactly what it is. Because basically just like you would think of a drug cartel, not to say that the railroad commission was a drug cartel, but it's the same principle, right? If you control the supply, then you can actually keep those prices higher and presumably then all the suppliers are doing better. And so they actually do that successfully, right?

Mose Buchele (12:33.999)

It wasn't an easy sell, especially when you're dealing with more independent and especially during the depression era, you're dealing with

Doug Lewin (12:39.566)

Because demand is so low. So you can only do so much with supply. There's not demand because of the depression.

Mose Buchele (12:43.842)

You had independent and again, still to this day, these are schisms that you see within the industry. have independent operators, you have a small time landowners, have people who were farmers who are losing their mortgage because of the depression. Suddenly they can dig an oil well in their backyard and they're happy making a few cents. They'll take anything. They, in some cases, violently resisted this kind of regulation. But what was eventually arrived at?

Mose Buchele (13:12.718)

it appears is that most sectors of the industry came to realize there was a benefit to that type of essentially what was price fixing, you know, on the part of the state government, on the part of the commission. And this was done in cooperation with different factions of industry. And that is how this, what you correctly described as a cartel system of regulating supply was born. And it was born right here in Texas.

Doug Lewin (13:40.214)

Yep. And then OPEC learns from the railroad commission, like literally studies what the railroad commission has done and then uses that to sort of, you know, wield oil as a weapon in the 1970s, which causes the energy.

Mose Buchele (13:56.172)

We're getting again, and now we're getting into the second episode. And again, like I said, this lays the foundation for a lot of interesting kind of historical things that come up later. indeed, this system of control that began here in Austin and in Texas was adopted by other countries and eventually taken over by OPEC, which still uses the blueprint for it today in the way that those member nations

Mose Buchele (14:22.444)

Will decide on allowables and supply in order to fix the global energy prices.

Doug Lewin (14:27.15)

We're recording March 5th. Just this week, OPEC announced that they were going to release more barrels into the market. They have tried over the last few years through OPEC plus, which includes Russia and some others that weren't traditionally part of OPEC to pull back the supply to cause the price to go higher. Prices have sort of stubbornly been right around 70 and they have kind of decided, forget it, we're going to release a couple more million barrels. So all of this is to say, right, this history, there's a through line right to today. And if you want to understand what's going on in the energy world and you don't want to read great long textbooks, a podcast is a great way to learn about it. So, and actually just one other tidbit on this, Moe's, and I don't know if you are going to cover this later, but there's also a very recent example, right, of some of the companies coming to the railroad commission during COVID.

You could quote unquote buy a barrel of oil for a negative price for a couple of weeks there, maybe not a couple of weeks, maybe one week, whatever it was during COVID. And some of the companies came to the railroad commission and said, we should do pro rationing again. This is only a couple of years ago. So like now they voted against that. The railroad commission did not do it. But again, like all of these issues still kind of circle around today. I think it shocked a lot of people to even learn that the commission still had that power. that they ever did. mean, if you're not paying attention, if it's not something that you study, like there was a really memorable public hearing, and you had, you people coming in and telling commissioners, need to do this. We need to this to, you know, to save the business basically. And then others opposing and rarely are those schisms and those tensions within industry on public display but in moments of crisis they get there.

Doug Lewin (16:19.116)

That's exactly right. And I will put in the show notes a link to Russell Gold with Texas Monthly wrote an article about Scott Sheffield that he was under investigation. I can't remember if there was actually an indictment or just an investigation from DOJ on that. Like sort of what was happening during that period and whether or not he was actually talking to allegedly leaders in other countries and other oil companies around the world trying to get the price of oil up and whether or not that was some kind of collusion or

Mose Buchele (16:49.518)

Price fixing or something like that.

Doug Lewin (16:51.174)

Yeah, yeah, totally. That is still like literally playing out in real time right now. So in the third episode, which just came out again, as we're recording just a few days ago, you do get into, and this, I really, I'm sorry to be like so gushing to my audience, but I just really do love this series. I have for a long time, like wondered, we, Texas was one of the very last states to have It was the last. The last to have a public utility commission. Wasn't, wasn't established till 1975.

Doug Lewin (17:18.766)

And I've often kind of wondered about that. And I actually taught a class at the LBJ school last semester. So I was doing some research. I found some journal articles that kind of got into it, but journal articles are pretty dry. You found the man who was still alive and not even particularly old. He was very, very young when he was elected in the 1970s. Tell us about Lyndon Olson and the beginnings of the Public Utility Commission.

Mose Buchele (17:45.166)

mean, an incredible storyteller too. It was just one of these things where I call this guy up and he's like, yeah, sure, I'll talk about it. So Lyndon is, I mean, he's had a very long career, but as you said, he's from Waco and he was elected a democratic state rep from Waco in the early seventies, right as the energy crisis kind of hits, especially as we understand it in popular consciousness. There were obviously kind of shortages and building up to the energy crisis before then, but-

Doug Lewin (18:14.656)

And I think most people listening will probably know this. And again, you describe it well in the podcast, but for those that don't know, right? mean, this was, it's not hyperbole to call it a crisis. Like you couldn't fill up your car. had long lines, half a mile long in some cases. People were freezing in their homes in the wintertime because there wasn't enough gas. It was a mess.

Mose Buchele (18:32.014)

Absolutely. yeah, and again, I think that some of that's lost. you know, if you're younger, you weren't alive for that time, you don't realize it, but it was such a huge thing. anyway, yeah, young man, not even in his thirties, elected from Waco to be a state rep. And he kind of enters into this debate over, how are we going to better regulate utilities? And this wasn't just energy utilities. wasn't just electric utilities. It wasn't just gas utilities. There was, but everyone is worried about the high cost of everything at that time. Obviously in the energy crisis, the cost of electricity and the cost of gas went way, way, way up. And that was really pinching people. There was also a massive scandal that I wasn't that aware of around telephone utilities, telecoms. Southwestern Bell was in a lot of trouble for its rates and some of its corporate behavior. All of this rolls together to collide with the fact that Texas is looking around and saying, every other state has a public utility commission and we don't have one.

Basically, almost all these things were really mostly decided at the local level. And so in 1975, there is a growing kind of appetite in a chorus, consumer advocates, all sorts of different kind of factions that maybe it's time to have a public utility commission. This man, Lyndon Olson, comes in and as he describes it to me, he's actually kind of more in favor of maintaining local control over a lot of these questions. He was interested in strengthening the power of local oversight as he recounts it to me in the bill that he first introduced. One of the big questions about that was that small towns especially, but really almost any city didn't feel equipped to go up against some of these massive monopoly utilities when they're gonna do rate negotiations, right? And so.

Doug Lewin (20:19.352)

So they really didn't have watchdogs, right? It was like cities trying, it was a complete mismatch.

Mose Buchele (20:25.326)

So Olson gets in there and drops a bill that, as he said, would initially strengthen local control over some of these issues. As he recounted it to me, it was immediately substituted by the Public Utility Commission Bill, the Public Utilities Regulation Act that establishes the Public Utility Commission. And then from there, the story gets even stranger when you start to look at how they decided which utilities were going to then fall under the auspices of what became the Public Utility Commission. Because when the bill was first written, gas utilities were a part of that. And he tells the story of how it was explained to him in no uncertain terms that all of that regulation and oversight was to remain at the Railroad Commission. From the very inception of the PUC then, you see this tension. How are we going to have some say over what should be fair electric rates while we have no real regulatory control over the sector of energy that provides the fuel to create that electricity. And here I'm speaking mostly to natural gas. you know, so there's a quote that I don't, I don't even know if I included it in the podcast, but maybe I'll try to slip it in somewhere. After the public utility commission is established, regulation of natural gas is kept at the railroad commission, which has given utility cost of service kind of regulation authority over gas utilities. There is a guy who was a city attorney for the city of Austin and became a consultant later on for the city. And he was asked, is this going to help us with our electric rates? Because gas rates and electric rates in Austin had been going crazy because of another whole other scandal that we got into in the podcast in regards to a company called Coastal States or Lovaca Gathering that had different names.

Doug Lewin (22:15.31)

A notorious case.

Mose Buchele (22:18.668)

So this guy, Don Butler was his name. He's asked quite understandably, is the Public Utility Commission gonna help us lower our electric costs now that it exists? And he said, it's really not because it never got authority over natural gas. And he said, what the legislature did is that he allowed us to regulate the tail, but not the dog. Wow. Yeah, yeah, I don't have it on tape, but it's still, it's a killer quote.

Doug Lewin (22:40.263)

Wow. Which really kind of sums it You've got to get that correct. You need to go back and get him to record that and put it in there. Look, I think hopefully it isn't lost on anybody listening right now, right? The connection back to seasons one and two where you're dealing with Winter Storm Uri because part of the story of Winter Storm Uri is a lack of coordination between gas and electric. If people want to, you know, ask...

Doug Lewin (23:08.878)

Why did that happen? Why did 240 something people die? Why did a hundred billion dollars in damage happen because of freezing pipes? And why was I without power for three or four days? There's a long list of reasons, but on anybody's short list is there was terrible coordination, if any coordination at all, between the gas sector and the electric sector and the seeds of that were planted in 1975 when the PUC was established and not given any authority over gas.

Mose Buchele (23:37.902)

I remember actually way back in 2021, it was probably one of our earlier interviews on this subject. I called you for a story I was working on and you were one of the first people I spoke to about this. And this became, like you said, a huge and continues to be a huge question in Texas. Like how do we coordinate those two parts of energy, gas and electric? And it's something that a lot of the efforts, I guess I could just say that have been proposed, a lot of the proposals have not succeeded so far. So it's still an open debate, you know, in terms of how you do.

Doug Lewin (24:11.086)

So let's, is there anything more you want to say about season three? You want to give folks like kind of where it's going, what to look for, anything I should ask you about season three before I kind of go back to Uri and we talk about season one and two.

Mose Buchele (24:21.09)

You know, I just think, like I said, season three has been a really cool, a little bit of a different take on the podcast because we focus on history throughout every season. But this one, I really like telling this integrated story that is now, you know, if you start tuning in, know, it's difficult to do timing on podcasts, but we'll slowly bring you up to today. And it's been a fascinating challenge, like seeing how that works but everything does kind of connect. mean it all just comes together. You know if history doesn't repeat it at least it rhymes.

Doug Lewin (24:55.854)

Exactly correct. And I'll just say one more thing about that. I meant to say this earlier and forgot. there's, cause again, the connections between the past and the present are, they're obvious, but I think sometimes it's good to say them out loud. So we are right now, again, so we're recording on March 5th. By the time this comes out, who knows what will happen with tariffs. But one thing that folks associated advisors to the Trump administration, people within the administration are saying is, we're gonna, that may cause prices to go up, but we're gonna counteract that because this drill baby drill thing, we're gonna bring oil down to like 50 bucks. And so then your prices are gonna go down. So it'll all be okay. And I think what, you can go back to history and see what happens when you drill baby drill and prices crater. And a lot of people lose their shirts and then people stop drilling, right? Like the that isn't the way it works. You have market forces. You can't just as a government say, we're going to go drill because once you do that, now you're causing this other counter force where you're going to get less drilling. Yep. And we've already got this countervailing force of OPEC putting more barrels on. So, yep. Anyway, it really is great to like get into that history and see those parallels because there's just so many of them to, to today. Yeah. I really appreciate what you're doing with that. I, again, it is hard even as somebody who just loves this stuff and I'm pretty voracious reader on this stuff. I'll put a link. There's some good like books on the history of natural gas and stuff, like those, they're hard reads. Like, you know, like to get that in a 30 or 40 minute podcast and feel like, okay, I have a deeper understanding of this, this history. It's a real like public service. It's really.

Mose Buchele (26:40.224)

Well, thank you. Yeah. And I think I've read more for this, this particular season than I have for any others. I've checked out some great books, but also some of them, yeah, cause it can get pretty wonky.

Doug Lewin (26:50.574)

Shout out to Charles Blanchard. I will put a link to his books on natural gas that are actually like, I think is, I forget the title, I'll put it in there, but it's like. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a great read. He wrote a great piece for Texas Monthly two or three weeks after Uri that was something along the lines of like.

Mose Buchele (26:59.886)

Extraction state or extraction. You recommended that to me actually.

Doug Lewin (27:14.572)

Uri was a problem of natural gas supply. And his book, Extraction State, is a great one and very readable. But, you know, let's be honest, that, that many people, sorry, Charles, are gonna read your, like, 300 400 page book on the history of natural gas in America. I did. I loved it. And even though I read that book and have read many others, there are details you have in there that I have never heard before. So, okay, enough on that. So let's go back to season one. You, you're putting episodes out only months after Winter Storm Uri ended. I actually just kind of want to start with, we've already talked about one of the reasons why Uri happened was this connection between gas and electric or lack of communication, lack of coordination between gas and electric. If you're kind of a doctor diagnosing the problems, right? You're deep into this. You've talked to so many people about this, put together episodes on it. Why did Winter Storm Uri happen? come on, Yeah, yeah. So one is electric gas, but there's a list, right?

Mose Buchele (28:11.046)

Yeah, yeah. It's real easy question. my goodness. Well, so, you know, yeah, obviously the question of why, not just why did the blackout happen, but why it was so severe and so bad. You can answer it a million different ways. And in fact, there's, you know, there are still a lot of differences of opinion about it, right? I mean, and we can get into what some people are still litigating today later on in our conversation, but

Doug Lewin (28:12.608)

It's an easy question.

Mose Buchele (28:40.546)

What we do in the first season is that in the aftermath of the blackout, everybody was talking about deregulation. Texas existed as did the rest of the country under a system of with regulated regional monopoly utilities ever since basically the beginning of or the maturation of electricity as a thing that everybody.

Doug Lewin (28:59.244)

But as you were talking about before, right, and because we didn't have public utility commission, very lightly regulated monopoly. if regulated at all, kind of self-regulated, which means not really regulated at all.

Mose Buchele (29:11.586)

Yeah. So then there's this period where you have utilities that are regulated by, you know, with stricter price controls by the government. And there's a very close relationship between regulators and these monopoly utilities. They're allowed the, I don't, again, I feel like I'm kind of rehashing just utility 101 or something, but we had a large fleet of different kinds of power plants in Texas, many of them natural gas, because we had an abundance of gas here. Although also that became a whole thing after the energy crisis, some coal and other ways to generate electricity too. Deregulation hits, that breaks down the monopolies and these power generators are now forced to compete, to offer the lowest price. And critics of deregulation, of which you heard many, especially after this catastrophic power failure, pointed out that the capacity, the excess capacity that Texas had enjoyed through the 1990s under regulation had all but been kind of frittered away by the time we got to 2021. And so then when energy demand went through the roof and power plants, which at that time had been under invested in and were many of them reaching their kind of end of their natural lifespan, started breaking down, you had a crash in energy supply on one hand, right as you had a skyrocketing of energy demand on the other, all thanks to this extreme and cold weather.

Mose Buchele (30:39.372)

And what that leads to is an imbalance on the grid and forces the state grid operator to rebalance supply and demand by cutting the demand. They can't encourage more supply because there's no real extra supply out there.

They had used every mechanism they possibly could to bring some including spiking the price to try to potentially get more on there. So that's one way of looking at this. that was one of the questions we tried to explore in the first season. And I think that we found it was a little more complicated than that, but I think that that is maybe a good place to start with your question.

Doug Lewin (31:19.424)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is something I've obviously talked to a lot of people about. The very first episode of the Energy Capital podcast I did was with Will McAdams. Will was of course the first commissioner appointed after winter storm Uri. And one of the things, cause he's pretty strong defender of what I think he wouldn't, and frankly I would also call not the deregulated market, cause there's still a lot of regulation, right? There's an independent market monitor.

There's all sorts of controls and penalties that many of which have been assessed over the last 20, 25 years for folks that withhold power from the market. Like there is regulation of that market, but it's a restructured market that then is competitive, right? We do have competition on both generation and retail. And he's a pretty big defender of that. And one of the things he said in that podcast, which has been said a lot since, since Winter Storm Uri said during the hearings after Uri heading into February of 2021, the various reports our cop puts out of how much capacity versus demand, we had a 40 % cushion. So like, even if you had had like a fully regulated system, you almost certainly would not have ordered your fully regulated utility to purchase more power because you have 40 % reserve margin. What do you need, a 50, 60 % reserve margin? Like 40 is a lot of slack in the system. And in fact,

A year and a half later, right, December, 2022, almost two years later, winter storm Elliott, we did see blackouts in areas of the country that have fully regulated utilities. Tennessee Valley authority has a huge reserve margin. They had blackouts. They, by the way, also only have two to 3%, less than 3 % of their mix is renewables, 97 % thermal, huge capacity reserve margins, and they still had rolling outages. So the conclusion that McAdams reaches and we talked about a lot during that particular podcast. And I think I reached the same kind of conclusion is it wasn't actually like the restructured market, but a lack of regulation was a big part of it. Because we weren't winterizing power plants. We weren't winterizing the gas fields. We weren't requiring homes and buildings to reach a standard where that demand would not spike. So there's still a problem of quote unquote deregulation. But it's not necessarily the way the wholesale market is set up. you, how does, how does that?

Mose Buchele (33:42.248)

Yeah, no, I think there's a lot to that. think that the, first of all, to the question of like calling something, saying deregulation, it is just misleading to say that it's, you know, what you're really talking about is an arrangement between regulator, a very specific arrangement between regulators and monopolies. And again, this doesn't just happen in electricity. I mean, when deregulation became a thing in the late seventies, it went to numerous different industries.

Doug Lewin (34:06.888)

Airlines is one of the, right? Because like you literally could only fly from one city to another if you had the government, you know, license to do so. And if you want, if you saw somebody who was flying the New York to Chicago route and you're like, I could serve that for half as much, you could not. And it was Jimmy Carter and Alfred Kahn. Like it was really actually like liberals that really got, in concert with conservatives, there was actually sort of like, ideological agreement across the spectrum that like charging 500 bucks for a route that somebody else could serve for 200 isn't a good thing.

Mose Buchele (34:42.252)

One of the main continued critiques, even given what you've just articulated, is that people are nervous about a system which rewards scarcity. And when you create a deregulated, quote unquote, sorry, whatever you wanna call it, restructured market, you have a system where the price of what you're selling becomes more valuable as its scarcity. Rises which is scarcely rising you understand what I'm saying?

I understand volatility when prices go up and and so to give one example. Talk to people who used to work for big utilities. In the 80s and 90s, it was very common for more power plants to have massive tanks for backup fuel, for fuel oil, right? That they could switch to to burn if their natural gas supply shut down. And in fact, they would sometimes coordinate with their gas supplies. I was talking to a guy just a few weeks ago who said that they would get calls and say, the pressure is going to drop in these pipes as a big storm or something. Something's happened. Switch to the fuel oil. And then they can keep generating power. The market incentive to have that type of backup did begin to evaporate after the restructuring. And I think that is a kind of thing, like a very specific example you can point to and say, that maybe was a problem because that could have come in handy, again, maybe in 2021. But your point is well taken. There are a hundred different things that came in to create this crisis. And we are seeing not crises of the same magnitude, but similar challenges with energy systems and grids and ISOs and whatever all around the country. And so it is not just one thing. I mean, we could talk about Texas's relative isolation in terms of its own grid is another thing people point to all the time. We've already kind of mentioned the whole question of natural gas and how it feeds into the system.

I mean, if you want to talk about regulation versus deregulation, know, ERCOT looks like a very tightly run ship when you start looking at what rules may or may not exist when it comes to how natural gas is traded and moved around the state. That's one reason why we were interested in doing this new season. So, yeah, is just a question of degree in a lot of ways.

Doug Lewin (37:04.398)

No, I think that's right. And I actually think you hit the nail right on the head that I think what does get people very nervous about a competitive market is the question of scarcity and volatility and high prices. And it is hard for folks to kind of get used to that. And you see this happen all the time. There are days during the year we've seen them, we didn't see as much in 2024, though quite a few in 2023 where prices got really high.

I was often on Twitter saying that is not necessarily a bad thing. If we get into an energy emergency, that's bad. But like high prices actually are a signal to investors that you want to come into the market. But that's a hard thing. I don't discount that. That is hard. It's a little scary, right? But people have to like, know, markets do require some uncertainty, some dynamism and some high prices. That's how markets work.

Mose Buchele (38:00.352)

And there's also just, mean, not to kind of take a different turn with this, but within the context of Texas, know, people love and hate the, and I'll use your term restructuring for various reasons, but one thing that it did do, and we get into this in the first season, it was the way that we kind of opened up to allow for so many more renewables and so many more other kinds of ways of generating electricity in this state. And so it's not just you find people defending or criticizing that historical decision for all sorts of reasons, but there are a lot of people who just in terms of the energy mix really celebrate what happened under deregulation for just that reason.

Doug Lewin (38:41.824)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was one of the reasons why it passed with such wide margins, throughout the House and Senate in a very bipartisan way, partly because there was an energy efficiency resource standard, there was a renewable portfolio standard in there. You have great episodes throughout these first couple seasons on, you mentioned Urquhart's isolation, you had one on the Midnight Connection, I wanna ask you about that. You had a great episode on Black Start, which I feel like still is not understood by folks enough. You obviously had episodes rather that got deep into deregulation, Senate Bill 7. You talked a lot with Senator Sibley. Given it's an hour long podcast, I'm not gonna ask you about each and every one of those, but is there one in particular sort of like asking you which of your kids you love the most? Is there an episode though you wanna kind of highlight for the audience? It's like, I gotta imagine the Midnight Connection one is one. Again, that was like a history that as much of a nerd as I am, I did not really appreciate how that all came about.

Mose Buchele (39:39.522)

I love that episode and I love the experience of making that episode. was one that we've.

Doug Lewin (39:43.352)

You guys went to the other border to the Red River.

Mose Buchele (39:47.15)

I think that one of the things that people still like are most fascinated by and maybe concerned about when it comes to the Texas grid is our relative lack of connection with other grids in neighboring states. we had, I'd heard even before probably, as an energy reporter, I just always kind of been aware that there was an attempt in the seventies to connect, to create a stronger interconnection between

a utility in Texas with a utility in neighboring state. And that this was in fact done almost as a test case to kind of push the issue because there were people on both sides of that argument in Texas at the time. were utilities that wanted to interconnect and those that didn't. And not to get too deeply into it, but the reason was federal regulation. If you start moving massive amounts of electricity through these big transmission lines and synchronize with a neighboring grid,

then that invites regulation from the feds. And a lot of people in Texas didn't want that. Again, other utilities may have seen a benefit to that. And certainly others argue that there's just simply a benefit for reliability to that. But all that is kind of maybe getting ahead of myself. What we do.

Doug Lewin (40:58.944)

You found the guy who made the Midnight Connection. It's amazing.

Mose Buchele (41:04.014)

Yeah, and I'll credit to Audrey to my colleague who's a co-host in this most recent season. She looked through some old hearing documents and I don't know if they were hearings at the PUC or court documents and found this man who had worked for this utility. They made a connection to a place called, I think it's called Vernon, Texas, I'm not mistaken. yeah. Birthplace. We decided to drive up there and Ullman King was his name and we had not.

Doug Lewin (41:07.873)

A COAST!

You did yeah

Mose Buchele (41:33.41)

I don't think that we had gotten a response from him. Maybe we had emailed him. We decided to drive to Vernon just to see where this happened. Maybe try to talk to some people there. We're thinking maybe there are some like old timers, right? Who just remember. And we showed up in the town and everyone's like, nah, man, we, know, this is, this happened. This is something that kind of happened in secret, you know, 50 years ago. people are like, there's no monument. There's a monument to Roy Orbison. There's not a monument to the Midnight Connection. But on the way there, we found an address.

And Audrey went knocked on this guy's door and he was there and just happy, know, happy to have us in. We went and visited him the next day and he recounted the entire story, this entire... He wasn't there when they did it, but he was the guy who was going to present legal papers, the second the connections made to essentially kind of prompt what was going to be a big legal battle, a big regulatory battle.

Doug Lewin (42:13.11)

of actually stringing a wire.

Mose Buchele (42:32.256)

And in fact, it dovetails nicely with, we were talking about Lynn Olson earlier, the public utility commission in Texas was just a a baby state agency then, right? So this happens right around the time when the public utility commission comes out. Yeah, yeah. And this case falls in their lap. And the PUC was very hostile to the idea of interconnection. And indeed, eventually,

Doug Lewin (42:48.193)

that a year.

Mose Buchele (42:59.142)

you know, not to give the whole story away, but they, you know, they reach something of a negotiation, but really set the precedent for what we have today, which is a grid that is not tightly linked with any neighboring grids, unlike any other state in, you know, in the lower 48 states at least.

Doug Lewin (43:15.404)

Definitely everybody listened to that episode. It's amazing and and really again like you're right Audrey played a huge role in that one and like the as she hasn't so many of them but the the way you guys kind of tell the story and you're even like on the road going up there like the the way the process is kind of start it was part of it is a lot of fun briefly tell us a little about the black start one because I think that again like folks don't really understand how, we were actually quite close during winter storm. You're like, this is still the language even sort of like gets to how little folks understand this. Cause we all use the term like, you know, blackout. was actually technically rolling out. It it felt like it was a complete blackout. Cause people were without power for days. But actually that term means you've lost the whole grid. And it could be down for weeks or months. And then you have to try to bring it back. again, like you can read up on this stuff. You can find technical reports, but to listen to a 20 or 30 minute podcast, give us the short version of that. Then folks can listen to the longer version.

Mose Buchele (44:16.622)

Yeah, yeah. And I mean, this is like what they also refer to as a of a catastrophic grid failure. This is where, as bad as what we had in 2021 was, there is the possibility that a power grid completely crashes to the point where it almost breaks into its different constituent parts. Like when you think about electricity grid, it requires a constant balance of supply and demand on the transmission systems. And all the different things that go into that grid, from power generators to substations, even to the things in your house that run off that electricity, they're synchronized to that flow, to that beat of power as it moves. And if that beat stops working, stops being steady, everything breaks apart. And then you really don't have a grid system anymore. You don't have a system of transporting electricity.

And in many cases, you don't have a way of generating it too, if it's damaged your power generators. So what a black start is, is the program that is in place to re, and I think about it in terms of light almost, like re illuminate the grid, re power, recharge the grid, re-energize the grid, right? You know, as you're trying to get, get the system running again. And what that requires you to do is, is, you know, begin in one place, you know, you start generating electricity in one place. And then start kind of charging the wires again, moving it along only in so far as it's balanced where it can reach the required demand again and starting in several different places at once, re-energizing the entire system, which can take weeks to do. depending on how much damage is caused by the grid failure, it can be, it is almost inconceivable how tragic a historical event that would be in Texas.

Doug Lewin (46:10.488)

I quoted Pat Wood, the former chair of the PUC and chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission saying it would be like being in the stone age again. Yeah, yeah. I mean, just to give an example to folks, you can't fill up your car at the gas station. You think, well, gas, that's not the electric grid, but it's a pump. It needs electricity. You can't even drive out of the state unless you had filled up before and you have enough range in your gas car to get out of the state, right? I mean, it would have been an absolute...

Doug Lewin (46:37.656)

Catastrophe. is, the way though, one of the things I'm most excited about, well, there's so many reasons to be excited about battery storage, but batteries work really well for Black Start because they can be supply and demand. And when you're trying to balance them, they can go both ways, which generator can't and generally load can't, but batteries can do both. It's also a reason why like distributed energy resources having the backup power packages, which the legislature passed as a policy.

If the grid goes down and you're able to island, right? You're a hospital, you're a water treatment facility, you're a police station. In that situation, you would still have power. like there's, I think the knowledge that we were so close to that for, what was it? Four minutes, 37 seconds, right? That away from that has spurred some positive change. And I think this is where I wanna go next,

Doug Lewin (47:28.352)

Again, you're as deep into this as anybody, as a reporter and journalist talking to people all the time, you know, putting these stories together, you know, separating wheat from chaff to be able to really tell the story in your estimation. Like what has changed for the better at this point? Are we better off than before winter storm Uri and, and related to that?

Doug Lewin (47:49.718)

What hasn't been done? This is the question I get asked all the time. It's so fun to ask this question instead of being asked it. like, yeah, what are we better at and where has there been improvement and where has there not been? Where do we still need to see some progress to get towards a grid where we wouldn't have to worry about it every time it gets super cold?

Mose Buchele (48:07.15)

Yeah, mean, yeah, it's such a tricky, tricky question to answer. I mean, I think obviously the first thing people point to is weatherization or winterization. There has finally and belatedly, probably most likely, definitely, well, I mean, in my opinion, definitely belatedly, been an effort after 2021 to really put teeth on and do inspections for things like power plants and energy infrastructure.

Mose Buchele (48:32.248)

that could simply break down in the cold. And that's low-hanging fruit, but it's exceptionally important. And it seems to have helped. There are things like backup power and I was talking about those big fuel storage tanks that were more common decades and decades ago. Well, some of the answers that we've come across have been to kind of re-explore some of those options, right? So now there is more incentive for having dual fuel capabilities at power plants.

Doug Lewin (48:58.678)

Yeah, there is a program that PUC started called Firm Fuel Supply Service, which is exactly that. So what's old is new again.

Mose Buchele (49:05.55)

Yeah, yeah, you know, which if it works, you know, it works. you know, things like that should supply a little extra insurance. The most complicated part of this for me and maybe for you two, although I think that you've done a great job explaining it to me before in some of our previous interviews, is just are the different market changes that have happened. mean, like this is you can look on paper and say, well, they've made these costly changes to the way that energy is kept in reserve. They've invested more.

in all these different programs with kind of incomprehensible names to keep more energy in reserve in case things get tight. And so there's a huge debate over like the kind of cost benefit of all that. But, know, we've seen, I think a little less scarcity than maybe we would have otherwise if some of that hadn't been in place. I'm not exactly, you know, advocating for it, but it does seem that those things have changed the dynamics a bit. Places where we have not seen a lot of movement, you and I have talked a lot and you've, you have talked a lot about energy efficiency, you know, for years and years and years. And that's something that seems as, you know, I interviewed you in the podcast, we had a bonus episode about this very issue and, and it seems one of the least costly and obvious ways of trying to bolster our power system that has been really not sufficiently addressed. And, you know, maybe

There's always this session or next session or whatever, but there just seems to be some kind of intrinsic part of the political equation that makes that a hard nut to crack. And then obviously there's this thing that we're focusing on this season, looking at the kind of disjuncture that I want to say disconnect, but that's a disconnect. You can say disconnect. That's right. Between the, if we are going to, this is one of the central kind of questions of this season.

If we're going to try to continue to reinvest in natural gas generation, as indeed our political leadership really is keen to do, in part because it is dispatchable, right? You know, they say, well, these are generators, on-off switches, and you can deploy them when we need the electricity. It is perhaps advisable to take a closer look at what went wrong with the natural gas system.

in this massive power failure. And so that's really kind of where we're heading with this season. There were a lot of proposals on the table in the wake of the 2021 blackout to even relatively modest suggestions to kind of create a little more transparency in what's going on with gas, create what they were calling a gas desk or some type of a monitor at ERCOT that would take a closer look.

Doug Lewin (51:48.906)

No, no, but nobody at ERCOT or the PUC mentions the, the, word gas desk is, is verboten at this point, or you get into trouble for speaking it. I can say it. They need a gas desk at ERCOT. I mean, literally this was just an effort to like have awareness of what is going on in the gas fields, because that is, to say it's not transparent. I mean, it's the opposite. It's opaque. You don't know in real time what is going on out there. And if you're a grid operator and you need gas,

In the wintertime especially, gas is a predominant fuel on our system and they don't know what's going on in the gas fields. then somebody tries, know, Brad Jones, who you interviewed in some of the episodes, may he rest in peace, former CEO of ERCOT, talked about this a lot. Like we have to have visibility into that. And you would have thought you said, we are regulating every aspect of the industry, price controls, all of it. You would have thought it was the most heavy-handed.

They literally just wanted a desk in their control room to monitor gas. And it was treated like it was the biggest insult in the history of human.

Mose Buchele (52:56.468)

I just had a flashback because I interviewed Brad Jones in this room. He might have been sitting at this part of the table. you know, one of the things we touched on was this very issue. Yeah. And he was very articulate and open about that. I just recently, as part of my work on this new season, went back and listened to some of those hearings that happened a couple of years ago now on proposals for things like a gas desk and then some other maybe a little bit more far reaching legislation that would have just taken a look at some of the

Mose Buchele (53:25.218)

the market power of pipelining companies and gas suppliers. as you said, the gas desk idea was, it really was treated like somebody had set off a bomb, you know, and it's the kind of thing that exists in other places and seems to not interfere with.

Doug Lewin (53:40.44)

So sorry, got, yeah, yeah, yeah, I got us off on a tangent, but the point is like, that is an area of the energy system. And this is kind of really what you're getting into in season three. And disconnect is the right word. There is a disconnect between gas and electric. It is better than it was during your year. I think that that is true. There is more coordination going on between the railroad commission and the PUC, more communication, more awareness, but there is still a very significant disconnect that is frankly dangerous.

Mose Buchele (54:10.552)

Yeah, yeah, and this is something that, like I said, this is where we are focused this season. And it's been a wild ride.

Doug Lewin (54:17.43)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm also just curious whether you get into it this season or it could be, I hope there's many, many more seasons of The Disconnect. I think I am like your target market, Moze. I love, I am consuming these episodes as much as you could put them out. But you know, there's this question of like who profited as well, right? And like, then you get into this whole notion, which you've already got into some in the first few episodes of the intrastate pipelines that do not have regulation from FERC.

Doug Lewin (54:46.562)

So they're only regulated by the railroad commission. There were some famous hearings in 2022, famous to me anyway, where then chairman Wayne Christian said, well, we don't regulate those. And it's like, well, but if it's a monopoly and the feds don't regulate it and you don't regulate it, who regulates it? And of course the answer is nobody.

Mose Buchele (55:07.718)

Yeah, I mean, and this is to get back to kind of our wonky discussion of regulated utilities at the beginning of our conversation. You know, if you're going to restructure or deregulate, on one hand, you may give up some price control, you know, which is what they obviously didn't, you federal energy deregulation starting on a Carter. But you also are supposed to break up that monopoly, right? You know, like you need both parts of it, right? You can't have the monopoly hanging out there then without any kind of

Mose Buchele (55:37.262)

guardrails put on how they exercise that monopoly power. And what you hear over and over again from people through history. And again, this is, you know, this is most recently come up in the context of post 2021, but it seems like every decade, this, this kind of rises its head up in out of sometimes out of the oil field. Sometimes it's oil, it's, it's producers, it's gas and oil producers that are saying in Texas, we need to take a closer look at pipeline market power because they feel like they're getting taken advantage of.

Mose Buchele (56:07.016)

And sometimes it's on the other end of the pipeline. It's someone like a natural gas power plant operator saying, we are negotiating these contracts with zero position of power. And again, so you started hearing that again. You hear it, like I said, through the history of this regulation, you started hearing it again after the blackout. again, just is not something, there were efforts that were made last session and you hear people still talking about it, but it's

Doug Lewin (56:34.222)

Absolutely, yeah, but nothing's really changed from that. No, and I think it's a great point because a lot of times people will talk about the oil and gas industry and it's really important to look at its component parts. You're absolutely right. A lot of times, and again, this goes back to like 1930s and some of the original regulation from the railroad commission, the producers were upset with the pipelines. This stuff runs deep. And to understand like what's going on today, to understand what happened during winter storm Uri, to understand why your power bill might be more, your gas bill might be more.

Doug Lewin (57:02.348)

you gotta understand that, that history. it's just, you know, the word story is in history. And I think you guys have just done a great job with, with the storytelling. So big fan of what you do. I think this is probably a good place to, to leave it, but I, but I'll ask you as I, as I do every guest of the Energy Capital podcast, what should I have asked you that I didn't? Any, anything, any, is there, is there anything else? And it's okay to say.

Doug Lewin (57:24.366)

No, Doug, this was the greatest interview ever. No, I'm just kidding. But no, no, like if we've said everything you want to say, that's fine, but I always want to give you an opportunity. Is there anything else you want to leave the audience with?

Mose Buchele (57:34.796)

Man, I feel like this has been pretty far reaching, but I...

Doug Lewin (57:38.83)

Mo's, I'll ask you this just in closing. you guys are obviously, there's stories and it's human stories. Can you think back to over the seasons, a particular human story that like really kind of got you?

Mose Buchele (57:54.158)

I mean, there are so many of those that.

Doug Lewin (57:56.17)

I know there are but you gotta pick one.

Mose Buchele (57:59.032)

I mean, the story that sticks with me the most is probably the story of a family who lost their mother during the blackout. She was an elderly woman who, this is a family, the Shaw family, they live here in Austin, and the siblings were caretakers for their elderly parents and they lost power and maintained heat in their house because they had a gas fireplace, actually. So, one of those, you heard a lot of people talking about how much they appreciated having that option during those cold days. But it was not enough to, know, seemingly to heat their full house and they lost their mother during that crisis. they were so, and remain to this day, opened to, they shared their story so well and invited us into their home and told us all about their mom. And, you know, I think about her, you know, every time the anniversary comes up.

And actually I just called one of the, daughter's just a few weeks ago, just to check in. yeah, there are thousands and thousands of stories of hardship and loss that we should keep with us, you know, because you never want to see something like that happen.

Doug Lewin (59:15.978)

Absolutely. I think that's a very important guiding light like North Star is to remember that 247 Texans, at least probably more like eight or 900 lost their lives. And it is critical we get this right, you know, as much as possible. And I think your reporting has gone a long way to do that. So thanks for everything you do. And thanks for being on the Energy Capital podcast. Thanks most.

Mose Buchele (59:41.045)

Thank you, Doug.

Doug Lewin (59:43.074)

Thank you for listening to the Energy Capital Podcast. I hope you enjoyed the episode. If you did, please like, rate, and review wherever you listen to your podcasts. Until next time, have a great day.

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Disconnected by Design with Mose Buchele

Energy Capital Podcast (private feed for [email protected])

Disconnected by Design with Mose Buchele