The freezing storm that battered Texas, resulting in power losses for millions, is a sign of what’s to come, the newly confirmed secretary of energy for the Biden administration warned on Wednesday.
“There will be events like this that occur with greater frequency,” Jennifer Granholm said. “And we have to think of the resilience of the grid, even if you live in warm places.”
Granholm was speaking at CERAWeek, the annual U.S. energy industry conference, in her first official engagement since she was officially confirmed by the Senate five days ago. She previously served as governor of Michigan, where she oversaw federal rescue packages for some of the state’s largest carmakers during the height of the financial crisis.
Granholm followed her warning that Texas’s crippling winter storm will not be just a “one-off” by urging the state’s legislators to consider connecting its grid to that of its neighbors. Texas’s isolated grid, which cannot take or provide power to neighboring states, was flagged as one of the causes for the extent of the blackouts, reducing its flexibility to draw power from other sources.
“I understand the, you know, sort of ‘go it alone’ ethos, but there’s also an ethos of helping your neighbor, too,” Granholm said.
Granholm’s appointment is part of an early focus from the Biden-Harris administration on rapidly advancing clean energy and emissions targets, after the Trump administration largely rolled back climate and energy legislation. Biden began his term by reentering the U.S. in the Paris Agreement; he has also said that the country must reach net-zero emissions by 2050, in part by being 100% reliant on clean energy.
Her appearance also coincided with signs of a tentative shift within the U.S. oil and gas industry, the main audience for Wednesday’s appearance (when not held online, CERAWeek takes place in Houston). On Tuesday, a leaked draft from the American Petroleum Institute (API), the industry’s powerful lobbying body, appeared to suggest it will definitively back carbon pricing as a means to incentivize lowering emissions. Such a move would represent a departure for the API, which has previously staunchly opposed such an approach.
Granholm also emphasized the potential positives of a wide-scale energy transition, arguing that it would be a “heck of an economic opportunity” and that the market for products that reduce emissions would hit $23 trillion globally over the coming decades.
“Are we going to get in the battle? Or are we going to bring a knife to a gunfight?” she said.
However, she also acknowledged that the pace of the transition has provoked anxieties among the oil and gas industry about the scale of potential job loss in the sector.
“I’m not going to sugarcoat how hard transitions are. I saw it firsthand, as governor, when people lost their jobs through no fault of their own,” Granholm said, while arguing that skills would be able to be transferred to the promised boom industries of wind development and geothermal.
“This is our opportunity to build the energy economy back better, in a way that lifts up communities that have felt unseen or abandoned or left behind too long,” she said, through clear opportunities to create clean energy jobs.
That also includes communities of color, who have been particularly hard hit by air pollution and high energy prices, she noted, and who are often the “first and worst” impacted by the climate emergency.
