The Texan Podcast - Weekly Roundup - February 19, 2021

Episode Date: February 19, 2021

This week on The Texan’s “Weekly Roundup,” our reporters Brad Johnson and Daniel Friend discuss the state’s major energy crisis by breaking down ERCOT, how they responded, and how lawmakers plan to move forward.

Hey folks, welcome to a special Texas Freeze edition of the Texans Weekly Roundup podcast. I'm Daniel Friend, a reporter with The Texan, and this week I'm sitting down with Brad Johnson to talk about the state's major energy crisis that we're recovering from. Brad has been covering the energy beat for the Texans since we launched two years ago and is ready to break down the ins and outs of the Lone Star blackouts, what ERCOT is and how they responded, and how lawmakers might respond moving forward. Thanks for listening and we hope you enjoy. Well, Brad, it looks like it's just you and me this week. Indeed it is.

Yes, we've- There's a barren landscape here. Yeah, I saw a meme on Twitter. I think it was a political cartoon or something, but it was a picture of a land rover and these people from nasa were like it's very icy desolate this is texas yeah that's basically it the roads are you know very clear um you know in some ways it kind of looks like it did at the beginning of the pandemic with traffic being just evaporating yes yeah i mean uh a few more cars on the side of the road. That's true. And a little bit colder than it was last year about this time. Just a little bit, yes. But yeah, it has been a hectic week. We were not expecting to be writing so many energy stories, but fortunately we have you as an in-house energy expert. I wouldn't say expert, but...

I mean, this was like a year and a half ago after I started working here, I remember coming in and, uh, shortly thereafter you wrote that piece comparing the California blackouts to the Texas energy grid. Yep. And I was just, you know, everybody was like, didn't really care about that in Texas at the time. Yeah. Now everybody from California doesn't care about what's going on in texas but texas has a huge problem yes yes i joked earlier this week about how you know i've been covering this for close to two years now and until now the average person couldn't give a rip about this topic and now everyone is an energy expert yeah everyone obviously now has heard what ercotOT is. But this is something that

I've been knee deep in for a long time. Yes. You've actually had the ERCOT app on your phone for like how long? Yes. Yes. And it turns out to be very handy, much more handy than their communications department. Well, we can get into that a little bit later. But first of all, can you just give us a brief overview of what in the world has happened in texas the past week yeah if uh have you seen day after tomorrow uh i've seen clips basically that just kidding yeah not quite that bad you know it's uh it's dip below freezing um you know five inches of snow roughly throughout most of the state this is definitely something texas is not used to.

And obviously that bore out this week. But in the grand scheme of things, it is not day after tomorrow. However, the bungling by the state has kind of created a situation like that. So over the weekend, temperatures dropped. We had some precipitation move in. Roads became icy. There was sleet. And then people started jacking up their thermostats because they're not used to this.

Texans don't like the cold. That's part of a reason why you live in Texas, right? And that should be expected. But this cold snap, this prolonged cold snap, because that's one aspect of it too, how long it has occurred. It hasn't just been one night of cold weather. It's been continuous. And on top of that, the roads have been poor with all the precipitation, the snow, the ice and kind of created this perfect storm of, of problems for the thing that Texas is, if not most known for among the most known for, uh, you know, it's energy, it's energy supply. It is the energy hub of the United States. If it were its own country, it would be, uh, like

fourth in the world in terms of energy production. And so for this to happen to Texas is, you know, not only shocking, but unheard of for this severe of a problem to occur. And so what kind of led to this was the way things played out. It hit over the weekend, the storm did, you know, as I stated, electricity usage jumped. And then early a.m. on Monday morning, about 1.30 in the weekend, the storm did. As I stated, electricity usage jumped. And then early a.m. on Monday morning, about 1.30 in the morning, ERCOT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, they instituted this rule to establish these, quote, rolling blackouts throughout the state.

And the reason they did that was to try and allow the capacity that was available on the grid in order to exceed the demand. So if there's more demand than the grid can supply, then right there you have a bunch of people already out of supply. They can't access the electricity they need. And so they were essentially trying to do controlled blackouts. And when they say rolling blackouts, what they mean typically are like, you know, short, intermittent blackouts of power in your home, and then it gets distributed elsewhere. So like originally they said it would only be 15 to 30 minutes long that you would be without power. Then it'd come back on.

And then at some point later down the road in the day, you know, you would have another 15, 30 minute period. Now that would happen, you know, multiple times during the day. Now what it became was this, these control blackouts, because the grid got so overwhelmed, they, they instituted just, you know, flat out, widespread blackouts throughout the state. And, you know, a lot of places, um, just had no power for days, uh, and while others did. And so, you know, one thing, if you lived near a hospital or something like that, you probably kept your lights on. And, uh, you know, that's kind of how it played out throughout the, throughout the week. Um, you know it reached um like four now three three million three to four million customers um out of power at its kind of peak but since then it kind

of dropped and it's but slowly and the state has been struggling to make up that ground. You know, at one point yesterday there were 2.6 million customers out, and this is days after the original policy went into place. And so they, they've really struggled to keep their head above water with this. Now, today there's less than 500,000 people, especially from, from Wednesday afternoon to Thursday morning, they made a lot of progress. They got about a 2 million people back on the grid, which is great, great news. Um, because you know, that would be, that would have been the, uh, you know, third night in a row of, of frigid temperatures without any power. So, um, progress is being made. The more rapid progress

is the most recent. It had been slow moving early on, but that's kind of where we're at now. And ERCOT is still trying to fix the problem. Now, can you tell us a little bit more about ERCOT? We hear that so much going around. Politicians are talking about ERCOT, ERCOT this, ERCOT that, ERCOT needs to do this. What in the world is ERCOT? And does it have anything to do with Epcot at Disney? Absolutely nothing. Although, you know, our friend Charles Blaine down in Houston joked that Epcot could have handled this problem better. But no, so ERCOT is the Electric Rel reliability council of texas it is a non-profit corporation that has been appointed to or established to kind of oversee the grid

it it monitors it it can issue orders uh especially in time in emergency times like this um it essentially just oversees the grid and tex Texas's grid itself is the only one in the country that is kind of not only separated as its own in a state, but really separated from federal oversight. And, you know, there's a lot of people saying that's part of the problem here. Maybe. I don't know. I haven't looked into that aspect of it much, but you know, the way it's set up has been beneficial, especially in the past because, um, Texas was able to weather, as you mentioned in the piece I wrote last year, Texas was better able to weather these, uh, heat spells and they, um, you know, it, whereas California faced severe blackouts, Texas was better able to weather it. And a part of that is the way ERCOT is set up now, you know, with this storm kind of the opposite direction of freezing, sub freezing temperatures. It created the storm necessary to kind of knock it on its head.

But ERCOT is, like I said, still trying to figure this out. It's a market-based system, the way it's set up, meaning the generators that create electricity are paid after the fact for what they provide. Whereas in other places, pretty much every other system in the in the country um you know they they pay on a contract basis so they negotiate prices up front for a specific amount of generation supplied and that with the latter one the uh the one that other places have that's kind of a way to hedge your risk against volatility of energy prices of electricity prices but it doesn't give you the the most efficient um cost effective pricing model because it's not as um you know respondent to the market now there are provisions in each one that you can um you know

prices can change it's not one set price all the time. But these negotiated prices are in place. Whereas ERCOT, the prices are constantly moving. And, you know, if you've paid attention to the ERCOT app or even just their basic updates when they come, you know, you can see that, that these prices are constantly moving, constantly in flux. And during normal times, that is a benefit because you can get cheaper energy. And one of the most important aspects of society is the ability to have cheap, reliable energy. The ability to know with near 100% certainty that when you flip your light switch on, it's going to go on. That when you turn your heater on, it's going to go on. And obviously, ERCOT was not prepared for what came about here.

Not just ERCOT, the grid itself, all the infrastructure that goes into it. But everything in life is about trade-offs, and this is one of those things. Do you choose the market-based system that is slightly more beneficial well to some degree but more beneficial some would argue severely some would argue less so um during normal times or do you pick the one that kind of has a risk is risk averse to when you know things really hit the fan so that's that's kind of the way is set up and uh you know a lot more people not only know that now, but just know the name because it's been trending on Twitter constantly. Governor Abbott is hitting it in his press conferences. It's come out of the darkness, that's for sure.

Yeah, that's a good pun there. I'm a big fan of puns if you didn't know that. Come out of the darkness is power. I will gladly take it. Now, you touched on this a little bit, but for people who are just becoming familiar with ERCOT, and they're also hearing from all these other utility companies, whether it's Encore or Austin Energy, what is the difference between ERCOT and those other energy providers? So ERCOT kind of facilitates the transaction between the generators of electricity and the utility companies that distribute it

onto consumers, to customers, households. And it just kind of, you know, it's a marketplace where these utility companies go to purchase wholesale loads of electricity. It's sold in megawattage. As a household, you generally use it's like 900 kilowatts in a month. So the difference between that and one megawatt is astronomical. And then on top of that, the amount of wattage statewide is generally between during, again, normal times, the state usually operates between 60,000 and 70,000 megawatts. And so distributed down, you know, that's how you get like a utility bill that is $50, $90 a month.

At least that's for me in an apartment. I'm sure a household is much larger but uh that's kind of how it goes from top to bottom okay and so would it be fair to say that ercot then is kind of like a middleman between the energy providers and these other uh people that provide the or i guess the producers of energy and the providers of energy. Overall, yes. They have a bit more teeth than the average middleman. You know, they are, even though they are a non-profit corporation, so technically not public, they are overseen by public agencies, namely the Public Utility Commission. And they have the force of, it's not law, but it's, you know, they can order things to happen, which they have done now. And it's namely instituting these percentage blackouts on these utility companies' sections of the grid.

Well, thank you for that. That is very helpful to just get an idea of how our energy gets to us and what in the world our God is. It is very complicated. And, you know yeah the complications have complications yeah and you have been in these weeds for longer than anybody most people on twitter have even heard of ercot so uh thank you for doing that um now let's go back to kind of the overall picture there's lots of people on twitter, you know, you see some Republicans saying the windmills, the windmills are frozen. That's what's causing this outage to happen. You have other media

outlets that are basically windmill apologists and saying that they really didn't affect anything. What is the truth in that? What is, what are the root problems of this? Was it the windmills? Was it other things? Tell us the the source of this problem i mean overall it was across the board not failures a little severe but um you know energy sources across the board did not meet what uh we were expecting what was needed to to you know meet the demand needs of consumers. Windmills absolutely were frozen. At one point I heard about half of them in West Texas were frozen and inoperable.

That has since changed. They have de-iced many of them, and many of them are back online. But the wind generation in general, its production is very, very low. So there's between 25 and 30,000 megawatts capacity available in Texas of wind generation. Now, that's a lot, but it doesn't happen all the time. There are points that the wind just doesn't blow. For solar, which is still a part of the grid, but a very small percentage, it's like 1%, something like that.

When the sun doesn't shine, it doesn't collect. When there's snow on top of them, they don't collect energy. I've heard they melt pretty good, though. Yes. And so there's a lot of finger-pointing at wind. I've heard they melt pretty good, though. regardless of how much windmills were put out of commission by the freezing temperatures, they weren't producing much. And I use 25 megawatts as a baseline. That was the first amount capacity total that I had heard. So that's what I used when I did most of my analyses.

You know, at pretty much every point throughout this situation, wind has generated less than a fifth of that capacity and sometimes far less than that. At one point Wednesday morning, I saw they were below a thousand megawatts and that's like nothing in terms of the grand scheme of of the state when you know typically they rely on a much larger portion of of wind so winds faltering absolutely had something to do with it in one of my pieces i put a a this graph that shows you a real-time evolution of what percentage of texas's grid was made up by which energy source was produced by which energy source. And natural gas was by far and away the most prolific in its production. You know, coal was there too. It was second. And then you had nuclear,

wind, and solar. And then the other sources were were you can't even see them on the on the graph um now every single one of those sources dropped off from its normal generation so you talked about windmills you know they did freeze what happened to the other energy sources um you know there were a lot of problems with natural gas and coal plants a mix of problems you know some infrastructural like you know in pipes occasionally they for the natural gas froze or water needed to start the process uh froze or couldn't be delivered and that kind of you know led to them these power plants being out of commission at the last figure i heard was at one point or another during this, 168 power plants were out of commission.

And those power plants are where you turn the fuel into generation. And so it's a very, very pivotal aspect. And out of all the power plants, how many would that be? It was 168 would be, there was like 680 total okay at one point there were 70 out in one moment and so that was like 10 okay of the total which is you know a sizable amount and 10 of the total raw number because i you would have to know how much those places generate in order to find a true percentage of what we're missing. But overall, we've been floating around, we've been floating between 30,000 and 40,000 megawatts out of commission at any given moment. Meaning

that what we typically expect, what typically is on the grid for our use we can we cannot get uh for whatever reason so there were there were also problems though with natural gas at the wellheads um that uh you know their electricity was turned off and therefore you couldn't get get the product out and get it to the generate the the plants to generate um there's also an issue of being able to pull the natural gas out of the ground itself. You know, these freezing temperatures are not what we're used to. And the, quote, weatherization across the whole board is lacking in this rare instant. You know, it's not like Texas has never seen cold temperatures before, but they don't come

often. And the broad system is not equipped to deal with this compounded effect of everything. Now, one other aspect of this that I haven't mentioned yet was how much harder the grid had to work in order to meet customers' needs. So one question often asked was, why can we handle these heat spells, but we can't handle this cold spell? Well, if you think about it in terms of temperature ranges, during the heat spell during a summer, it probably reaches, at at peak 110 degrees. The difference between that and a comfortable level,

you know, 70, 80 degrees is lower than the difference between a comfortable level here in this instance, when we're getting temperatures below 10 degrees and a comfortable level, you know, let's say 60, 70. That means that the grid generally has to work twice as hard. The grid, its infrastructure, the generators, everything going into it has to work twice as hard in order to get, deliver that electricity to you. And not only does that mean higher prices,

it means, you know, increased stress on the system itself. And that system broke. And so that's where we're at. And one more thing about the types of generation that failed. There was one unit in the Houston area, a nuclear plant there, one out of two units went down. Now, they haven't really indicated why. And this gets to another problem that I will talk about later about the communication side of this. You know, the nuclear plant, they lost one of their generators, and that's a substantial portion of the base load that the Houston area relies on for their consistent energy supply, electricity supply. And when that goes down, that's a big hit to its load.

And you have to find, you have to replace that from elsewhere. But they haven't, other than saying it had something to do with a feed water issue, they haven't said why it was down. And it was down, that was one of the triggering moments early Monday morning that caused the state to issue these rolling blackouts. and Thursday morning lots of power had come back on. The state has taken some action. You just mentioned that. What are the steps that the state has done to remedy this action? What has Urquhart and other people involved, how have they tried to approach this and try and solve it

while we wait for everything to thaw out? Yes. I mean, it really comes down to getting as much generation back on the grid as possible. And behind the scenes, because of how tight-lipped they've been, I'm not sure exactly the specific ways in which they've gone about doing that. But trying to get these power plants that are out of commission back online is essentially what they're doing.

And they've done that to varying degrees of effectiveness at different points during this. I mean, like I mentioned, you know, 2 million customers, um, that, that would probably be a lot more people. There would be a lot more people. Um, they, uh, that's a very good, that's very good news. And it's surely not an easy thing to do in over one night. But they kind of limped along throughout the first part of it. And when they were trying to – when they were still facing the initial blow of this combination of demand surge, supply shortage, they institute these blackouts. That was their first measure. And it's a last-ditch effort. It's not something they do often.

In the last two summers, Texas has gotten close to blackouts, but they haven't gotten there. They've been very, very close where they basically ask people to curb their usage, which they did this time, but they had to take it another step further and not just ask people, but take them off of the load. And so that instituting the blackouts has been the main aspect of this. Now, earlier today, this being Thursday, the state said that they were ending the widespread broad blackouts across the state. Now, that doesn't mean you won't you automatically get back power. of however many people are asking for power on the market, decreasing that number so that their capacity can meet it. At the same time, like I said,

trying to restore as much of the generation, the supply that they can. But really it comes down to waiting for the weather to improve. Because our infrastructure is not, um, is not quote weatherized for this. Uh, you know, it's, it really just takes a thought and it will take some time to get things back to quote normal. And, you know, by then, you know, we'll be in the full swing of, of, uh, you know of legislative hearings, things like that, trying to figure out what went wrong, nail down solutions if there are any.

And that really comes down to it. Just we need the weather to improve, and that doesn't give people a lot of hope. Yeah. Now, you have lived in some colder climates than texas before and even when we were driving here uh from my apartment that lost heat then uh you know you were telling me how to drive like it was very helpful to have someone who you know tells me how to when to use the brakes when not to use the brakes and that kind of thing. That's an important distinction. How does, how does that weather up there where you come from where people are prepared for

it, how does that compare with what you've seen in Texas where, you know, there's not necessarily salt on the roads? Yeah. Well, I don't mean this as a Texans can't handle cold weather. I mean, it's just, you know, I couldn't handle the heat when I came down here. It's just a different climate and it takes a lot of time, years to get used to it. Not only you as an individual, but the infrastructure surrounding you that allows you to complete all your day-to-day tasks. It takes years for that to adapt as well.

So, you know, up in, I'm from Ohio up there, the worst snowstorm we had was like two, two and a half feet of snow. And we were closed from school for a week. But, you know, there was emergencies issued kind of like here. But, you know, that's a far cry from what we've had to deal with in Texas where, you know, at least here in Austin, we got like five inches. And the temperature dropped to at the coldest like eight degrees I think you know it's not it's not rare for up in Ohio to be negative negative 10 negative 20 it does happen it's not common but it does happen and so it So here in Texas, because this kind of weather is so rare, they haven't felt that it hasn't been cost effective to adapt everything to this rare event that may or may not come. You know, that's one thing that officials are going to have to decide going forward. Like, do we protect against this? Is it worth it for us to protect against another, quote, snowstorm like this?

Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. I don't know. I mean, the people that have been days without power would probably say yes. And it's not like you have to weatherize everything for 100 hundred percent of you know like it's not like we're living in the arctic whatever changes come will likely be on a spectrum some degree towards that that end but you know there's a reason texas was not prepared for this and it's because it's it's rare and um you know it's it may not be worth it.

So weatherizing things, so to speak, or as it were, it is a proposal that probably is going to get some attention later on. I imagine there's going to be people with their pitchforks and say, we need this just in case it happens again. Now, like you said, it's a really rare event. Back in January, it snowed. And the day it snowed, I was like, shoot, I got to go to the Capitol and get some pictures because this is not going to happen again. Yeah, sure enough. I was wrong. But while you were doing

that, people were rushing to the grocery store because they thought, you know, things were going to be closed for two weeks. Yeah. And I mean, the same thing has happened now. Like everybody's gone to the grocery store. The lines are back out the door. And I've heard there's like an hour wait outside the building to get in. And of course, there's also currently COVID restrictions that are in place. Now, interestingly enough, in the past week, you know, a month ago, basically all the state under Governor Abbott's orders was under the renewed lockdown, however you want to say that. Basically, all the state was basically above that 15% threshold. In the past several days, several large regions, Houston, the DFW area, have all dropped out of that and gotten below the 15%.

So there's actually been less restrictions now. Completely side note. But back to the point of weatherizing stuff preparing for it what are other things that lawmakers executives officials what are they going to do after this what is the response moving forward well we've already seen a bit seen a bit um the house called emergency hearings for one of their committees to investigate this situation that will happen next week and the governor followed suit by declaring uh you know ercot reform an emergency item and so what that does is allow the legislature to address any potential legislation that may come

down the pike earlier than they normally for when they would be able to for for a run-of-the-mill bill. Now, none of that is a specific solution listed out in any plain detail. There are proposals to establish a security council that kind of oversees the security of our grid and looks at potential vulnerabilities, analyzes it, analyzes what needs to be done, and institutes some sort of action to address them. Now, interestingly enough, those bills have been killed or just left to die in committee the past few sessions. Like, there's been zero interest from the legislature to do anything about the grid so but now obviously they're gonna you know move mountains to institute some sort of change and i i honestly couldn't tell you what it'll be because you know like with other issues there's just such a broad array of proposals some help may help in

one respect some may help in a totally different respect some may not help at all some may just be solutions in name only it it really will just have to see what what what develops i i have heard you know proposals such as as the one requiring all ERCOT employees or board members to actually live in the state. That way they are subject to the decisions that they make, which, you know, that's a pretty reasonable thing, I would think. Now, is that going to be effective in solving this problem? Probably not. Now, I've seen that ERCOT, you know, they had a list of their board, the board of directors, on their website. And apparently they were getting lots of death threats or threats of some sort.

And so the officials at ERCOT pulled their names off the website. So that's no longer available there to be seen. They did just say they're restoring it. It shouldn't have been taken off, but like you said, it was taken off because they were getting threats. Okay. Now, like you mentioned this earlier, I think towards the beginning of the podcast when we were talking about

ERCOT and their transparency, what has your experience been with that? What do you think is in store for that going forward? Well, I mean, I would say it's been terrible. And the governor kind of called them out on this in his press conference on Wednesday. But they have not been kind of like the nuclear plant in Houston.

They have not been very forthright about what all has gone wrong to you know explicit detail and that is important in understanding what caused these issues they just they've tweeted some things that clearly seem uh tone deaf and they also have talked a lot in, you know, these, this industry jargon that the average person can't understand really. And, you know,

I, it's my job. And so that's one reason I, I am able to, and a lot of my job this week has been kind of translating what ERCOT says to real things people can understand. And I'm just kind of astounded at how tight-lipped they've been on a lot of this stuff. They've had some press conferences. They've said some things.

They've given periodic updates updates but emphasis on periodic i mean it has been maybe six news releases they have put out since everything really went down on monday morning it's just kind of it's disgraceful and they should be better improved at that especially because you know while they're a technically not a government entity, they're doing the work of a government entity. And part of government, one necessity of government is transparency, and they have not really applied that very well. I'll jump back quickly to solutions, because something just popped back in my head that I didn't really, didn't really address.

So there's a fight over as we kind of alluded to before renewables versus fossil fuels. You know, this fight has been raging for a long, long time. And the state has stayed its state's position itself has kind of been to champion both. You know, they've put out there that, you we're texas is the energy capital of the world and you know we we diversify our energy grid and whatnot and you know that's true but it's coming to cost i mean the the amount of subsidization to the renewable industry industry um you know i saw, it was like 18 billion. Um,

it could very well be more than that in like tax incentives and straight up, uh, capital that, that is a, a, um, a value judgment. And they clearly are betting on,

on wind and solar to take off. And the problem with that is those are not as reliable forms of energy no it doesn't mean the other ones don't have issues too like when you can't when you can't get natural gas from the well to the generator it's useless but that same thing that same problem comes with wind and solar only the times that you can't get access to it are far more regular. Now, that doesn't mean that the state shouldn't be. That's something for the policy heads to decide, whether the state should encourage wind development.

Texas is the second. In terms of raw production, it's the highest producer in wind. In terms of its percent of its energy grid, it's second. I believe it's Oklahoma that wind makes up a larger portion of its energy grid. But, you know, that's all something that's going to have to be decided. You know, there are people like at the Texas Public Policy Foundation that say that we've wasted too much time, money, energy, pun very much intended, on renewable resources that are, quote, not reliable. Then there are others that say, you know, more on the progressive side that say, you know, renewable energy has been, you know, producing at higher than expectation during

this and therefore we need to invest more in it. The truth is somewhere in the middle right as it often is um and you know there are pros and cons with each and you know the governor and the legislature is going to have to analyze you know which which is better to bet on essentially all of this what all of this comes down to, forming an energy system, is betting on that source or that combination of sources that you can count on to supply energy when you need it most. And that has failed this time. It hasn't failed like this before, but this is going to provide a lot of lessons moving forward. Yeah, and I expect on that issue of renewables versus more reliable energy sources, I expect that we'll have a lot of partisan arguments on that topic. Not only will it have that, but it already has that.

It already has that. I think it'll just heat up some more. Yes. Pun also intended. Now, it'll be interesting to see where compromises are made. But we'll be keeping an eye on that as the legislative session moves forward. If it ever does move forward, we're still waiting for them to meet. Yeah, they gaveled in shortly this week, and shortly thereafter gaveled out. Yeah.

Because. There was not a quorum present. Yeah. I believe is the technical reason why. It's because nobody could get here. Yeah. So. You know, when the roads are all frozen, it's a little bit hard.

Yeah. It's kind of previewing the session going forward. You know, obviously we had COVID as a main theme for this. Part of that, but also a significant theme, was the emergency power stuff. Then we have the stuff left over from last session that didn't get completed. And now we have this.

And so something's got to give. left over from last session that didn't get completed. And now we have this. And so something's got to give like the, this situation is going to take up so much oxygen that a lot of stuff that might've had a chance will no longer have a chance to get through, to get past. A lot of the rhetoric is going to be focused on this in addition to covid and i i fully expect you know urquhart to be a name that is said in the halls of the capital constantly so that's what we have to look forward to yes exciting stuff we'll be watching it um is there anything else i always ask this'll be watching it um is there anything else i always

ask this when i'm interviewing people is there anything else that you want to add well it kind of is is moot now but one of the pieces of advice i had for you while driving was uh you know try and tap and hit your brakes as rarely as possible when road conditions are bad slamming the brakes will do nothing but send you flying and um the other one is if you start fishtailing steer into it so if your back end goes left turn your wheel left and that will help you uh regain composure on the road and hopefully not crash into other people and you know cause a lot of issues. So as the resident northerner, those are my recommendations for driving the roads. Well, thank you for that. Everybody, we will catch you next time on the Texans Weekly Roundup.

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