DALLAS (AP) — Congress is looking into the cause of last month’s power blackouts across Texas. A House panel heard Wednesday from officials who oversee the state’s energy industry and electric grid. Bill Magness is the outgoing CEO of grid operator the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. He says that because of a loss of generating capacity, the grid operator had no choice but to order rolling outages to prevent an even more disastrous and longer blackout. Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner says Texas policymakers wrongly assumed that a severe winter storm in 2011 was an anomaly. The outages caused millions of Texans to lose power and heat during subfreezing temperatures.
