Former congressman raises cyber security concerns following Texas power grid failure

SAN ANTONIO (KTSA News) – A former San Antonio-area congressman is raising cyber security concerns following the statewide power grid failure last week.

Republican Will Hurd told NBC’s Meet the Press  that our adversaries have seen how Texas was brought to its knees.

“Our enemies are looking at this and they’re looking at how the grid was able to fail, and they could potentially use this and have a cyber attack to do this kind of thing,” said Hurd.

Hurd, who chose not to seek reelection last fall, believes last week’s power crisis was preventable.

“This wasn’t a problem with any individual fuel source.  This was a problem of lack of leadership and lack of long-term planning,” said Hurd.

He also noted the high energy bills some Texans are facing.

“You don’t take the steps to provide reliable power and then you’re going to give somebody a bill in the tens of thousands of dollars? That’s absolutely outrageous,” said Hurd.

While democrats are blaming the failure of the Texas grid on deregulation,which happened in 1999, Hurd says that doesn’t mean we need to go back to what we were doing before that.  The former congressman believes state leaders should be talking about making sure that the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT)  has the tools and the power it needs to keep the grid from failing.

“I think the conversations, instead of using this as a political budgeon against one another, we should be talking about the serious issues about reliability, about how the Texas grid increases its connection with the other grids around us,” said Hurd.