Profile I: Texas House Representative Jon Rosenthal

In this issue, the Daily Dynamo met with former longtime engineer in the oil and gas field and current Texas House Representative for district 138, Mr. Jon Rosenthal. During his ongoing four year tenure in the House, Texas has experienced a litany of crises that have disrupted the state’s energy infrastructure, from Winter Storm Urie in the winter of 2021 to the summer of this year, when his district weathered a rare derecho storm and Category 1 Hurricane Beryl, both of which left hundreds of thousands without electricity for weeks. 

In regards to energy infrastructure, which Rosenthal highlighted as the most important energy priority for the state legislature in their next session early next year, his professional background uniquely differentiates him from his peers. 

“As an oil and gas technical professional, it makes me a subject matter expert among my colleagues… legislators on both sides of the aisle give me credibility whether they agree with me or not”, he said, noting that such a technical background also gives him a more ‘nuanced understanding’ and ‘pragmatic’ view on issues with energy infrastructure compared to other legislators, ‘informed by decades of real-world experience’. 

“Many of my colleagues look at most things strictly in political terms”, he said, asserting that as the only oil and gas technical professional in the legislature, “gives me a broader perspective than most”, arguably the most diverse in the chamber.  

However, despite spending the vast majority of his time in the workforce as an oil and gas industry technical professional, he argued the contrary of many of his peers in the legislature who operated on the commercial side of the sector, lamenting the risks of not subsidizing alternative energy investment. 

It is “irresponsible not to take this all-of-the-above approach… the best possible situation is we keep all aspects of the energy portfolio operating”, he argued, suggesting his conservative peers opt for a heavy-handed agenda in primarily pursuing petroleum and natural gas development as he additionally critiqued their argument that federal subsidies eliminate the need for state-level subsidization. Rosenthal also cited H.B #5, which was passed by the Texas House of Representatives last session, and offers property tax cuts and incentives to businesses in industrial development, as an example of policy he sees as detrimental to the state’s energy prospects.  

“The reason I did not support that bill, though I’m down for industrial development and new energy generation was because it only allowed incentives for oil and gas”, Rosenthal said as he explained his opposition to the bill, adding “the only exception to that [new code] is geothermal, as the technology and the process, especially at the front end is very similar [to oil and gas]”. 

While an overhaul in the fuel mix will not be on the docket for the Texas Legislature, with Rosenthal speculating there might be ‘even less [alternative energy investment]’, regulating and strengthening the state's energy infrastructure is what the congressman emphasized will be the main energy priority for the state’s legislature this next session. One key cause of such an issue is the ‘profit-driven’ mindset of the state that has become the central dogma behind its relatively deregulated economy. While eastern Texas border city El Paso is connected to a neighboring grid, Rosenthal postulated that the reluctance of connecting the entire state’s grid to national infrastructure is due to the string of federal regulations that comes along with Texas’ assimilation into a regional energy grid.

“In my opinion, it would be good for us to subject ourselves to federal regulations”, Rosenthal argued, adding that “areas with federal requirements did much better in the winter storm than we did”, referring to Winter Storm Urie that was the state’s most severe grid failure in several years. 

“The deregulated market has clearly produced a business model that is run to prioritize profits over reliability and resiliency”, Rosenthal maintained. He argued that in the face of increasing profits and deregulation, businesses naturally exploit the favorable business environment. 

“For the folks who are distributors and not required by law to make certain investments in aging infrastructure, I hope we’ll be able to address that this session”, Rosenthal stated, adding it was a glaring need. 

Pushing for legislation “to regulate Centerpoint”, a business that provides electricity to millions of Texans, he said that such a policy would be the first step in fixing the state’s energy infrastructure. However, Rosenthal conceded efforts to close all gaps in the state’s so-called ‘grid’  will be long-winded, emphasizing legislation is rarely ever comprehensive and often has unintended side effects.

“We don’t have to fix the whole thing all in one bite”, he asserted, adding that there was a robust set of reforms implemented after Winter Storm Urie, some of which he criticized. However, he stressed “it’s not just regulating Centerpoint…they don’t make electricity, they just distribute it… All aspects of the system have to remain reliable from the source to the distributors to the network of equipment”.

Echoing the attitude by many in government that such efficacy will only be truly tested by the next catastrophe, he noted “the part that didn’t fail, nobody’s going to try to fix that”. In what he called “an ongoing process of improvement”, Rosenthal underscored two key tenets of his own approach to improving energy infrastructure. 

“The system must have reliability, where it doesn’t falter in the face of severe weather, and resiliency, where the parts that do fail can be recovered”, he emphasized.  

Though the grid may be the ‘highest priority item’ in energy for the legislature, he also emphasized the need for the state to match growing energy demand of its rapidly growing population, regardless of severe weather events. 

“We have the fastest growing population in the nation, which means we also have the fastest growing demand for energy”. Rosenthal said, proposing many initiatives that could ease pressure on the state’s infrastructure, from ‘updating building codes to make buildings more energy efficient’ to ‘proliferating wind and solar energy in commercial structures’, adding that the demand side of infrastructure can be just as pivotal as the ‘supply side’, or the grid. 

With the Texas Constitution mandating an extremely compressed biennial legislative session of 140 days, Rosenthal and his colleagues’ plan of reform may prove exceedingly difficult, though senior officers of the state’s executive, namely Lieutenant Governor and Senate President Dan Patrick, who owns a house in Cypress, one of the areas heavily affected by recent severe weather, have expressed that urgency for such reform is a sentiment shared by both sides of the aisle. 

In the wake of both major weather events that have hit his district, which contains Cypress, he has been active in spreading awareness about relief centers and recovery infrastructure, as well as the need to urge the state’s government and their officials to act to shore up existing energy systems and ensure that the catastrophic symptoms of severe weather never become accepted as a normality.