On the final day of the legislative session, May 31, Texas lawmakers completed the final version of Senate Bill 3, which aims to bolster the state’s electricity infrastructure and require power plants to prepare for extreme weather conditions in response to the outages that resulted during the deadly February winter storms. The bill, sent to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk June 1, requires electric generation providers to winterize both their infrastructure and operations or pay fines of up to $1 million a day for each offense.
Abbott signed the legislation June 8 and it went into effect immediately.