Granbury Fights the Texas Gas Rush
By Kamil Cook
On a surprisingly cool Texas summer night in July, residents of the Granbury area gathered to learn about the industrial development in their community and talk about how they could get involved in the fight to stop it. With a crowd of around 40 in the church hosting them, you could feel the energy in the room that comes from the realization that change can happen.
Granbury is like other communities across Texas facing the possibility of a state-backed methane gas-fueled power plant, and all the pollution that comes with it, setting up shop not far from where people work, live and play. It’s part of what we call the Texas Gas Rush, a push by Texas’ elected officials to stabilize the electric grid by building expensive new gas plants that are paid for with taxpayer dollars and, worse yet, potentially with people’s health and safety.
Public Citizen is fighting back against the Texas Gas Rush. There are cheaper alternatives to grid stability that take far less time and tax dollars than billions of dollars’ worth of new gas plants that won’t generate any new electricity for five years or more.
In Granbury, the meeting was kicked off by Shannon Wolf, the Republican chair for Precinct 211, who outlined the structure of the town hall: updates on all the industrial buildouts happening in the area, updates on their work to stop this, and then community announcements.
Many of the updates focused on the dangers of various chemical emissions resulting from either the regular use of natural gas-based energy production or that come from battery energy storage system explosions and fires. With the proposed Wolf Hollow III plant, a behind-the-meter gas plant co-located with a data center, and a new solar and battery storage unit, concerns have arisen about potential releases into the air and water.
Although the crowd worried about what this buildout would mean for them, they also came eager to discuss the community’s response collectively. Many of the more vocal members of the crowd discounted electoralism as a potential option. They easily saw the connection between the corporations developing these sites, their legislators who voted in their interests, and the regulatory system that facilitates industry’s ability to build. For them, our political system was a dead-end. They needed something else.
The real lesson that people took away was that, as community members themselves, they have the power to create change. It requires work and is not easy, but it is ultimately what will bring about change. The most effective way to achieve this is through community buy-in, such as through public town halls.
I’ll provide one example from the town hall that illustrates this point. As people spoke up about what they could do in response to this buildout, some were visibly dejected after realizing that their elected representatives were unlikely to support them. Rather than letting people sit in that dejection, Cheryl Shadden, another organizer, walked people through the strategies they have employed, how they worked, and why they have settled on municipal incorporation as one of their primary tools of choice.
Walking through this process served two purposes. It gave the organizers legitimacy in the eyes of their community. It also offers community members a way to see how power and change work — it takes trial and error, and tactics that work emerge from this process. Finally, it also offered them a way to get involved in ongoing efforts.
Chip Joslin, a county commissioner from neighboring Somervell County, also offered a community update. Another came from people who live in Tolar, a town about nine miles west of Granbury with a proposal for a large data center with a potential gas plant alongside it. Working together, sharing the lessons learned and strategies used, are things that will collectively protect the people and the environment of Granbury and surrounding communities. One example of support is by sharing how to navigate Texas’ difficult regulatory system, from a public meeting to a contested case hearing. Those experiences must be shared. We know that the executives of all these different projects are talking to each other; we should be, too!
This town hall served its purpose of reinvigorating, informing, and drawing from the community. As people filed out of the room, some stayed behind to reflect on how far the battle had progressed over the past two years, and where it was going. Even if the thought of volatile organic compounds and nitrous oxides was on their minds, so were protests and teach-ins and, of course, the town halls.
Kamil Cook is a climate and clean energy associate for the Texas office of Public Citizen