Politico's Morning Energy examined the Texas energy crisis, quoting AEE’s Jeff Dennis on what it will mean for the future of grid infrastructure. Read excerpts below and the full Morning Energy piece here.

THE EYES ON TEXAS: Infrastructure was already promising to play a prominent role in Washington in 2021, but the ongoing Texas energy crisis has injected fresh attention into how crucial the sector is to basic, every day tasks.

“We take infrastructure for granted,” Henry Cisneros, former HUD secretary under President Bill Clinton, told POLITICO. “I think it’s perfectly legitimate to draw the lesson from this incident in Texas that we need more attention to our basic infrastructure. Unfortunately, it’s so easy to politicize that.” Cisneros recently co-authored a report, delivered to the Biden administration and congressional leaders, outlining top infrastructure priorities across the biggest U.S. cities, including energy and climate resilience projects...

More talk of grid resilience: Others see the Texas crisis, on the heels of California’s rolling blackouts last summer and the polar vortex in 2014 that crippled mid-Atlantic states, as shining a national spotlight on the importance of a robust grid. “Grid operators plan for extreme events and we’re seeing those events exceed those expectations,” said Jeff Dennis, managing director for Advanced Energy Economy. “I think it will create a lot of national discussion of the need for more infrastructure to secure all forms of energy writ large in the future.”

Read the full story here.