AUSTIN (Talk1370.com) -- With a second afternoon of forecasted tight conditions on the state's electric grid expected Tuesday afternoon, Austin Mayor Steve Adler took to Twitter to sound off on Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.
"It's Day Two of conservation warnings from @GregAbbott_TX delicate power infrastructure," the tweet posted to Adler's account said. "It's still technically spring and Texas is experiencing late-summer temperatures, power plants offline, and the governor is tweeting about a border wall that he can't fund."
ERCOT, the agency that manages the state's electric grid, issued a conservation alert Monday afternoon, asking residents and businesses across the state to conserve electricity usage during the afternoon hours. Grid operators were dealing with nearly three times the usual amount of electricity generation being offline in a "forced outage" state. Similar conditions are expected again Tuesday afternoon and for the rest of the week.
Abbott said in an interview with the "Ruthless" podcast released Tuesday that the state would solicit donations to help fund the wall. "When I do make the announcement later on this week, I will also be providing a link that you can click on and go to for everybody in the United States - really everybody in the entire world - who wants to help Texas build the border wall, there will be a place on there where they can contribute," Abbott said.
The announcement comes after a border summit in Del Rio last week, where Abbott announced the state would build its own wall along the Mexican border. Abbott has said more details will be revealed soon.
A second tweet from Adler needled Abbott over his usual pro-business stance, regularly featured in the governor's tweets. "Maybe when a corporation tells the governor that an unreliable power grid is bad for business, he'll finally listen. He doesn't seem to care about whether it's bad for people."
ERCOT gained national attention during February's brutal winter storm, when required load shedding led to millions of Texans being plunged into the dark for several days.
Meanwhile, strong to severe thunderstorms in late May and early June caused their own issues for Austin Energy crews, with storm damage taking out power to more than 30,000 customers over the Memorial Day weekend. Hundreds of customers remained without power for several days.