In Texas and across much of the South, record-breaking cold temperatures and ice storms trapped millions of people indoors without electricity. People froze to death, and failing water treatment facilities left millions of Texans under boil advisories.
For me, what happened is personal. I lived in Texas for years, and most of my wife’s relatives still do. We spent days worrying about them. Thankfully they are all fine now, but most experienced power outages and water shutoffs in bitterly cold weather that Texas homes aren’t designed for.
So what happened?
In short, the cold weather caused very high energy usage, even as generating units went offline, because of extreme conditions. Texas’s fossil-fuel heavy electric power grid simply couldn’t handle the peak load.
Conservative Texas politicians and right-wing media, absurdly, blamed everything from wind power to the Green New Deal for the crisis. These are lies.
According to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the operator of the Texas grid, generating units went offline “across fuel types” — especially natural gas.
Independent experts agree. “Texas is a gas state,” said Michael Webber, a professor of energy resources at the University of Texas at Austin. And “gas is failing in the most spectacular fashion right now.”
This isn’t surprising. A lot of peak generation capacity, which is brought online only when demand peaks, uses natural gas. What’s more, two-thirds of electricity generation in Texas uses fossil fuels, with 47% from natural gas alone. Only one-fifth is from wind energy.
Fossil fuels are also to blame in a larger sense.
Texas and the South are more likely to experience freak cold snaps today because warming planetary surface temperatures are destabilizing the jet stream, causing extremely cold Arctic air masses to flow south.
That’s right: global warming makes extreme cold weather events more likely.
So when propagandists spew misinformation about “freezing wind turbines” and advocate more fossil fuel use, they’re actively calling for measures that would make disasters such as the deep freeze in Texas more frequent.
This propaganda isn’t new. It’s an old, repeatedly debunked lie suggesting that wind, solar and other renewables are less reliable.
Under Rick Perry, the one-time Texas governor and the Trump administration’s former secretary of energy, the U.S. Department of Energy produced a highly flawed, politicized 2017 study alleging that renewable sources made the grid unreliable. Professional researchers at Perry’s own agency disputed that claim. Now Perry is claiming that Texans would rather freeze to death than endure federal regulation of the state’s energy grid.
In truth, the reliability of the nation’s grid is improving — even as the share of energy from intermittent renewable sources increases.
