Ron Jenkins/Getty

As the ongoing power outages in below-freezing Texas remain national news, I’d like to draw your attention to Kate Aronoff’s piece on Tuesday about how conservatives are blaming the deadly crisis in Texas on renewable energy—specifically, wind power.

It’s true that wind turbines have ice problems in winter weather (deicing systems are typically implemented further north). But as Kate pointed out, the real problem was the failure of natural gas generation, which Texas’s independent and rather outmoded grid relies on for peak energy generation (every other state in the continental U.S. is part of multistate energy grids):

As of Monday afternoon, 26 of the 34 gigawatts in ERCOT’s grid that had gone offline were from “thermal” sources, meaning gas and coal. The system’s total installed capacity in the system, Power magazine’s Sonal Patel noted, is around 77.2 GW. Wind and solar power, meanwhile, produced near or even above planned capacity, according to energy analyst Jesse Jenkins, as only small amounts of wind and solar are utilized in peaking conditions. Wind turbines did indeed freeze, and did eventually underperform. But so did natural gas infrastructure, and to a far greater degree. That proved to be a much larger problem since it makes up such a huge proportion of the state’s power supply in extreme weather. And frozen power lines and equipment were a far bigger cause of outages than generation shortages.

That didn’t stop Fox News’s Tucker Carlson from an outrageous bit of misinformation. “The windmills failed like the silly fashion accessories they are, and people in Texas died,” he said on Monday. Troublingly, mainstream nonpartisan media also picked up this narrative, with early coverage in The New York Times and elsewhere emphasizing wind power failures in headlines and story leads.

That narrative has now been debunked by one of the people in charge of the Texas grid, who spoke with Bloomberg about the real source of the outages:

While ice has forced some turbines to shut down just as a brutal cold wave drives record electricity demand, that’s been the least significant factor in the blackouts, according to Dan Woodfin, a senior director for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which operates the state’s power grid.

The main factors: Frozen instruments at natural gas, coal and even nuclear facilities, as well as limited supplies of natural gas, he said. “Natural gas pressure” in particular is one reason power is coming back slower than expected Tuesday, added Woodfin.

The allegation that wind power largely caused the Texas blackouts is bogus. Once started by political interests, these narratives have a way of taking on a life of their own, as evidenced by just how many reputable news sources began reporting the outages this way on Monday and Tuesday. (Some outlets later attempted to atone for their errors: The Times on Tuesday noted that frozen turbines were “a smaller part of the problem.”)

The bigger problem, as these outlets are belatedly realizing, was that natural gas plants failed—and there was no way for the Texas grid, which was set up in 1935 to avoid federal oversight, to compensate. Given the amount of severe weather that global warming is sending our way, the state may want to reconsider the merits of going it alone.

–Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor

Advertising

The book has some issues. Bill McKibben’s review for The New York Times is worth your time.

Volunteers in Texas are trying to save cold-stunned sea turtles from the freezing temperatures, as people load boats and Subarus with sluggish turtles. Unless they are pulled from the water or beach, the turtles, motionless from the cold, are vulnerable to predators, freezing, or drowning:

The turtle rescue put out a call for help, and soon, much of the island was involved in an all-hands-on-deck effort to transport turtles to an overflow facility at the South Padre Island Convention Centre, where generators and good insulation could keep the animals warm.… McLellan said she spent hours outside the convention center participating in a kind of turtle bucket brigade: She and other volunteers would approach a long line of vehicles, dismount the animals onto dollies and then cart them over inside the center.

Teo Armus | The Washington Post 

Advertising

Copyright © 2021, The New Republic, All rights reserved.