Some in GOP blame wind turbines, solar energy for Texas grid failure
With millions of Texas residents still without power in frigid conditions, conservative commentators have claimed that wind turbines and solar energy were primarily to blame.
“We should never build another wind turbine in Texas,” read a Tuesday Facebook post from Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller. “The experiment failed big time.”
“This is a perfect example of the need for reliable energy sources like natural gas & coal,” tweeted U.S. Sen. Steve Daines, R-Montana, on Tuesday.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott directed his ire at frozen wind turbines.
“This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” Abbott said to host Sean Hannity on Tuesday. “Our wind and our solar got shut down, and they were collectively more than 10% of our power grid, and that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis … It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary.”
In reality, failures in natural gas, coal and nuclear energy systems were responsible for nearly twice as many blackouts as frozen wind turbines and solar panels, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which operates the state’s power grid, said in a news conference Tuesday.
In his Fox News interview, Abbott did not address the fact that most of the state’s power comes from fossil fuels and that the energy council had planned to produce far more power from natural gas than became available as the cold set in, contributing a deficit during the freezing weather.
Abbott’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment late Tuesday.
Still, a variety of misleading claims spread on social media around renewable energy, with wind turbines and the Green New Deal getting much of the attention.
A widely seen photo of a helicopter de-icing a wind turbine was posted with claims that it showed a “chemical” solution being applied to one of the wind generators in Texas. The only problem? The photo was taken in Sweden years ago, not in the U.S. in 2021. The helicopter sprayed hot water onto the wind turbine, not chemicals.
Other social media users, including Republican U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, labeled the Green New Deal as the culprit.
But the Green New Deal is irrelevant, as no version of it exists in Texas or nationwide, said Mark Jacobson, director of the Atmosphere/Energy Program and professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University.
“It’s really natural gas and coal and nuclear that are providing the bulk of the electricity and that’s the bulk of the cause of the blackouts,” Jacobson said.
After Fox News host Tucker Carlson told viewers that the state’s power grid had become “totally reliant on windmills,” former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who served as energy secretary under President Donald Trump, joined Carlson in railing against the Green New Deal, which has not been enacted in Texas or nationally.
“If this Green New Deal goes forward the way that the Biden administration appears to want it to, then we’ll have more events like we’ve had in Texas all across the country,” Perry said in another Fox News segment.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who has been a strong proponent of the Green New Deal proposal, slammed Texas Republicans early Wednesday.
“The infrastructure failures in Texas are quite literally what happens when you *don’t* pursue a Green New Deal,” she said in a tweet.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas said Tuesday that of the 45,000 total megawatts of power that were offline statewide, about 30,000 consisted of thermal sources — gas, coal and nuclear plants — and 16,000 came from renewable sources.
On top of that, while Texas has ramped up wind energy in recent years, the state still relies on wind power for only about 25% of its total electricity, according to the council’s data.
“It’s not like we were relying on it to ride us through this event,” Joshua Rhodes, a research associate at the Webber Energy Group at the University of Texas at Austin, said. “Nor would it have been able to save us even if it were operating at 100% capacity right now. We just don’t have enough of it.”