- In August, Texas senator Ted Cruz scoffed at California’s “failed energy policies” on Twitter.
- His post resurfaced on Tuesday, when more than 3 million Texans were left without electricity during a winter storm.
- The Texas state power grid has failed because of resource stresses.
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An August tweet in which Senator Ted Cruz of Texas scoffed at California’s “failed energy policies” recirculated on social media on Tuesday, when millions of Texans were left without electricity due to a rare and severe winter storm.
As of Monday, about 154 million Americans were in some form of winter weather advice, CNN reported. Some 3.6 million Texans were left without power on Tuesday afternoon, according to the outage monitoring website PowerOutage.us, as the state’s infrastructure struggles to cope with inclement weather.
In the August 19 tweet, in response to a message from the governor’s office asking Californians to turn off unnecessary lights and limit the use of appliances, Cruz said California was “unable to perform even basic civilization functions, such as having reliable electricity “.
—Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) August 19, 2020
Twitter users on Tuesday were making fun of Cruz’s tweet given the circumstances in Texas, accusing him of hypocrisy and, in some cases, responding with anger for the six-month tweet.
“Hey, Senator Cruz, Texas, I could use some civilization now. People are freezing to death,” Lisa Falkenberg, opinion editor for the Houston Chronicle, tweeted.
During the summer, California experienced wildfires and extreme heat waves that overloaded the state’s energy infrastructure and caused disruptions. State and local authorities responded by urging citizens to limit the use of electricity.
Now, the Texas power grid has failed; the state’s infrastructure is not equipped to deal with a lot of ice, snow and freezing temperatures.
In the 1970s, Texas developed a state and regulated power grid, called ERCOT, largely to avoid federal regulation and federal energy standards, the Texas Tribune reported in 2011. The rest of the contiguous U.S. states are on the Interconnection Eastern or Western interconnection networks.
Most of Texas is on ERCOT, except El Paso and parts of the Panhandle and eastern Texas.
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ERCOT works mainly with wind and natural gas – those that are suitable for heat waves when the demand for water and air conditioning increases, reported the Chronicle, but the winter storm Uri damaged wind turbines and depleted natural gas resources.
Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday that faulty instruments in power plants and a lack of natural gas – not frozen turbines – were primarily responsible for the failure of the Texas power grid.
Power outages and blackouts have affected designated heating centers and shelters. Two men were found dead this week in Texas; their deaths are believed to have been due to exposure to low temperatures.
“The ERCOT network collapsed in exactly the same way as the former Soviet Union,” Ed Hirs, an energy fellow at the University of Houston, told the Chronicle. “It hobbled with underinvestment and neglect until it finally broke down under predictable circumstances.”