With millions of Texas residents still without power amid cold temperatures, conservative commentators have falsely claimed that wind turbines and solar power are the main culprits.
“We should never build another wind turbine in Texas,” said a Facebook post by Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller. “The experiment failed a lot.”
“This is a perfect example of the need for reliable energy sources like natural gas and coal,” U.S. Senator Steve Daines, a Montana Republican, tweeted on Tuesday.
In reality, failures in natural gas, coal and nuclear power systems were responsible for almost twice as many outages as frozen wind turbines and solar panels, said the Texas Electric Reliability Council, which operates the state’s power grid, at a news conference on Tuesday.
Still, several misleading claims have spread on social media about renewable energy, with wind turbines and the New Deal Green receiving much of the attention.
A viral photo of a helicopter thawing a wind turbine it was shared with claims that it showed a “chemical” solution being applied to one of the huge wind generators in Texas. The only problem? The photo was taken in Sweden years ago, not in the USA in 2021. The helicopter sprayed hot water in the wind turbine, not chemicals.
Other social media users, including Republican Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado, have intriguingly classified the Green New Deal as the culprit. Boebert tweeted on Monday that the proposal was “proven unsustainable, as renewable energy is clearly unreliable”.
But the Green New Deal is irrelevant, as no version of it exists in Texas or across the country, said Mark Jacobson, director of the Atmosphere / Energy Program and professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University.
“In fact, it is natural gas, coal and nuclear energy that provide most of the electricity and that is the biggest cause of blackouts,” Jacobson told the Associated Press.
ERCOT said on Tuesday that of the 45,000 total megawatts of power shut down across the state, some 30,000 consist of thermal sources – gas, coal and nuclear power plants – and 16,000 come from renewable sources.
In addition, although Texas has increased wind power in recent years, the state still depends on wind power for only about 25% of its total electricity, according to ERCOT data.
“It’s not like we’re counting on it to help us with this event,” Joshua Rhodes, associate researcher at the Webber Energy Group at the University of Texas at Austin, told AP. “Nor would it have been able to save us, even if it were operating at 100% capacity now. We just don’t have enough. “
The agency confirmed that well freezes and other problems that restrict supply to natural gas systems were the main culprits for further disruptions on Tuesday after the severe winter caused failure of various types of fuel. in recent days.
Renewable energy is a popular scapegoat for new problems as more frequent extreme weather events overwhelm infrastructure, according to Emily Grubert, assistant professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
“It is easy to focus on what you can see changing as the source of why a result is changing,” Grubert told the AP. “The reality is that managing our systems is becoming more difficult. And that’s easy to blame for the reaction to that, but it’s not really the root cause. “