As Texas entered its third night on Tuesday with sub-zero temperatures and 3.3 million customers without electricity, the state’s exclusive power grid operator, the Texas Electric Reliability Council (ERCOT), asked Texans that still have electricity to turn off the lights, turn off the appliances and turn down the thermostat. People without energy would take shelter elsewhere, if they could, or resort to the sometimes deadly means of generating heat.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) and state lawmakers called for investigations – and Abbott and others prominent GOP politicians wrongly blamed frozen wind turbines and other renewable energy sources for the Texas power grid failures.
Texas Governor Abbott blames solar and wind power for blackouts in his state and says “it shows how the New Green Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America” pic.twitter.com/YfVwa3YRZQ
– Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) February 17, 2021
“Some turbines have actually frozen – although Greenland and other northern outposts are able to keep them running during the winter,” The Washington Post reports. “But the wind is responsible for only 10% of the energy generated in Texas during the winter”, and the losses linked to thermal plants, mainly “dependent on natural gas, reduced the crush caused by the frozen wind turbines by a factor of five or six . ” According to ERCOT, wind power generation is actually exceeding projections.
A nuclear reactor and several coal-fired plants have been shut down, but “Texas is a gaseous state,” said Michael Webber, professor of energy resources at the University of Texas. The Texas Tribune. And “the gas is failing in the most spectacular way right now.” Instruments and other components in gas plants froze and “according to some estimates, almost half of the state’s natural gas production was interrupted due to extremely low temperatures”, as electric pumps lost energy and uninsulated wells and pipelines froze, the Tribune reports.
After a 2011 winter storm cut power to nearly 3 million Texans, a federal report warned Texas that the same network disaster would happen again if it failed to properly weather its energy infrastructure and increase fuel reserves – and reminded Texas that “many of the same warnings were issued after similar blackouts 22 years ago and have not been heeded,” The Associated Press reports.
“The updates were made after the 2011 winter storm”, The Texas Tribune notes, but “many Texas power generators have not yet made all the necessary investments to avoid the type of equipment disruptions that happen.”
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