Stop us if you've heard this one before: Texas's deregulated, isolated grid is stressed nearly to breaking by the excessive electricity demand during an extreme weather event because fossil fuel power plants are unexpectedly offline. Wind and solar make sure the light, and A/C stay on, but instead of being championed, they're maligned as unreliable by fossil fools responsible for the uncertainty in the first place.
It was February 2021 all over again, but this time it wasn't a cold snap the grid couldn't handle, but a heatwave that it just barely did. Nevertheless, professional disinformation spreaders have been hard at work preemptively blaming renewables, with some help from their fossil fuel-loving counterparts at utilities.
ERCOT, for example, sent out a press release in which it asked residents to conserve electricity to keep the grid online during Monday's heatwave, and blamed unexpectedly low wind power production for the need to reduce demand.
But it turns out that the (solar and) wind generation was exactly what should be expected. Instead, it was 12 gigawatts of oil, gas, coal and nuclear power that was unexpectedly offline, failing to provide power for some 2.4 million homes- two Houston's worth of power!
Why blame wind power when it was doing fine? "They were trying to produce an excuse if the power went out" and "paint wind as the fall guy," Texas A&M climate scientist Andrew Dessler told a local CBS affiliate.
Not that the unreliability of fossil fuels is solely to blame. Texas could also cut down on the demand placed on the grid with energy efficiency measures. For example, one of the reasons the grid was able to meet demand was because a bunch of Bitcoin miners paused the wasteful energy consumption required to manufacture the digital monopoly money for their Ponzi scheme. (So noble of them to not mine not-so-valuable digital fun money during a time when the cost to do so is through the roof, thanks to Texas's deregulated energy market!)
That apparently saved a gigawatt of power, recovering approximately 200,000 of the 2.4 million homes worth of energy that fossil fuels failed to provide Texas.
And if they stopped them permanently, then they'd really be doing something good!
