This week, Texas is experiencing a deadly and record-breaking (climate-change-connected) winter storm that has left nearly five million people without electricity. Predictably, the fossil fuel industry’s defenders, paid and volunteer, were eager to pin the blame for the blackouts on frozen wind turbines, with a seven year old picture of a turbine in Sweden being de-iced. But it’s been gas that has proven incapable of weathering this climate-changed storm.
The Texas grid planners weren’t counting on wind to keep the power on, they were counting on the ample gas power. After all, “reliable” has one of the few key words dirty energy uses to sell their product — “natural gas defines reliability,” according to a 2017 API post about API’s congressional testimony to that effect. Just this last month, API’s State of American Energy page introduced itself with a line about “the foundational role of affordable and reliable energy...” while CEO Mike Sommers released a statement on gas and climate that opened with a reference to “affordable, reliable and cleaner American energy.”
So according to its backers, one of the great big benefits of gas is that it’s reliable. But it froze. Literally. Pipelines, valves, all the complicated machinery and instrumentation built to keep cool in Texas summers were suddenly iced out, while gas pressure fell in the pipes. Bloomberg reported frozen turbines were the “least significant factor,” accounting for just 13% of the blackouts as of Monday evening, so those who operate in good faith would know that it’s unfair to blame wind turbines after that point when so much more gas, coal, and nuclear power unexpectedly went offline. Those “thermal sources” account for more than two-thirds of the state’s power generation and accounted for 27 of the 34 gigawatts that went down, while wind actually exceeded the forecast.
But of course deniers don’t operate in good faith so before the facts were in, the party line went out, and the Wall Street Journal published an editorial blaming wind, just like Tucker Carlson would then have the execrable Marc Morano on to do as part of Fox’s pop-up disinfo campaign. But the WSJ news side reporting not to blame renewables did little to dampen the chorus of denial carried the lies through the rightwing echo-chamber, with boosts from local industry fronts like the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and lazy denier content like a denial tag team video of old-school liar for hire Steve Milloy spreading lies with the relatively young for-profit fossil fuel propagandist Alex Epstein, who tweeted his “100% certainty” about the reliability of the gas, coal and nuclear plants on Tuesday morning. (To give Alex credit though, at least he waited until after the facts were available to be 100% wrong.)
So by Tuesday, there were multiple pieces warning about dirty energy-backing “right wing shitposters,'' like Trump’s former Energy Secretary, unjustifiably brought on to BloombergTV to lie about the facts Bloomberg's own journalists had reported by blaming renewables for Texas’s fossil fueled power failure.
As U-Texas research associate Joshua Rhodes told Molly Taft of Earther, the grid operators weren’t relying on wind, “but we were relying on natural gas, and it failed terribly in that respect.”
If the only reason to keep building expensive and dirty gas plants instead of clean and cheap renewables is they’re supposed to be reliable when you need them most. So what does it mean that fossil fuels failed terribly to keep Texans safe and warm?
And why should something that’s “failed terribly” at reliability, a trait that supposedly worth changing the climate for, deserve continued support?
After all, wind turbines in places as cold and snowy as, oh, Antarctica, have built-in weatherization and heating systems to ensure they can keep spinning in these sorts of conditions, providing exactly the sort of cheap, reliable and abundant energy the gas industry claims to sell.