As a deep freeze continues to pummel the central United States, millions of Texans are without power and facing potentially life-threatening temperatures.
As temperatures plummeted across the state, the frigid weather booted numerous coal, gas, nuclear, and wind power generators offline, resulting in the widespread blackouts.
The unprecedented weather is affecting all sources of power in the energy-rich state, with expert Jason Bordoff telling CNN:
"The extreme cold is causing the entire system to freeze up. All sources of energy are underperforming in the extreme cold because they're not designed to handle these unusual conditions."
In the face of these dire circumstances, Republicans of all stripes are falsely blaming green energy policies, such as wind turbines, for being unequipped to handle the temperatures.
In reality, the culprit is much more complicated.
As John Timmer of Ars Technica points out, the majority of Texas is powered by an isolated state grid run by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) with little integration across neighboring areas.
Timmer writes:
"While some early reports indicated that frozen wind turbines were causing significant shortfalls, 30GW is roughly equal to the entire state's wind capacity if every turbine is producing all the power it's rated for. Since wind in Texas generally tends to produce less during winter, there's no way that the grid operators would have planned for getting 30GW from wind generation[.]"
He goes on to point out that, though wind turbines are experiencing outages like all other power sources in the state, these turbines are outperforming their estimates.
As for those on the right asserting that blackouts were due to unsatisfactory green energy policies, Twitter took the wind out of their sails.
Sadly, many are still succumbing to the rampant misinformation.
President Joe Biden granted the state's request for disaster assistance earlier this week. Additional ways to assist those affected by the frigid temperatures can be found here.
