No, frozen wind turbines aren’t the main culprit for Texas’ power outages

Last month, Texans experienced a severe energy crisis caused by an extreme weather event. Unfortunately, clean energy’s usual opponents predictably tried to spread misleading narratives before all the facts were in. While the facts are still coming in, what is becoming clearer is that renewable energy is not the primarily to blame for the Texas blackouts—other fuels like coal, gas, and nuclear also experienced significant problems which accounted for a majority of the lost generating capacity. 

“Frozen wind turbines in Texas caused some conservative state politicians to declare Tuesday that the state was relying too much on renewable energy. But in reality, the wind power was expected to make up only a fraction of what the state had planned for during the winter.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas projected that 80% of the grid’s winter capacity, or 67 gigawatts, could be generated by natural gas, coal and some nuclear power…

Gov. Greg Abbott specified that fossil fuel sources were contributing to the problems with the grid when describing the situation Monday afternoon.

‘The ability of some companies that generate the power has been frozen. This includes the natural gas & coal generators,’ he wrote in a tweet.”

Read the full story in The Texas Tribune.