Conservatives Are Seriously Accusing Wind Turbines of Killing People in the Texas Blackouts

At least two million people were left without power in Texas as temperatures plummeted and snow piled up on Monday. Wholesale power prices careened toward all-time highs. Worryingly, some 60 percent of homes in Texas get their heat from electricity, with many using heat pumps that can fail in extreme conditions.* Perhaps counterintuitively, those conditions are in part the product of a climate crisis driven by the fossil fuel industry. Warming in the Arctic, research suggests, allows for more cold air to escape farther south. Now fossil fuel backers are spreading misinformation suggesting the blackouts are reason to burn more fossil fuels.

About 90 percent of Texas’s grid is part of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. Save for a few lines, ERCOT is largely cut off from power in neighboring states. That’s because back in 1935, the state government was eager to avoid being regulated under the Federal Power Act. The Federal Power Act was passed to regulate interstate electricity sales, in the wake of massive scandals involving utility holding companies. It established what’s known today as the Federal Regulatory Energy Commission. To this day, Texas exists outside of FERC’s jurisdiction.

Grid management is a beast of a planning challenge, requiring different contingencies for turning disparate sources of generation on and off to suit certain conditions. Less important than whether a certain generation source is running at any given point is whether the grid managers expect it to be running. That’s an even bigger challenge for an outmoded grid with fewer tools available. For its winter peaking capacity, Texas relies inordinately on natural gas, which it seemingly assumed would be available around the clock, in the worst of wintry conditions. It wasn’t. And yet already, right-wing pundits are blaming the state’s wind farms for the outages, which incidentally also affected neighboring grids like the Southwest Power Pool and Midcontinent Independent System Operator.