Eli Hartman / Odessa American via AP
An Oncor Electric Delivery crew works on restoring power to a neighborhood following the winter storm that passed through Texas Thursday, Feb. 18, 2021, in Odessa, Texas.
Friday, Feb. 19, 2021 | 2 a.m.
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Republican leaders seem to rarely let a crisis go to waste when it comes to denying climate change and opposing regulations on fossil fuel companies.
Remember, for instance, how they turned logic on its head by claiming the horrific wildfires in California were a matter of not raking up dead leaves and pine needles?
Now comes the record cold snap in much of the country and the power outages it triggered, and Republicans are at it once again. This time, they’re claiming that when wind turbines iced up and quit spinning in Texas, the lights and heat went out for millions.
“This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” a grim-faced Greg Abbott, Texas’ Republican governor, told Fox News propagandist Sean Hannity. “Our wind and our solar got shut down, and they were collectively more than 10% of our power grid, and that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis.”
Oh, the utter nonsense.
In reality, Texas’ grid went down for a number of reasons, nearly all of which had nothing to do with the wind turbines. For starters, the state draws more than 80% of its power from fossil fuels, along with some nuclear power, but failed to winterize those facilities despite the growing effects of climate change.
Sample result: Pipelines to natural gas plants froze up, due to moisture in the gas. Pumps at those plants also quit working, because the diesel engines that power them had been rendered inoperable by the cold. Elsewhere on the grid, a reactor at one of Texas’ nuclear plants went down due to frozen equipment.
Keep in mind, this could have been avoided. As shown in areas that regularly experienced extreme winter weather, power can be produced without interruption in bitterly cold temperatures if the right precautions have been taken. That includes wind turbines, by the way, which can be fitted with equipment to keep them from freezing up.
Another reason Texas’ grid is vulnerable is because the state is the only one that operates its own system — and that system is almost entirely unregulated.
As one utility expert described it, this “Wild West” approach has left independent energy producers with no reason to build the necessary infrastructure to handle cold weather. In the minds of these producers, those protections are a needless expense.
Meanwhile, the lack of regulation allows the power producers to charge whatever the market can bear, which has sent energy rates in Texas skyrocketing. The same system that allowed the producers’ negligence — not hardening their systems to the cold in order to save money — also allowed them to reap windfall profits at the expense of the public and the state’s general economy.
In scapegoating wind turbines, GOP leaders are not only attacking renewable energy, they’re avoiding blaming the negligent energy producers and trying to preempt calls to regulate the industry. They’re prioritizing the energy companies over the needs of the people.
By contrast, states whose power grids survive the cold have utilities that operate in a regulated environment that ensures the providers do what’s right for the entire state — individuals and businesses — versus what’s best for a small handful of energy producers financing statewide political careers.
The bottom line is that wind turbines in Texas, while indeed providing about 10% of the power, weren’t the leading culprit for the power outages. Blaming them for the losses was ridiculous, and pinning the storm-related deaths on them was completely irresponsible.
Sadly, though, even in the short time it took to debunk the Republicans’ claims, they were already zinging all over social media and, no doubt, leaving many Americans confused or misinformed about renewable energy.
The true motivation for the right’s hit jobs on green energy can be found in another of Abbott’s remarks to Hannity: “It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary.” In other words, it’s about maintaining Big Oil’s energy dominance and the flow of cash that fossil fuel giants give overwhelmingly to GOP candidates.
Just as insidiously, the false narrative also is part of the GOP’s polarizing politics. Tying renewable energy to deaths is a form of demonizing proponents of green energy and presenting them as an existential threat to the right.
Most Nevadans, fortunately, see right through this. Our state is striding forward in the development of solar, wind and geothermal power, as we showed last year when voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure calling for energy companies to produce at least 50% of their power from renewable sources by 2030.
And in terms of regulation of power providers, we made a smart choice in 2018 by rejecting a ballot measure that would have transitioned the state to a competitive retail electric market by 2023 and potentially opened the door to dangerous deregulation.
We’ve also elected leaders at the congressional and state levels who understand the critical importance of moving beyond fossil fuels, addressing climate change and adopting clean environmental policies.
The GOP’s reaction to this latest round of extreme weather, though, is a reminder of how far Republicans are willing to go to squelch the development of renewables and allow polluters to run unabated.
In Nevada and most of the country, we prefer to expend our energy in search of the facts and not the fantasies of right-wing fanatics.
