Kinda surprised those wind turbines can freeze up. Those things are YUGE! I would have guessed there are de-icers and heaters to keep them going.
Have us use jet fuel to fly helicopters over the frozen / expensive / not green wind mills - just to start..
I think it is more of a question of the blades becoming unbalanced. Ice forms on the blades. Some of the ice comes off but it is not evenly distributed. The blades can be a couple of hundred feet long, even small differences in weight out near the tip could lead to unbalanced load and bearing failure.
I don’t seem to hear about wind turbines freezing up where I live up north, but maybe the northern models come with defrosters installed. A bigger problem up here is dead calm wind with light snow, like right now. No solar either.
Northern turbines do have deicing capability.
At some point, they don’t put them in.
Many northern states keep the same number of generation stations on line even with renewable sources because, well you need heat.
Guess not in Texas. Which rarely gets weather like this.
But I do wonder how they handle summer.