Texas could have had zero electricity from renewable sources and it still wouldn’t have prevented the gas plants from freezing up and the coal and nuke plants from shutting down and the lights from going out. None of the electricity infrastructure was prepared to cope with the weather that they got. Conversely, Texas could have gotten the majority of their electricity from renewable sources and had they installed generators that were able to deal with winter weather then the power would have stayed on. It was the fact that the utility chose not to equip for severe winter weather that is to blame.
This is true and accurate. Completely. They're idiots and were unprepared.
The very idea that "Texas, Energy Capitol of the WORLD" was brought to its knees in four days of cold weather because TX Republicans were somehow tricked into adding wind power generators to their power grid is absurd.
Texas Democrats will make plenty of political hay with this. Pretty soon Texas could be politically bluer than most Texans' lips and fingertips are right about now.
Of you turn on your gas stove, does it work? Many hot water heaters are gas only. Still work in an outage
Wrong. The freezing up and shutdowns occurred because of overload trips when wind capacity dropped dramatically. If 15 - 20% of capacity had not been lost, no overloads and trips.
Sorry, the basic math does not confirm that.
During the first week of cold weather, solar and wind peaked around 20,000 MW of output, and the natural gas minimum was around 5,000 MW.
During the second week of much colder temps, solar and wind crashed to 5,000 MW and natural gas zoomed to 40,000 MW.
Natural gas did not fail until Day 7 of record cold temperatures.
Texas has at least 37,700 MW of solar and wind capacity, but they produced just 10%-15% of capacity during extreme cold.
If Texas had built 37,700 MW of coal and nuclear instead, they would have been exporting electricity to neighboring states during the last seven days.