The Insane Lies About The Texas Blackouts

An enormous winter storm hit Texas and knocked out power to millions of Texans,

and the experts knew exactly how it happened.

Coal, gas, and nuclear have equipment literally freezing over,

seizing up Some of the maintenance and the upkeep, if you will,

of the basic grid had not been done power problems

that kind of go across the scope of all types of energies Tucker Carlson,

uh, had a different take,

and he just sort of panic blamed everything on windmills.

The windmills froze, so the power grid failed.

Meaning windmills wind farm wind wind wind wind wind windmills the wind wind wind

wind wind wind wind wind windmills wind Accept your windmills,

bigots!

Windmills did all this!

This is, of course, obviously a lie,

and you can tell it's a lie

because it's the exact opposite of what all the Texas energy experts,

grid operators, and regulators all independently reported.

In fact, grid operators expected just seven percent of their forecasted winter capacity to

come from wind and eighty percent from natural gas,

coal and nuclear.

Also, here's a bunch of examples of wind turbines working in much colder climates

and temperatures than the Texas cold snap.

But you can't just, like, admit you were lying, right?

I mean this is the news, baby, it's not Canada!

So all these other bing bongs just had to sort of go with the

windmill thing the cold crippling Texas's power grid,

and part of the reason why is because wind turbines are frozen.

Uh, but you saw from what Trace said

and that is our wind

and our solar got shut down,

and they were, collectively, more than ten percent of our power grid,

and that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power on a

statewide basis they froze up last night,

no wind out there destroy the natural environment with Chinese-made windmills And so,

by Thursday, they're all swearing up

and down that Texas -- Texas!! -- is like this beta male Green New

Deal wind commune that's completely reliant on wind energy,

and it's insane because people keep really good track of where electricity comes from,

and now it's a huge mess,

and let's get into what the absolute hell is happening in Texas.

In America, there are three grids: the Eastern United States, the Western United States,

and just Texas.

Anyway, the grid is managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas or ERCOT.

The ERCOT grid is largely deregulated

because Texas companies can make more money

that way.

But, more importantly, it's mostly disconnected from the other two larger grids,

so when outages occur, it's not that easy to pull extra energy from outside.

ERCOT has to be really good with planning

and fixing infrastructure problems

if they want to prevent outages,

and, as it turns out, they're not!

Texas, you may recall,

is a state that is overwhelmingly powered by natural gas and coal.

The Energy Information Administration,

a group of people who absolutely gets off on tracking energy,

clocked Texas's October 2020 numbers.

Natural gas was fifty-two percent of the grid, coal was seventeen percent,

renewable energy like wind and solar was twenty-three percent,

and eight percent was "other", which includes nuclear, hydro,

and the energy you get

when you watch a bunch of dudes who look like Wilford Brimley yelling at

their kids at the grocery store.

And because I don't want to be some kind of hack,

here's two more sources that look at Texas' electrical breakdown:

they're all a little different, but wind is never even close to natural gas.

But the storm that hit Texas on February 15, 2021,

was much bigger than ERCOT had planned for,

and left millions of Texans without power in freezing temperatures,

sometimes for multiple days in a row.

This led to the very preventable deaths of dozens, if not hundreds, of citizens.

And to be clear, this is not some kind of bug in the system.

This is how the system is designed to work.

Texas power generators make less profits

if they prepare for a colder day than actually occurs,

so they expect to need about 57.7 gigawatts of power,

but they have the capacity to provide for about 68.6 gigawatts

if things get very,

very cold. but they know if things get very, very, very cold,

they're going to be turning people's power off,

even if their equipment works the way they expect it to Now

when it gets very,

very, very cold, and the for-profit power generators like natural gas, coal, wind,

and nuclear didn't want to pay to properly winterize their equipment,

they start shutting down and even more power goes offline,

so you get widespread outages,

which is exactly what happened when this Monster Mash snowstorm rolled in.

Yes, the cold weather did shut down a part of the wind turbine fleet,

but according to senior ERCOT director Dan Woodfin,

wind turbines accounted for about thirteen percent of total outages.

The majority of the outages, and the reason why Texans lost their power,

was due to natural gas equipment failing in the cold temperatures

and a spike in natural gas demand

that they couldn't supply.

Similar shutdowns happen to coal and nuclear plants,

further boning an already super boned system.

And that's just what we know as of February 19th.

I mean, there's a bunch more stuff that's going to come out after the

smoke clears.

Basically what we do know now is that natural gas, coal, nuclear, solar,

and wind in Texas are looking like a bunch of little kids trying to

play hockey for the first time.

and if you've never seen a bunch of little kids trying to play hockey,

it's... it's so funny.

Any way you slice this,

the main characters are natural gas

and the infrastructure in Texas not being able to stand up to cold temperatures.

But on Tucker's show:

wind farms wind farms wind farms I mean it would be a lot like

if the Avengers lost a huge battle

and Tucker spent nine minutes claiming it was Hawkeye's fault for not shooting enough

arrows at the space Godzilla.

You know what?

Maybe I'm taking Tucker out of context.

Is there a clip we could roll here?

So it was all working great, until the day it got cold outside.

The windmills failed like the silly fashion accessories they are,

and people in Texas died.

A lot more of them than died at the Capitol on January 6th,

by the way, just for reference.

Oh, that's the good stuff.

Now, this is the first time these sorts of power outages have happened, right?

I mean, like, it would be crazy for Tucker Carlson to do a whole

nine-minute segment about windmills

if this exact same thing had happened before windmills were this big of a

part of the electrical grid,

right?

rolling blackouts Well they just weren't prepared for temperatures in the single digits

and a wind chill of zero.

The state was incredibly close last Wednesday to actually suffering a complete blackout Oh

no,

2011!

That was when wind was, like, a tiny fraction of the grid.

Well, maybe the wind was small but mighty.

At least this sort of thing didn't happen back before there was wind at

all.

Shedding power that is also known

as rolling blackouts This is one holiday weekend Houstonians won't soon forget.

Oh no, 1989?

This thing happened in 1989, too?

Oh geez.

But surely there was no federal report written

that investigated the cause of the 2011 blackouts,

determined them to be natural gas related,

and gave exact recommendations on how to fix these in the future, right?

It's 350 pages of exhaustive analysis provided to you by the good folks at

FERC,

or the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

You know, let's go ahead

and scroll through this bad boy to a section confusingly titled "Recommendations",

whatever that means.

But if you know anything about companies trying to maximize their profits,

you'll know that they don't just spend their own money to fix stuff

because somebody recommends they do it.

They wait 'til it breaks, and then they're forced to fix it,

and sometimes they even get taxpayer money to help, and so we get blackouts.

We know why we get blackouts, and we know how to fix it,

but we don't, because the free market doesn't want to.

Sean, this shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for

the United States of America unleashing the Green New Deal on the whole country

well the Green New Deal has come,

believe it or not, to the state of Texas And there it is.

Windmills are associated with the Green New Deal,

and they hate the Green New Deal, therefore they blame it all on windmills.

And just to be clear, the Green New Deal is not a law anywhere.

It has no jurisdiction in any state, especially not Texas,

a state that hasn't had a Democratic governor or senator since 1995.

It's just a buzzword they can use to cover up a catastrophic failure in

a system they profit from.

And I'm not saying wind energy doesn't have any problems.

It does.

But I am saying

that when Fox News

and the governor of Texas are tripling down on an insane lie about windmills

just to cover up a failure in fossil fuels

and market forces,

it kind of says a lot about where their priorities are.

In related news, congratulations to Texas governor Greg Abbott for his twenty-six million dollars

in campaign donations from fossil fuel companies over the past six years.

Now the reason that this is a critical problem

and not just some sort of huge bummer

that lies about windmills are being spread on the internet is

because it's a stall tactic to delay policy,

and people are being killed because of it.

If we don't fix the actual problems behind these extreme weather blackouts,

they're going to keep happening. and climate scientists from NASA, the IPCC,

and everywhere are saying

that extreme weather events are much more likely in the coming decades.

There's a link in the bio to Texas relief organizations you can donate to

if this is still an ongoing crisis

when you're watching this,

but generally this is the time to get involved in climate organizations,

start learning about the science and the policy, and, most importantly,

get loud about climate change.

Because I can barely hear anything over the sound of these g*ddamn windmills humming

and buzzing and chopping up birds that's what a wind turbine is I have

not tried marijuana It was almost

as if the climate in Texas had somehow changed

and now this is probably

because the stratospheric warming in the Arctic caused the polar vortex,

which is the normally spinning mass of cold air, to wobble,

and it happened to wobble in the direction of Texas

which sent a whole bunch of cold air all the way down to Texas,

and it set a ton of cold temperature records.

I'm not saying it's because of climate change,

but I am certainly thinking it loudly,

and also there's a whole bunch of lines of evidence about this exact thing,

and they all point to climate change.