In February 2021, a winter storm knocked out power to millions of Texans and killed hundreds of people. Within days, Governor Greg Abbott went on Fox News and named a culprit: "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." [2] He told the same audience the disaster showed "how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America." [2] It was a clean story, aimed at the right enemy for the room. It was also contradicted by the governor's own words from earlier that day.
The receipts, in his own voice
Hours before the Hannity hit, Abbott told a Dallas television station what had actually failed, and it was not the windmills. "It's just frozen right now," he said of the gas supply. "It's frozen in the pipeline. It's frozen at the rig. It's frozen at the transmission line." [2] That is the accurate version. The natural gas system, which Texas leans on hardest in a deep freeze, seized up at every stage. Between the morning interview and the evening one, the cause did not change. The audience did.
What the federal report found
The official autopsy backs the morning Abbott, not the evening one. The joint report from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation found the outages were driven overwhelmingly by failures at natural gas and other thermal plants that had never been winterized. [1] The lost output from natural gas was more than five times the lost output from wind. [1][3] Wind underperformed too, on a smaller scale, mostly because turbines that could have been winterized were not. The lesson the engineers drew was not "too much renewable energy." It was "too little winterization," across every kind of plant.
Data
| Natural gas | 5x |
|---|---|
| Wind | 1x |
Why the wind story got told anyway
The frozen-turbine story survives because it does a job the facts do not. [1][3] Blaming wind turns an infrastructure failure, a deregulated grid that skipped the cost of weatherizing its gas plants, into a parable about green energy run amok. It moves the blame from the people who chose not to winterize onto a technology the audience was already primed to distrust. The iced-over turbine made a striking photo. The frozen gas wellhead, which did most of the damage, never got one.
The verdict is not close, and the best witness against the claim is the man who made it, eight hours earlier, before the cameras he wanted were rolling. [2] Wind and solar did not black out Texas. Unwinterized gas, on a grid that bet against the cold, did. The federal report says so, and so did the governor himself, that morning.
