On Wednesday morning, millions of homes in Texas are still without power as a prolonged blackout continues. Meanwhile, the temperature in Austin, Texas, is expected to approach freezing for the first time in days … as the city is hit by a massive ice storm that’s expected to bring down trees and power lines. As a bonus, the cold weather has also broken water lines in multiple Texas towns and cities. In some areas, the prolonged outage has become genuinely life-threatening.
Fox News and Republican politicians—including Texas Gov. Greg Abbott—have been taking this “opportunity” to attack Texas’ use of wind energy, call for the burning of more fossil fuels, and to make claims that green power is “deadly.” However, the statistics provided by Texas own grid managers show that wind continues to produce more power than projected for this time of year, with the great majority of outages in exactly the gas- and coal-based plants that Fox has been touting.
Meanwhile, far from being off line, wind generators are enjoying a fat payday. Thanks to the way power prices fluctuate in Texas, Bloomberg reports that a 100Mw windfarm that could normally expect to clear $40,000 on any two days in February, instead racked up over $9.5 million on Monday and Tuesday thanks to record spikes in Texas power market.
