The Texas fiasco demonstrates what happens when rational, market-driven energy policies give way to virtue signalling and political incompetence. From Tom Luongo at tomluongo.me:
Polar winds scream out of Canada in seeming revenge for Joe Biden canceling the Keystone XL pipeline.
Texas’ power grid collapsed as temperatures more likely in Sioux Falls than San Antonio roared in plunging more than 4 million people into darkness and without heat.
How can this have possibly happened in a place whose entire cultural identity revolves around producing energy?
Simple.
Texas’ deregulated energy market went green over the past decade. In the past ten years, according to the EIA, Texas retired more than 5,000 MW of coal-supplied power while spinning up more than that in windmills.
Wind produces the marginal, or last, megawatt in Texas, in this case the last 17%. Nuclear provides the first megawatt, less than 10%.
Natural Gas provides most of the megawatts.
One would think in a world which is getting hotter that putting windmills and solar panels would be a good idea.
I’m sure that’s what the CEO’s of all those energy providers across Texas thought as well. And our government at every level incentivized this. The cultural zeitgeist of ‘sustainability’ and ‘renewables’ overrode, as it always does, common sense.
