As Texans battle through serious cold with serious shortfalls in the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) region (about 90% of Texas’ electricity load), fossil fuel propagandists have been out hot and heavy to distort the situation. Much like happened in 2011, cold has driven thermal power (primarily fossil gas but also coal, diesel, and nuclear) plants offline while driving up demand. Roughly 90 percent of the power sources in ERCOT’s planning for a peak winter event are thermal plants but roughly 40 percent of that capacity wasn’t online. Also as per 2011, some wind turbines have frozen but wind has continued to contribute to the grid more or less as ERCOT had in planning. And, much like happened in 2011, you can search far and wide in ‘conservative media’ and Republican commentary without finding a truthful discussion of the situation. Rather than highlight the core combination (spiking demand plus fossil fuel plants going offline), Fox News pundit after OANN pundit, Republican politician after Republican operative is out there falsely (FALSELY) blaming “windmills” and the “Green New Deal” for freezing Texans.
While many journalists and news outlets have sought to provide truth here, this has been (at best) uneven and with often deceptive framing. Some of this is due to ignorance, some sloppy both-siderism, and, as Ketan Joshi has laid out, there is a bit of click bait journalism going on.
As with all major blackout events, the fact that a range of fuel type failures contributed to this will be obscured by an excessive focus on renewables, leading to the faulty perception that renewables share all of the blame.
Whether purposeful or inadvertent, many media outlets are advancing and enabling deceit.
Here are just a few examples:
- E&E News’ Energy Wire went heavy with bothsiderism emphasizing “partisan arguments about whether to blame renewables or fossil fuels”.
- The Washington Post went out of its way to do ‘horse race’ ‘there isn’t truth’ bothersiderism journalism with a tweet that “Texas Gov. Greg Abbott blames wind turbines, Green New Deal policies for outages. Critics call that “a lie.””
- Staying with the Post, read this paragraph from columnist David von Drehle: “While demand surged, supply fell. Solar farms lost juice as snow clouds filled the skies. Wind turbines froze in the bitter cold. Icing was evidently a problem at steam-driven plants, too, whether powered by coal or natural gas.” While the material in this paragraph is true and even factual, it is absolutely not truth nor truthful. Any reader will conclude that the problem was increased demand along with failing renewables and that, maybe, there were some ‘oh by the way’ problems with fossil fuel systems.
- Bloomberg Green tweeted out “Researchers at an Arctic test site in Sweden are learning how to keep wind turbines generating through the harshest winter weather. That knowledge would have come in handy in Texas this week” as if cold-weather packages don’t exist that keep wind turbines operating without problems in cold weather in North Dakota, Iowa, Canada, and else.
- Staying with Bloomberg Green, how about this tweet which seemed to put everything on an equal playing field for ‘fault’: “As temperatures continued to fall, gas pipelines began to seize up, wind turbines started to freeze, and oil wells shut in — just as homes and businesses raised demand for heating to record levels.”
- NOTE: Bloomberg Green has done some excellent reporting even as their have been tweets and parts of articles that falsely frame the situation in Texas.
- Recharge News tweets out: “As millions of Texans endure frozen blackouts, a furious row erupts over the role of #windpower.”
- CNN’s headline on Texas started “Frozen wind turbines …”
This is a pervasive problem not just isolated to a few outlets and a few tweets. Even outlets with reasonable stories do things like illustrate with wind turbines (remembering that a picture is worth 1,000 words …)
The Texas situation is complicated (with many details to come out in the months to come) and it is an emergency (with people dying and millions at risk) but it is not a situation where wind turbines are at fault nor are they core to the crisis. Any reporting that suggests otherwise, even if paragraph seven provides excellent and accurate analysis and details, is deceptive and damaging to the public interest.
Think about fossil fuel interest objectives — to practice predatory delay and maximize their profiteering for as long as possible by delaying climate action. As per Genevieve Gunther, key to this to make people believe climate action will hurt and that they need fossil fuels. Falsely blaming wind turbines for freezing Texans is doing exactly that. Journalists and media outlets who facilitate (knowlingly or otherwise) that false messaging are complicit in enabling that fossil foolish predatory delay.