I was born and raised in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. Home. It gets cold there on occasion, and a bit icy, but I don’t remember anything close to what happened earlier this week. At one point, every county in Texas was under a winter storm warning. Few of us will forget what happened to Texas’ power grid and the images of ceilings exploding with water, homes flooding in the aftermath, and a 133 car pileup on I-35W. All in the backyard of my youth. Difficult to believe.

In the middle of all of this came opinions and perspectives from some of my conservative friends about what was truly behind the massive energy blackouts. The narrative went something like this: Windmills and other green energy appliances couldn’t handle the cold, stopped working, and taxed the rest of the coal/gas based systems, causing them to shut down as well.

This is supported in a Wall Street Journal article:

“The policy point here is that an electricity grid that depends increasingly on subsidized but unreliable wind and solar needs baseload power to weather surges in demand. Natural gas is crucial but it also isn’t as reliable as nuclear and coal power.

Politicians and regulators don’t want to admit this because they have been taking nuclear and coal plants offline to please the lords of climate change. But the public pays the price when blackouts occur because climate obeisance has made the grid too fragile. We’ve warned about this for years, and here we are.”

U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Houston, tweeted, “This is what happens when you force the grid to rely in part on wind as a power source. When weather conditions get bad as they did this week, intermittent renewable energy like wind isn’t there when you need it.”

I hadn’t done any homework on this, so I bought into it initially, not catching the veiled accusation that, were it not for liberal politics and its hippie tree hugging religion, we wouldn’t have gotten into this mess. I believe in green energy, but I do have a similar discomfort with the pushy, judgmental, insensitive way that liberal politicians push their agendas. Conservatives do that too, of course. American politics isn’t a nice, peaceful place, and it certainly isn’t Christian. There’s evil on both sides of the hill to be sure. It would be nice if we could move forward in our epic energy re-think as fellow Americans on the same page and with the same purpose, but we’re well past that. It’s become too tempting to see the other side as a threat to our freedom.

When an unthinkably massive blackout happens, the finger pointing begins.

Anyway, I set out to do some homework, reading articles from Texas based news outlets and querying my social media connections for their perspective.

A respected friend from college, a fraternity brother from Sweetwater, sent me a ton of info. I haven’t gone completely through it yet as some of it’s a little too technical for me. As he hails from a place full of windmills, he’s got some things to say. They’re expensive. The “boneyards” are all over the place. What are we supposed to do with all that waste? Do you know how big a single windmill vane is, much less 100?

Green energy, windmills especially, have a dark side that you and I could never fathom. This guy from Sweetwater can. I’d add some thoughts about the not-so-green energy that’s required to build and service these behemoths. The off-gassing from composite construction processes alone are significant. Guess where all of those gasses go? They don’t simply disappear, or get repurposed by the atmosphere.

But there’s much more to the green energy saga, especially as it relates to Texas.

I’ll pen my thoughts and perspectives on this, and try to make it interesting for you, while fully admitting that I’m no energy expert. In addition, I’ve in no way done all the homework required to tell you what to think. As always, feel free to comment as that’s what drives us bloggers, even when you don’t agree, especially if you have important data/perspectives crucial to this discussion.

Spinning the Numbers

The WSJ article I cited above is interesting, claming a 93% drop in wind production during the blackout. But that’s not what happened. Referencing two charts below (from the article), the average wind output from Jan 18 to the eve of the blackout was ~ 250000MWh. On the Feb 16 reference point, During the blackout, it fell to 90087MWh, a drop of 64%; significant, but nowhere near 93%. Given the fact that wind only makes up 24% of Texas output, it’s hard for me to buy the idea that a ~ 15% reduction in overall capacity would crash the whole system.

Here are the charts referenced in the article:

What they’ve done here is instead compare wind production at its highest to it’s lowest point during the blackout, then use words like “plunged” to distract us from the correct math. If I go with their version of the story, wind energy also “plunged” on Jan 22, 61% but nothing close to a blackout. Interesting for an article that wants me to be wary of the spin that liberal pundits are putting on this catastrophe. It’s also interesting that a different WSJ article suggests a different problem: “The widespread cold weather led to record demand for electricity.”

Overwhelming Demand

It’s impossible for natural gas output to soar to 450% because wind production fell by 30%. Obviously, the system was taxed to overload. Even if coal and wind could’ve increased, things still would’ve popped. Ancient space heaters, homes built for much milder climes, etc, caused things to soar. As so many Texas media outlets have reported, they simply weren’t ready for this kind of demand.

“Demand for electricity during the weekend cold front far exceeded what the Electric Reliability Council of Texas predicted for a winter storm. ERCOT implemented blackouts early Monday morning to reduce demand as low temperatures forced more power sources offline than expected.” ~ The Texas Tribune

Cold. Really Cold

It’s true that these windmills failed because they couldn’t handle the cold, hence, windmills are bad. But is that true for all windmills? Vermont, for example, a place much colder than Texas, boasts 99% power generation from renewable sources. To my knowledge, they didn’t have near the outages that Texas did. If cold kills windmills, why doesn’t it kill them in cold places? I have a good friend who travels regularly to the Antarctic for a project he’s overseeing. Here’s what he has to say about windmills that operate in cold weather:

“We manage and operate both Wind and Solar technology in Antarctica and it’s extremely efficient. Works down past -50f in blowing snow and wind. Solar is actually 125% more efficient in colder temperatures. We operate entire field camps on wind and solar.”

The stations referenced above don’t come close in comparison to Texas’ renewable output scale, but if you’re wondering whether or not windmills can be winterized, here you go. Natural gas lines can be winterized too, and will freeze if they’re not, another problem that added to the catastrophe.

ERCOT itself refused to put the blame on renewables: “Extreme weather conditions caused many generating units – across fuel types – to trip offline and become unavailable.”

Again, maybe I don’t have the right information, and my carefully curated data sources are nowhere near an exhaustive representation of everything that’s out there. But you’ll understand why I side with outlets like Reuters, NPR, PBS, and the Associated Press.

“During a historic cold snap that has left millions of Texans without electricity, water, and heat for days, claims that the state’s use of renewable energy sources, specifically wind energy, are to blame have circulated on television and social media. These claims are misleading, as they shift blame for the crisis away from what appears, so far, to be the root cause: record cold temperatures that affected generation and transportation across all fuel types (including, but not limited to, wind energy), combined with the inability of the state’s independent and isolated electricity grid (operated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT) to source supplies from elsewhere.”

“Add it all up, and the state suddenly had a lot of power plants, of all kinds, that simply couldn’t function — and not enough electricity to go around. Electric grids must maintain a delicate balance between supply and demand at all times or risk catastrophic failures. With supply so inadequate, ERCOT saw no other choice than to force demand down with a blunt instrument: outages.”

“With millions of Texas residents still without power amid frigid temperatures, conservative commentators have falsely claimed that wind turbines and solar energy were primarily to blame.”

Let’s See Those Fingers!

There’s a ton of data to digest here, but we don’t want that. What we seem to want most, based on the way we (don’t) process data, is national division. The great state of Texas experienced a brutal catastrophe, and our national need for an enemy drove so many of us to draw conclusions based on the articles that best fed on our emotional, not-so-cognitive resources.

Alas, I realize that I might be doing the very same thing here, pointing fingers at the finger pointers, log-in-eye, blogging in the hopes that others might see their splinters, only referencing the data that makes me feel good. For now however, whatever data is out there seems to support the idea that Texas’ power grid failed because it simply wasn’t prepared.

I think it’s better to beat our fingers into plowshares, to use our personal resources, not limited to our social media influence, for the good of our country, not the destruction of it. But, as I’ve mentioned before, if all stories only have one side, if the people who don’t think like we do are the enemy, not worthy of a seat at our table, we’re done.

A couple of years ago, I was talking with a fellow pastor about a married couple that we were trying to help. He said something that has stuck with me since: “Whenever you walk down the wrong path, you have to walk back.” A country in error can never be magically catapulted back into unity when it’s been walking down the divided, finger-pointing, politically segregated path for so long. We’ll have to walk back. Every step.

The knee-jerk, anti-data, not-so-veiled accusations that the Texas power outages came at the hands of liberal politics, is another example of how far we’ve been walking in the wrong direction.

With some reservation, I’ll include myself in this problem. Everything above needs to be verified by the reader. And while I’m not done with my homework, I can assure you that I have some deep emotional ties to being “right,” and you being “wrong.”  My hands, like yours, love to curl up into a ball, extend a digit, and point it somewhere besides myself.