Ever since February 10th, crippling power outages, food and water shortages, and critical weather conditions have swept across Texas. Over 4.5 million homes and businesses in Texas, North Dakota, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi were left without power. Conservatives, such as Tucker Carlson and Greg Abbott, are blaming this crisis on renewable sources of energy. But is renewable energy really to blame, or is this crisis merely a failure of natural gas to deliver sufficient energy?
This winter crisis has two main causes: the climate change and extreme weather which are more than the power grid can handle, and the move from fossil fuels to renewable resources, due to environmental and ethical concerns. The strength of alternative energy sources vary with weather, so the frigid winter winds were potent enough to diminish the power of these sources. They were also able to cripple oil and gas production, as temperatures dropped below that of which oil and gas pipelines could function.
Due to the frigid snow storm and power outages, which they believed were caused by the sudden transition from fossil fuels to renewable resources, conservatives have believed that it was a foolish move to depend so heavily on renewable resources. Fox News host Tucker Carlson has written an article on this crisis, in which he blamed Texas' reliance on wind energy for deaths in the state, yet did not mention the failure of oil and gas pipelines. Similarly, Texas governor Greg Abbott has described the troubles processing and delivering natural gas in an interview, but then went on Fox News and decided to focus on the Green New Deal, a plan that advocates for renewable energy, instead.
In recent years, power grids have begun to rely more on renewable sources of energy, however, it is still not the main source of power. About 56% of Texas' energy comes from natural gas, almost 24% from coal, and just under 9% from nuclear energy. Because renewable energy takes up such a small percentage of the energy that Texas uses, it was not the main reason for the power crisis. Instead, according to industry data, it is natural gas. Experts, such as Sam Newell, head of the electricity group at the Brattle Group, provided statistics that refute the claims of these conservative figures. "Wind was operating almost as well as expected," he said. "It's an order of magnitude smaller than problems with natural gas, coal and nuclear energy,"
Some lessons that can be learned from this ongoing power crisis are that accepting scientists' findings on the evidence of climate change can help avoid these situations in the future. No form of energy is ever perfect, and there are always going to be some trade-offs. This crisis has paved the way for a path towards learning about the capabilities and drawbacks of certain energy sources, and a quest to develop renewable and sustainable energy.
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