Denmark, Des Moines, and Denton

Fun fact: Denmark, a Scandinavian country, gets around half its electricity from wind generation. The "windmills" that Tucker Carlson calls "fashion accessories" power half the country.

That would be a remarkable statistic for any country, but especially for one 300 miles farther north than Winnipeg.

Ok, let's be honest. I just checked: Despite its being so far north, Denmark's climate is strongly moderated by its proximity to warming ocean currents.

Not landlocked Iowa, though, in an American heartland famous for brutal winters. Iowa gets a whopping 42 percent of its electricity from wind. Iowa is the nation's second highest wind producing state behind Texas. (My home state of Kansas is in fourth place, behind  Oklahoma.) In January, the average high temperature for Des Moines is 28 F. Yeah, that's cold. The average low is 15. That being an average, it frequently gets far colder than that.

Because conservative media is currently all abuzz about how wind doesn't work in cold weather, you should keep these stats in mind. Tucker Carlson is lying to you, as is the entire media ecosystem he sits atop.

Perhaps even more egregious, if that were possible, is the edifice of lies about how wind and solar are responsible for the days-long Texas blackouts.

There were many points of failure with all energy sources in Texas, and we now know the Texas grid came seconds to minutes from catastrophic collapse from which recovery could have taken months. (No, really: when the grid collapses catastrophically, you can't just turn it back on. You have to put it back together piece by painful piece in a process that is maddeningly slow.)

But despite the failures in all energy sectors, by far the largest shortfall in Texas came from "thermal" (gas, coal, and to a small extent, nuclear) sources; far less of the energy shortfall was from wind and solar. That's partly because far less is actually expected from wind and solar in the winter in Texas. According to some reports, the entity that operates the Texas grid, ERCOT, typically plans for wind and solar to contribute 7 to 10 percent of grid load in the winter, but more in the scorching summer when it helps power all those Texas air conditioners.

Among the thermal sources, by far the largest failures came from natural gas power generation. Gas fired plants were unable to get sufficient fuel due to failures in the production and delivery of gas, such as from pipeline freeze-ups. It is tragic that the possibility of such failures was understood long in advance, yet not nearly enough was done to protect against them.

And yet we are now being treated to a raucous hyperventilating din in conservative media about how this all portends ill for "green" energy going forward; indeed, how Texas has in effect already succumbed to a version of the "Green New Deal" while the conservatives who have run the state for decades weren't looking. It is nothing short of Orwellian to hear right now how we need fossil fuel generation to save us from what happened in Texas, when in fact the largest failures were with fossil fuel generation.

With respect to wind generation in cold weather, Chris Hayes wondered in exasperation how stupid Tucker Carlson thinks his viewers are. Pretty stupid, I'm sorry to say. One wonders if Carlson is himself really so ignorant, or is blinkered by raving mindless ideology, or is just deeply cynical and knows which side his bread is buttered on. No way to tell. But even the conservatives in Iowa who see their turbines continuing to spin must be shaking their heads in disbelief about what they're watching on their teevees.

Happily, we don't need Tucker Carlson's derangements to tell us what's going on. There is such a large cornucopia of excellent information sources that finding one is as easy as hitting the side of an Iowa barn with a baseball from ten feet away. And unlike Fox, their highest purpose is the principled exercise of quality journalism.

If you want to know what's going on in Texas specifically, you can do no better than to browse the main page of the Texas Tribune, a statewide newspaper devoted to all manner of Texas happenings. Unsurprisingly, its current coverage is almost entirely about the blackouts. Go here and just start scrolling down the page.

When you do you'll see the article that describes how the grid was on the precipice of catastrophic collapse. Another on how Gov. Greg Abbott is now calling for "winterization" of the state's energy infrastructure—something that had been long neglected in order to keep electricity prices low, and whose neglect is the single largest reason for the system-wide failures (including with wind; turbines need to be winterized too).

You can read about how "Texas jails and prisons see brutal cold and overfilled toilets in winter storm".

You can read about how El Paso is one of the rare Texas cities that's not connected to the statewide grid, but rather the national grid, and so its power stayed on.

You can read about how "Nearly half the state [is] experiencing water disruptions as power grid operator says it's making progress". Turns out water treatment plants need electricity to operate. At least 12 million Texans are under boil-water orders—if they can get any water to boil.

You can read about negligence at the top: "Texas leaders failed to heed warnings that left the state's power grid vulnerable to winter extremes, experts say".

About how "Hospitals in Austin are running out of water, forcing some to transfer patients".

And so on. Article after article after article about the grid failure in Texas.

No need to be ignorant. No excuse for it.

Copyright (C) 2021 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

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