The hot-air campaign against wind turbines

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For most of the past week, Texas has been paralyzed by a series of deadly winter storms, plunging millions in the state into blackouts amid freezing temperatures. It’s the sort of emergency that cries out for serious introspection and a renewed sense of civic resolution among political leaders and media observers alike.

Instead, the response to the crisis in Texas has been to reach for familiar refrains of policy grievance on the right. Republican Governor Jim Abbott took to Sean Hannity’s Fox News show to complain that the misery in his state was due to wind turbines freezing up and malfunctioning at a time of dire need, falsely claiming that “this shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America.” Abbott’s predecessor Rick Perry—who had absurdly served as Donald Trump’s secretary of energy—tried to rouse Texans to continue freezing in the dark in order to preserve the state’s outmoded power grid, which was jury-rigged back in 1935 in order to operate free of robust federal regulation.

As TheNew Republic staff writer Kate Aronoff observes, such desperate and cynical lies are par for the course in debates over crisis management in the energy sector. In reality, wind installments account for just 10 percent of Texas’s generating capacity—and while turbine blades did indeed freeze during the storms, wind energy is not the state’s primary fallback option. “For its winter peaking capacity, Texas relies inordinately on natural gas,” Aronoff writes, “which it seemingly assumed would be available around the clock, in the worst of wintry conditions. It wasn’t. And yet already, right-wing pundits are blaming the state’s wind farms for the outages, which incidentally also affected neighboring grids like the Southwest Power Pool and Midcontinent Independent System Operator.”

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The urban legend of rampant wind-turbine failure also fanned out to mainstream media outlets such as Reuters, CNN, and The New York Times. Apart from circulating bald untruths, such coverage also plays directly into the broken policy dynamics that actually worked to create the Texas calamity in the first place, Aronoff notes. Because renewable sources of energy seem novel and unfamiliar—Tucker Carlson sneered at wind turbines as “fashion accessories” in his own Fox rant on the Texas crisis—fossil fuel interests always rush to depict them as unreliable and hazardous during crunch times of peak demand:

Events like this are a godsend to fossil fuel interests eager to build more polluting infrastructure. Investor-owned utilities can’t simply raise rates whenever they like. Instead, they have to go to regulators in statewide public service commissions to “rate base” new infrastructure, i.e., pass the cost of things like new polluting “peaker plants” down to customers. Spun the right way, the chaos playing out in Texas could help them make the case for rate hikes and new fossil fuel infrastructure around the country—all the more so if regulators already enjoy a cozy relationship to the power companies they’re supposed to rein in.

Polluters are eager to argue that all other sources of power generation—especially renewables—are fickle and vulnerable to disruption. While serving as energy secretary, Rick Perry repeatedly droned on about the 2014 polar vortex as a reason to bail out flailing coal and nuclear facilities in the name of grid resilience, even though many piles of coal ended up freezing in those winter weather events. A similar situation played out a decade ago. When Texas was hit with a storm and then rolling blackouts in 2011, Rush Limbaugh piled on and the Drudge Report called the outages “a direct consequence of the Obama administration’s agenda to lay siege to the coal industry.” Then—as now—it was overwhelmingly fossil fuel power that underperformed.

In other words, Texas isn’t the only place saddled with an outmoded, balky, and regulation-resistant power grid. Those conditions remain the status quo in our centers of media and policy consensus as well. And this system will continue generating disastrous outcomes for ordinary citizens struggling to get by–unless and until it manages to insist upon the simple truth about the real crisis before us.

—Chris Lehmann, editor

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