Frozen Texas Wind Turbines Create Havoc

A ferocious winter storm struck the southern plain states with exceptional ferocity over the weekend. By Monday, millions of Texans found themselves without power. Contrary to what one might expect, the energy problem wasn’t primarily because of downed power lines. Instead, in a state that has a quarter of America’s proven natural gas reserves, the power went away because Texas has turned to wind generation – and the generators froze.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s write-up about Texas’s State Energy Profile:

Texas is the top U.S. producer of both crude oil and natural gas. In 2019, the state accounted for 41% of the nation’s crude oil production and 25% of its marketed natural gas production.

As of January 2019, the 30 petroleum refineries in Texas were able to process about 5.8 million barrels of crude oil per day and accounted for 31% of the nation’s refining capacity.

That’s the good news. That’s the kind of news that helps make a nation energy independent so that it has a constant flow of energy and is not dependent on despotic, hostile foreign powers for its energy needs.

But then there’s the bad news from the same report:

Texas leads the nation in wind-powered generation and produced about 28% of all the U.S. wind-powered electricity in 2019. Texas wind turbines have produced more electricity than both of the state’s nuclear power plants since 2014. 

That’s all very nice and green – although no greener than clean-burning natural gas – but the problem with green energy is that it only works when the wind turbines are turning or, in the case of solar energy panels, when the sun is shining.

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See Also:

(1) Texas frozen wind power – outages ensue, electricity now at unheard of $9000 per megawatt-hour

(2) Cold snap leaves 8 million in Texas, Mexico without power