Texas Blackout Deception Chronicled by Clear Energy Alliance

Tom Shepstone
Shepstone Management Company, Inc.

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The Texas blackout is a matter of deception as well as reality, as Mark Mathis illustrates with a fresh take video explanation!

That Texas blackout was the entirely predictable result of a bunch of policies, subsidies and incredible governmental distortions of the energy market. Our friend, Mark Mathis, at the Clear Energy Alliance, has produced still another powerful common sense video on what really happened when the lights went out in cruel Windv City.

Here is the video:

As you know, when Mark posts his videos YouTube, he always includes the transcripts, too. Here is the one accompanying the above video, with some emphasis added on the most relevant parts of the story:

Have you heard wind turbines were not the reason for the Texas blackouts? That’s a half-truth, that’s bordering on a lie. But it’s a message wind companies, Green New Dealers, and mainstream media narrators are pushing. To get to the truth, you have to look a little deeper at the conditions that set up the Texas power grid fail. Pardon my appearance.

Like so many other people here in Texas, I’m dealing with a broken water pipe. We live in a time where we all want explanations in a “quick take,” but quick takes are often deceiving, which is the case with the Texas blackouts. The grid, here in Texas, suffered a systemwide failure caused by bad energy policy.

Here are the top eight reasons it happened.

1 – ERCOT — The Electric Reliability Council of Texas — waited too long to initiate conservation measures and begin rolling blackouts. But those measures wouldn’t have been necessary if ERCOT had taken reliability seriously by having more reliable power from nuclear, natural gas, and coal.

2 – Texas rapidly increased its dependence on unreliable wind power from six percent in 2010 to 23 percent in 2020.

3 – Policymakers and ERCOT know that during extreme weather events – heatwaves and cold snaps – wind typically has very low electricity generation, but they kept allowing wind turbines to be installed without holding them to any reliability standard.

4 – Contrary to half-truth news reports, between February 8th and 16th, wind generation crashed by 93 percent. Coal increased by 47 percent and natural gas increased by a stunning 450 percent. But it wasn’t enough as millions of Texans lost power in frigid temperatures.

5 – Wind power is massively subsidized which has distorted the Texas electricity market. The extra taxpayer and ratepayer cash discourages new investment for reliable nuclear, coal, and natural gas.

6 – The rush to install industrial wind turbines soaked a lot of capital. There wasn’t enough left for transmission upgrades and infrastructure maintenance. Natural Gas and coal could have contributed even more power when it was needed, but poor maintenance led to frozen pipes, and ultimately blackouts.

7 – Wind subsides have made older baseload power generators unprofitable. Texas has shut down more than 3,000 Megawatt hours of power from coal and natural gas over the past few years while adding 20,000 Megawatts of unreliable wind. This has made the grid far less reliable.

8 – Texas had a similar situation back in 2011. ERCOT and politicians knew full well this could happen if baseload reliability wasn’t fortified, but they kept building unreliable wind turbines instead. The White House, Green New Dealers and their advocates in the Mainstream Press are spinning half-truths that are a deliberate deception.

Sickening, isn’t it? It’s similar to what has happened in California. The state has wasted tens of billions of dollars on renewable fantasies. At the same time baseload power needs are ignored, grid upgrades are woefully inadequate, and the forests are massively overgrown. Instead of addressing the problem, California has doubled down on insanity. What’s happened in Texas is the result of policy

makers ignoring known hazards. Makes you wonder, how many unknown hazards will present themselves if the wind power fantasy continues? I guess we’ll have to wait for White House spokesperson Jen Psaki to circle back to us on that one.

Thanks, Mark! Power on!

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