(ICN) AMERICAN POLITICAL GAS BIAS

A sign warns of icy conditions on Interstate Highway 35 on February 18, 2021 in Killeen, Texas. Credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Texas is recovering from this week’s winter storm, nearly a year after a much more severe set of storms led to a devastating failure of the electricity system and about 250 deaths. The February 2021 storms showed the fragility of the grid at a time when climate change is contributing to an increase in extreme weather.

But the most enduring legacy of the 2021 blackouts may be the spread of a falsehood: the idea that the crisis was mainly due to the failure of renewable energy.

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia, invoked this idea in December, when he announced he was voting against President Joe Biden’s climate and social spending bill, saying that a rapid transition to clean energy “will have catastrophic consequences for the American people like we have seen in both Texas and California in the last two years.”

Fossil-fuel industry groups and elected officials across the country have made similar claims, part of a trail of distorted facts that has helped to obscure the true story of the Texas power crisis. That story, as told in a succession of reports by outside experts, is that the most consequential failures were in the natural gas industry and at gas-fired power plants.

Yet many Texas officials have responded as if they believed the warped version of events, choosing not to engage with what really happened.

“The idea that wind and solar were the problem, when our grid is dominated by fossil fuels, doesn’t add up in any way,” said Michael Webber, an energy resources professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

In the aftermath of the 2021 storms, Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, oversaw a complete change in the leadership of the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT. But he and other state officials did much less to require changes to the gas industry, which is regulated by the Railroad Commission of Texas.

Meanwhile, various reports have confirmed the central role of the gas industry in the power outages. These include a joint investigation from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation; a detailed timeline of events by the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin; and a paper in the journal Energy Research & Social Science, the authors of which include energy researchers from Texas and across the country, including Webber.

The reports showed that every major energy source, including wind, had problems that contributed to a shortage of electricity, but that the grid’s heavy reliance on gas meant that the breakdowns in the gas delivery system were a leading factor. Much of the gas system was not winterized, so many parts of it couldn’t function in extreme cold. Inside Climate News - link - Dan Gearino - link - more like this (USA) - link - more like this - link