A Green Energy Texas Whitewash
The federal report on the winter power outage ignores some key facts.
By The WSJ Editorial Board
Sept. 24, 2021

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on Thursday issued its long-awaited report on Texas’s winter power outage. Why did it take so long? Chairman Richard Glick’s foregone conclusion was that renewables were not to blame no matter the evidence.

“Today’s report makes it clear the facts don’t support the rhetoric,” Mr Glick said Thursday. That was a swipe at people, including us, who attributed Texas’s weeks-long power outage during February’s arctic freeze in part to the state’s heavy reliance on unreliable wind. Wind turbines froze across the state, forcing gas generators to run all out before many also failed.


The report focuses on the failures at natural gas plants, which experienced mechanical problems and fuel shortages as temperatures plunged and equipment froze. Texas’s grid regulators compounded these problems by mistakenly shutting off power to gas processors and plants.

According to the report, gas plants accounted for 55% of the power-plant capacity that failed during the freeze compared to 22% for wind, 18% for coal and 1% for solar. But actual power generation in Texas increased 400% for gas and 25% for coal in the week before the power outage. Solar and wind power fell 80% and 55%, respectively.

The solar industry hilariously tooted that solar “performed as expected during the February 2021 Texas blackout” and is a “predictable, reliable and affordable clean energy source.” Solar performed the worst of any source and produced less than 1% of state power during the freeze. But hey, regulators expect solar to be predictably unreliable.

FERC recommends weatherizing power plants, but the costs will be hard to absorb for fossil-fuel generators that run at very low levels except when they’re needed to back up green energy.

Here is the fundamental problem: Hefty subsidies allow renewable producers to pay to offload their power in competitive wholesale markets and still make a profit. This erodes the economics of baseload power generators and makes the grid less reliable. All of this is worth keeping in mind as Democrats pour more subsidies into green energy and attempt to regulate fossil fuels to death… (Read more)