Thar’ She Blows…Or Maybe Not!
Several of America’s middle and southern states experienced very unusual, extremely low, make that sometimes freezing, temperatures over the weekend. Perhaps none more so, with severe consequences, than Texas.
You see, several years ago, Texas caught the green breeze (rhymes with freeze) and, thanks to federal subsidies (as always), some companies there went heavily into windmill construction. To the point where, now, about 25% of the state’s electricity is generated by wind. That’s been fine, until it got cold. Really, really cold. Result: Almost half of the state’s wind turbines froze and ceased producing electricity. Result #2: An estimated two-million+ homes and businesses experienced power outages. Naturally, businesses had to close, homes got very cold, and residents were told to cut back on their home power needs. This is when folks sometimes have to get desperate and become overly dependent on choices like small electric heaters (fire) or without thinking it through, running cars for heat in closed garages, chancing the consequence of carbon monoxide. No word yet on possible deaths caused by any of this, or from just plan freezing. And think of the dire issues for hospitals and nursing homes, who hopefully had generators for unpredictable electricity shortages like this one.
Wrote Fox News anchor, Tucker Carlson: “Most electricity comes from natural gas, and Texas produces more of it than any place on the continent. Running out of energy in Texas is like starving to death at the grocery story: You can only do it on purpose, and Texas did. Politicians took the fashionable route and became recklessly reliant on co-called alternative energy, meaning windmills. Roughly a quarter of all electricity generated in the state now comes from wind.” To make matters worse, even normally totally reliable oil and gas production, the nation’s energy gold standard of today, was impacted and slowed by the extreme cold.
The wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine, as even pre-schoolers know. And sometimes, although perhaps rarely as far south as Texas, it gets freezing cold outside. Winter-time would be a good example! That means green energy isn’t as reliable a power source as natural gas, oil, nuclear (remember nuclear!), and forgive me global warmers, coal. It is interesting, however, referencing the globalists, how the big-money types, politicians and others, while championing gaggles of wind turbines, do NOT want them anywhere near where they live! You see, they block the view of the ocean, the mountains, the land, or whatever, and they are noisy. Wrote Carlson: “How would you like a massive power plant in your backyard humming and buzzing and chopping up birds? If you’re ever in rural America, go see for yourself. You’ll be shocked by how awful it is once you get up close.”
Yes, the freeze will end, the wind will resume, the giant blades will spin again, the sun will warm the solar panels in giant arrays and on building tops, and one day there will be gigantic battery clusters capable of storing that energy when its nighttime and windless.
Interesting that it will likely be natural gas and/or oil that will generate the electricity needed to manufacture those mega-batteries, wind turbine blades & towers, and solar panels, hopefully made here in America, as opposed to another country that begins with a C!
And on the subject of manufacturing needed products by more traditional and reliable fuels (fossil, in fact), we’ll end with a great quote from a writer who tweeted this caption along with posting the photo he described of efforts, by air(!), to un-freeze turbine blades: “A helicopter running on fossil fuel, spraying a chemical made from fossil fuels onto a wind turbine made with fossil fuels, during an ice storm is awesome.” While alternative energy sources may well be, or at least a larger part of, our distant future, natural gas, oil, nuclear, and, yes, coal, remain our present reality, and will be for many, many years into the future.
(Carlson quote(s) via foxnews.com, Tucker Carlson, 2-16-21; “Fossil-fuel-produced” quote via dailywire.com, Ryan Saavedra, 2-15-21).