Let’s recap some basic facts:

• Texas’ state government is Republican and has been for a long time. Most importantly, the state has been staunchly conservative for decades. (Party labels are not helpful here, as they have shifted in the past. This is established fact and means that, for example, you don’t get to tie today’s Democratic Party to the southern conservative states’ votes in favor of slavery. That pig will not fly here)
• Texas’ state energy grid is independent of the rest of the nation. 90% of the state relies on this grid
• Texas’ state energy grid is designed to rely on natural gas during the winter
• Texas’ wind turbines were never winterized and experienced some failures. However, there’s this to consider – some turbines were able to get back online and help restore power this week:

• Texas’ state officials never insisted that the privatized and independent natural gas infrastructure should be winterized in order to protect it against extreme winter weather, because that sort of thing doesn’t happen here… except when it did. In 1989. In 2011. And again in 2013. And 2015.
• Texas’ Lt Governor David Dewhusrt said in 2011, (explaining why over fifty power plants failed during a massive ice storm), “a lack of adequate winterization and preparation appear to be a major cause of the outages.”
• Texas’s state energy commission set the wholesale price of energy at its maximum allowed value Monday when energy reserves dipped below the 1,000 megawatt threshold
• Texas’ state energy commission declared Monday they could do whatever they like with wholesale energy prices and left the wholesale cost setting at its maximum for at least 36 hours after declaring the grid had returned to normal and energy reserves were back above the threshold

So, obviously…

It’s the liberal’s fault. It’s Biden’s fault. It’s the non-winterized, frozen wind turbines that caused all this. It’s the green energy agenda that should be blamed.

Yeah. Right.

Here’s a link to an excellent bit of blogging at Flying Penguin that was originally written during the 2011 Ice Storm and has been updated during SubZero 2021. The writer makes some great points about the governmental non-response to these events, as well as some intriguing observations about what might be happening between the state and Big Energy interests. I think he cuts through the crap pretty effectively…

Ice Virus Hits Hard In Texas (Updated 2021)