‘Coal plants will be our savior.’ Kansas senator blames renewables for power outages

According to Tucker Carlson, the cause of the deadly rolling power outages in Texas is too much reliance on that state’s “silly” windmills: “Well, the good news is all that alternative energy seems to have had a remarkable effect on the climate,” the Fox News host said sarcastically, since “Sunday night, parts of Texas got the temperatures that we typically see in Alaska. In fact, they were the same as they were in Alaska. So global warming is no longer a pressing concern in Houston. The bad news is, they don’t have electricity. The windmills froze, so the power grid failed.” That is a tidy narrative, and one the fossil fuel lobby loves. But none of it is true.

So naturally, the climate change denialist aka Kansas State Sen. Mike Thompson has hopped on this same coal-burning steam locomotive. He likewise blames frozen wind turbines for power outages.

The longtime FOX4 meteorologist, who doesn’t believe in evolution, either, said last year that the death rate from COVID-19 is so “infinitesimally small” that we should “call off this emergency.”

Which is right in keeping with this recent Facebook post. “Wind turbines are frozen up,” he wrote. “Solar is useless...Right now, coal plants will be our savior in this frigid weather as they (and Wolf Creek nuclear plant) will be generating the load, along with natural gas. This is why the expansion of renewables is dangerous for us going forward. We are putting too much reliance on sources that cannot meet our needs, especially in times like this. It is insanity.”

Hooboy. But let’s start with what did and did not happen in Texas.

At a Tuesday hearing of the Kansas House Energy, Utilities and Telecommunications Committee, Evergy vice president Darrin Ives said a major issue in Texas is actually the lack of energy diversification and the state’s “extreme reliance on natural gas.”

“That doesn’t work out well,” he said.

Natural gas, coal stacks froze in Texas

Especially when plants aren’t winterized, gas is frozen in pipes, and as WFAA in Dallas reported, “equipment literally froze in the single digit temperatures and stopped working.”

This will happen again, since our climate crisis is causing more extreme weather of all kinds. In this current disaster, warming in the Arctic is allowing more frigid air to go further south than it normally does.

“Some gas wells froze, reducing supply” just as demand exploded, tweeted Joshua Rhodes, a University of Texas expert on the Texas electric grid. “The current weather event in Texas is beyond anything that we have experienced in modern memory. I don’t recall another time when all 254 counties in TX were under a winter storm warning.”

Coal stacks froze as well, and coal, gas and even nuclear plants are all underperforming in the extreme weather. Yes, some wind turbines did freeze, too, but that was a relatively minor issue, especially since less wind energy, as well as less solar energy, is typically produced during the winter. Texas was not counting on much wind and solar at this time of year, in other words.

Yet Ars Technica reported that unlike gas and coal, wind technology “is producing significantly more than forecast” in Texas right now.

In Kansas and the entire Southwest Power Pool, wind energy hit its targets, according to Evergy’s Darrin Ives: “Our system received about 20% of our energy from wind reserves yesterday, and SPP’s indication was that wind came in right on their forecast.”

We’ve had to have planned outages because demand here, too, exceeds supply, though far less than in Texas.

What Kansas needs instead of the increase in carbon pollution that Thompson is recommending is the statewide energy plan that Republican lawmakers rejected last year. It needs more power storage, too, instead of seeing reserves as an expensive waste. Texas, which deregulated in the 90s, holds none in reserve, and how is that working out? What’s really unaffordable is our refusal to see what’s happening.

It’s our overreliance on the coal plants that Thompson still sees as “our savior” that have created the extreme weather that should no longer surprise us. And it’s our refusal, even now, to plan for more of the same that’s true insanity.

This story was originally published February 17, 2021 at 5:00 AM.