Inside Climate News reports:

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. [Continue reading…]