THE "LIBERALS" RESPONSIBLE FOR ALL THE WIND TURBINES IN TEXAS

Just to make the point one more time: The blackouts in Texas arenot because the state uses wind power.

What has sent Texas reeling is not an engineering problem, nor is it the frozen wind turbines blamed by prominent Republicans. It is a financial structure for power generation that offers no incentives to power plant operators to prepare for winter. In the name of deregulation and free markets, critics say, Texas has created an electric grid that puts an emphasis on cheap prices over reliable service.

... Some [wind] turbines did in fact freeze — though Greenland and other northern outposts are able to keep theirs going through the winter.

But wind accounts for just 10 percent of the power in Texas generated during the winter. And the loss of power to the grid caused by shutdowns of thermal power plants, primarily those relying on natural gas, dwarfed the dent caused by frozen wind turbines, by a factor of five or six.

But since every right-winger in America -- including Texas right-wingers, who know better -- is blaming wind, let's remember which very liberal politician made wind a significant factor in the Texas energy mix:

Ever since 1999, when then-governor George W. Bush signed a law deregulating the state’s power market, Texas has been building wind turbines like crazy....

As the Wall Street Journal reports, as part of the 1999 law, Bush included a provision that called for 2,000 megawatts of renewable power capacity by 2009. That milestone came four years early.

And then:

Bush’s successor, Rick Perry, raised the bar to 10,000 megawatts by 2025.

The state blasted past that milestone as well.

This won't impress your right-wing relatives, who've undoubtedly decided by now that Dubya was a liberal and a "globalist," and probably under the thumb of George Soros. I don't know what they think about Rick Perry, who was Donald Trump's energy secretary for a couple of years, although no one ever noticed. But in any case, liberalism wasn't why wind power happened in Texas. (Enron's investments in wind in the late 1990s might have been more of a factor.)