As a tragedy unfolds in Texas over widespread power outages following a historically awful winter storm, just about the only thing not in short supply has been blame. It’s only natural to want to find who’s at fault when so much goes so badly wrong for so many people, and when it costs lives.
Unfortunately, the search for fault has also created an opportunity for those seeking to spread misinformation online and in the news.
In particular, opponents of wind turbines and the “Green New Deal” have been active following Texas’s power grid problems.
And it’s true, some wind turbines in Texas did freeze during the storm and the cold snap, causing some issues with power generation. But as an investigation by the Texas Tribune found, those frozen wind turbines were not at the heart of the power grid failures. Rather, it was a much more widespread problem, with natural gas generation causing the most problems.
“Gas is failing in the most spectacular fashion right now,” Michael Webber, an energy resources professor at the University of Texas at Austin told the Tribune.
Officials with the Energy Reliability Council of Texas confirmed that as well, saying “It appears that a lot of the generation that has gone offline today has been primarily due to issues on the natural gas system.”
Nevertheless, several elected officials singled out wind turbines as being the issue.
Rep. Dan Crenshaw, who represents Texas’s 2nd congressional district, tweeted that “This is what happens when you force the grid to rely in part on wind as a power source. When weather conditions get bad as they did this week, intermittent renewable energy like wind isn’t there when you need it.
Governor Greg Abbott changed his tune mid-way through Tuesday, starting the day blaming natural gas in the media, while switching to blaming solar and wind later that night on a Fox News appearance.
And of course, wind energy opponents picked up on those complaints and ran with them, regardless of the accuracy.
Among the memes making the rounds online was this image of a helicopter being used to de-ice a wind turbine.
Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert tweeted along the same lines, saying “You know how you unfreeze frozen windmills? By sending up a helicopter that shoots out chemicals onto the blades. You need fuel for the helicopter. Keep that in mind when thinking how “green” windmills are.”
But there are a couple of major issues with that meme, not to mention Boebert’s statement.
For one thing, the frozen wind turbine in question wasn’t in Texas — and it wasn’t in 2021, either. Rather, the image comes from a test run in Sweden back in 2014.
As Nyteknik reported, Alpine Helicopter, working with Sweden’s Skelleftea Kraft’s wind farm, tested several methods to de-ice wind turbines in the Nordic country’s notoriously frosty winters, among them a tank of hot water sprayed over the blades.
Yes, that’s the other thing: it’s just hot water, no chemicals.
Indeed, the meme about “burning hundreds of gallons of jet fuel” has been circulating since at least 2016.
And it was debunked back then, too.
Clean energy analyst Ketan Joshi ran the numbers and found that using a helicopter to de-ice a wind turbine is well worth the expense and effort, as it saves two days worth of emissions compared to a coal-powered plant, and the energy used to de-ice the turbine would be recouped in about four hours, making it a better option than just leaving it to melt on its own.
What’s more, helicopters generally aren’t used to thaw wind turbine blades anymore, if they ever were beyond that test.
At most, some wind farms might use drones, but modern wind turbines incorporate internal systems to heat the blades if temperatures outside drop low enough. However, as Joshi told Earther , “systems inside the blade are fancy but sometimes not worth it, because blade icing is pretty rare.”
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And for the folks on the ground in Texas, what matters most right now is getting the lights and the heat back on.
