Blaming the Wind for the Mess in Texas Is Painfully Absurd | The New Yorker

I’m glad that there were plenty of authorities to try to set the record straight, but, of course, the truth was still searching for the winter boots in the back of the garage by the time the falsehoods had spread across the Internet. It’s particularly annoying because the bad-faith nature of the whole idea should have been obvious to anyone with an iota of geographical knowledge. Besides Texas, the biggest producers of wind power in the country are Iowa, Oklahoma, Colorado, Minnesota, Oregon, Illinois, Kansas, North Dakota, and California. Except for California, all these places are situated to the north of Texas, and deal with much harsher winters. The idea that wind turbines cannot deal with cold weather is, prima facie, ridiculous: countries with huge wind-power installations include Germany, France, and Italy, all of which have managed in the past to host the Winter Olympics—and Italy is planning to host them again, in 2026. People have developed plans for building giant wind farms in Greenland to feed the European Union and the United States. If cold weather somehow made it impossible for wind turbines to operate, you would think someone would have noticed by now.