Frozen windmills are only a very minor factor in the Texas blackouts that have come about due to the polar vortex, a fact that was well publicized on Tuesday, but that didn’t stop Tucker Carlson from doubling down on his false and misleading claims that incorrectly blame those windmills freezing for the blackouts.
“So Texas — big, durable, well-run place generally — is still kind of a disaster tonight. A lot of people without power. The Texas Public Utility Commission says the state had very little margin of error, it turns out, in its energy grid. Yeah. Turns out to be absolutely right. The commission described the situation as very scary. Now we know exactly why that margin for error was so tight: green energy,” Tucker said falsely.
“Because politicians benefitted from it, wind turbines wound up generating about a quarter of Texas’ power. It got cold last night, and the windmills froze, and as a result millions of Texans are freezing. Several have died.”
In actual reality, as opposed to the fake reality Tucker is creating for his viewers, the vast majority of the blame for the blackouts is on frozen instruments at more traditional power generating facilities — coal, natural gas and nuclear, according to officials in Texas who actually know about these things. They say that of the 30-35 gigawatts of shutdowns, problems with freezing windmills account for only 13% of those outages.
Wind power would normally make up 25% of the overall power load in Texas during the winter, so the windmills are actually holding up disproportionally well compared with more traditional energy sources.
As a professor of environmental engineering at Rice University, Daniel Cohan, told Bloomberg, “The performance of wind and solar is way down the list among the smaller factors in the disaster that we’re facing.”
Tucker wasn’t worried about that, though.
“It seems to me again from an outsider’s perspective that we’ve allowed lunatic ideologues who know nothing about science or engineering to have a lot of control over our power grid,” Tucker mused later in the segment.
During this segment, Tucker was speaking with Mike Taylor of oil and gas supplier Combined Energy Services in New York. Tucker tried to get Taylor to back up his windmill rhetoric, but it didn’t work.
“It seems like if the whole point of putting so-called green energy out there is because you think the weather is volatile, maybe you would have factored that into your decision. It seems, just from a civilian standpoint, it seems kind of reckless to set aside 25% of your power grid for windmills. Do you think that it is?” Tucker asked.
And Taylor replied, simply: “Well you know, Tucker, I don’t know enough about windmills.”
Tucker began this very same episode with a lengthy screed about the news media lying to viewers, without even a whiff of irony.
“Imagine if lying was your job,” Tucker said, completely seriously. “Imagine forcing yourself to tell lies all day about everything in ways that were so transparent and so outlandish that there is no way that people listening to you could possibly believe anything you said. Then imagine doing that again and again and again every day of your professional life for your entire life.”
You can watch the quoted portion of Monday’s episode of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Fox News in the video embedded up at the top of this article.