The world’s largest wind turbine maker announced the elimination of 450 jobs in Colorado Wednesday, which is ironic considering so many were destroyed in a Texas winter storm this week.
Making matters worse, the wind energy failure and a natural gas shortage has left millions of Texans in the cold.
The timing couldn’t be worse, coming just weeks after President Biden announced a fracking ban on public lands.
Natural gas production feel 20% in the last, and now there’s a massive shortage.
From the Wall Street Journal:
At the peak, about 45 gigawatts of power were offline due to the cold. Two-thirds of this generation was from gas- and coal-burning power plants and one nuclear power plant. The other third came from wind turbines that iced up and were taken out of service.
What powers Texas? Again we turn to the WSJ:
Natural-gas-fired power plants generated 40% of Texas’s electricity in 2020, according to Ercot, the largest single source. Wind turbines were second at 23%, followed by coal at 18% and nuclear at 11%.
In recent years, coal has been declining on the Texas grid, and renewable sources such as wind and solar have been increasing.
It’s not just the Lone Star State’s heavily taxpayer subsidized renewable energy that failed, the WSJ further reports Texas hasn’t properly winterized their natural gas and coal infrastructure.
So now their wind turbines have failed, and they have a natural gas shortage.
Pay attention Colorado.
The Texas failure should serve as a stark warning against reducing natural gas production in Colorado, and moving too hastily to a power source that’s unreliable in freezing conditions.