The Coming Winter Disaster That Is Texas....

[Webster]

...gee, Texas and failed systems? What a shock....

Greg Abbott’s Failures Mean Texas Could Suffer Another Freezing Winter Blackout

In a new documentary, filmmaker Steve Mims tells the truth about the deadly 2021 Texas blackout.

www.thebulwark.com

t was the longest blackout in American history, more than twice as long as the New York City blackout of 1977. In February 2021, almost all of Texas was without power for four days after a frigid winter storm, named Uri, descended on the region to create such a demand for energy the state’s electricity grid crashed. Property damage topped $100 billion; hundreds of people died.

Those who lived through the storm will never forget it, which is why over the last 18 months Uri has become a perennial topic of uneasiness for most Texans. Some questions are obvious. Why did the grid collapse? Who profited from Uri? And, most concerning, could the disaster happen again? In the storm’s wake, the Texas legislature passed two bills that did little to change the circumstances that led to the grid’s collapse, yet Governor Greg Abbott declared the grid “fixed”—a claim questioned by many industry insiders.

Now Steve Mims, a veteran filmmaker (Arlo and Julie, Starving the Beast), has made a short film, Disaster by Design, that addresses some of the lingering questions about Uri. The strength of the film emerges from interviews Mims conducted with experts in the energy field. Doug Lewin, of Stoic Energy, and Virginia Palacios, of Commission Shift (a watchdog group), are impressive, but inclusion of Jerry Patterson, the Texas land commissioner, a Republican who breaks ranks with the state’s Republican establishment, gives the film a bipartisan credibility it would not have otherwise.

As for the cause of the disaster, Abbott and his supporters tried to find scapegoats. An easy target was renewables like wind and solar power. On Fox, Sean Hannity claimed that “energy-producing wind turbines are freezing, not working” while Tucker Carlson announced that “the windmills failed like the silly fashion accessories they are, and people in Texas died.” And Abbott charged that when wind and solar producers “shut down,” it “thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis.” Some such assertions were based on early reporting, which overstated the relevance of renewable energy supplies to the overall problem; later reporting set the record straight. To debunk these erroneous claims, Mims quotes Jerry Patterson. “This ‘blame-it-on-the-wind’ is bullshit,” Patterson deadpans in the film. “Let’s find a scapegoat. . . Wind, that’ll be our scapegoat.”...