Republican Rick Perry, a former Texas governor and energy secretary, suggested in a recent blog post on House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy\u2019s website that Texans should be more than willing to endure blackouts to keep the federal government from regulating the state\u2019s power grid.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Lone Star State has been gripped by blackouts caused by extreme snowstorms, and as of Wednesday morning, about 2.7 million households in Texas were still left without power, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.<\/p>\n
\u201cTexans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business,\u201d Perry said. \u201cTry not to let whatever the crisis of the day is take your eye off of having a resilient grid that keeps America safe personally, economically, and strategically.\u201d<\/p>\n
The former governor, who once called former President Donald Trump \u201cthe chosen one,\u201d was responding to a prompt from McCarthy suggesting that \u201cthose watching on the left may see the situation in Texas as an opportunity to expand their top-down, radical proposals.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to Perry, the way to prevent future blackouts is to ensure that Texas has reliable baseload energy resources, which typically refers to coal, natural gas and nuclear-based power plants.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIf wind and solar is where we\u2019re headed, the last 48 hours ought to give everybody a real pause,\u201d Perry said. \u201cWe need to have a baseload. And the only way you can get a baseload in this country is [with] natural gas, coal, and nuclear.\u201d<\/p>\n
This echoes similar rhetoric from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), who blamed solar and wind for the power crisis in his state during an interview Tuesday with Fox News\u2019 Sean Hannity. Abbott argued that the \u201cGreen New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yet the Texas blackouts were largely caused by a number of failures in coal, nuclear and natural gas energy systems, which were not prepared to withstand extreme cold, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas said.<\/p>\n
Wind energy, in fact, surpassed daily production forecasts during the past weekend, and the GOP\u2019s lambasting of wind turbines was a \u201cridiculous political spin\u201d on the situation,\u00a0Daniel Cohan, associate professor of environmental engineering at Houston\u2019s Rice University, told HuffPost.\u00a0<\/p>\n