- In August, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz mocked California’s “failed energy policy” on Twitter.
- His post resurfaced Tuesday as more than 3 million Texans were without electricity during a winter storm.
- Texas’ state-owned power grid has failed due to the weather-related strain on its resources.
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An August tweet in which Senator Ted Cruz of Texas mocked California’s ‘failed energy policy’ circulated on social media on Tuesday because millions of Texans were without electricity due to a rare and severe winter storm.
As of Monday, about 154 million Americans were under some form of winter weather advice, CNN reported. About 3.6 million Texans were without power on Tuesday afternoon, according to outage-tracking website PowerOutage.us, as the state’s infrastructure struggles to cope with the inclement weather.
In a tweet on Aug. 19, in response to a message from the governors ‘office urging Californians to turn off unnecessary lights and restrict their use of appliances, Cruz said California’ is unable to perform even basic functions of civilization do not carry out, such as having reliable electricity. ‘
—Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) 19 August 2020
Twitter Users Tuesday was mock Cruz’s tweet given the circumstances in Texas, accusing him of hypocrisy, and, in some cases, react angrily to the six-month-old tweet.
“Hey Senator Cruz, Texas can use a little civilization now. People are freezing to death,” said Lisa Falkenberg, the Houston Chronicle’s opinion editor. tweeted.
During the summer, California experienced wildfires and heat waves that caused tensions and interruptions in the state’s power infrastructure. Civil servants and local officials responded by encouraging citizens to limit their electricity consumption.
Now Texas’ power grid has failed; the state’s infrastructure is largely not equipped to handle a lot of ice and snow and icy temperatures.
In the 1970s, Texas developed a state-controlled and regulated power network called ERCOT, primarily to avoid federal regulation and federal energy standards, The Texas Tribune reported in 2011. The rest of the adjacent U.S. states are on the eastern interconnection or Western interconnection grids.
Most of Texas is on ERCOT, except for El Paso and parts of the Panhandle and east Texas.
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ERCOT works mainly on wind and natural gas – it is very suitable for heat waves when the demand for water and air conditioning increases, reports the Chronicle, but Winter Storm Uri has hampered wind turbines and strained natural gas resources.
Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday that malfunctioning instruments at power plants and shortages of natural gas – not the frozen turbines – were primarily responsible for the power outage in Texas.
The power outages and the interruption of power outages affected the designated heating centers and shelters. Two men were found dead in Texas this week; their death is thought to be due to exposure to low temperatures.
“The ERCOT network collapsed in the same way as the old Soviet Union,” Ed Hirs, an energy fellow at the University of Houston, told the Chronicle. “It sank over investment and neglect until it finally broke down under predictable conditions.”