Another left-wing fact-checking organization targeted a Federalist article focused on green energy’s inability to hold up during the Texas winter storm last week on Facebook.
“Independent fact-checkers say this information is missing context and could mislead people,” Facebook factchecker Lead Stories’ label reads.
The fact check from Gov. Andrew Cuomo-defending organization PolitiFact claims that “natural gas plants were the biggest cause of the power shortfall, not wind.” The author, however, does acknowledge that “wind farms ran at about half of what was expected,” which contributed to the widespread blackouts, a similar point to the article by Federalist contributor Jason Isaac and the Wall Street Journal.
In The Federalist, Isaac argued that green energy showcased its “fundamental unreliability and impracticality” during the storm. He says the energy catastrophe that left millions without electricity for days in subzero temperatures is partly due to “the lavish suite of government incentives” given to green energy initiatives, which have repeatedly failed to keep up with Texas’s electricity demand and don’t provide reliable energy amid unfavorable weather. It is possible both for this to be true and for other sources of energy such as natural gas to have failed in Texas, which is what happened.
The Wall Street Journal’s deep dive into the Texas power grid failures noted that wind power in Texas “supplies about 25% of the state’s electricity” so when “half of that capacity shut down when ice coated the turbine blades…demand surged and the agency that manages the state’s power grid, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, imposed rolling blackouts.”
“Ercot ordered the electricity providers to shed as much as 14 gigawatts, enough to serve about 2.8 million households,” the article stated. “The grid operator said that about 46 gigawatts of natural gas, coal, and wind generation wasn’t working—roughly 40% of what it had expected to be available.”
In other words, when demand for energy goes up and 40 percent of the total supply malfunctions, in significant part because solar energy doesn’t work in the dark or when wind turbines are iced stiff, you get blackouts.
Earlier this week, Lead Stories, an organization that relies on funding from Silicon Valley tech giants Google and Facebook and Chinese-operated ByteDance to censor posts, added a “false information” label to the article. The fact-check did not address The Federalist article’s argument directly but merely focused on criticizing a Facebook post earlier this week from a user who noted the green energy sector’s failures during the Texas power crisis.
