Former Texas governor, who served as an energy secretary under former President Donald Trump, urged Texas residents to be “resilient” and endure “whatever crisis” even going days without electricity or water if it meant keeping the services they receive away from federal regulators.
“Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business,” Perry wrote a blog on House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s website. “Try 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,” he added, according to The Houston Chronicle.
Like many other Republicans, Perry also falsely claimed that renewable energy was the real reason for the blackouts.
“If wind and solar is where we’re headed, the last 48 hours ought to give everybody a real pause and go wait a minute,” Perry said. “We need to have a baseload. And the only way you can get a baseload in this country is [with] natural gas, coal, and nuclear.”
In reality, the blackouts were caused by a combination of a spike in demand and outages at energy plants that use multiple sources of energy, not just wind.
On Wednesday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott blamed his state’s catastrophic winter-weather blackouts on wind power and the “Green New Deal” — a climate resolution from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and other Democrats that hasn’t even passed Congress, let alone dictated Texas energy policy.
“Our wind and our solar got shut down, and they were collectively more than 10 percent of our power grid, and that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis. … It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary,” Abbott told Fox News host Sean Hannity.
However, the governor’s arguments were contradicted by his own energy department, which outlined how most of Texas’s energy losses came from failures to winterize the power-generating systems, including fossil fuel pipelines.
