Ted Cruz tweet mocking CA’s ‘failed energy policies’ resurfaces

• In August, Texas Senator Ted Cruz mocked California’s “failed energy policies” on Twitter.
• His post resurfaced on Tuesday as more than 3 million Texans were without power during a winter storm.
• The Texas utility grid has failed due to weather constraints on its resources.
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An August tweet in which Senator Ted Cruz of Texas mocked California’s “failed energy policies” was posted on social media Tuesday as millions of Texans were without power due to a rare severe storm winter.

As of Monday, about 154 million Americans were in some form of winter weather warning, CNN reported. About 3.6 million Texans were without power on Tuesday afternoon, according to outage tracking site PowerOutage.us, as the state’s infrastructure struggles to cope with inclement weather.

In the August 19 tweet, in response to a message from the governor’s office urging Californians to turn off unnecessary lights and limit their use of household appliances, Cruz said California was “unable to even perform the duties of basis of civilization, such as having reliable electricity “.

—Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) August 19, 2020

Twitter users on Tuesday were mock Cruz’s tweet given the circumstances in Texas, accusing him of hypocrisy and, in some cases, respond with anger to the six month old tweet.

“Hey Sen. Cruz, Texas could use a certain civilization pretty much now. People are freezing to death,” Lisa Falkenberg, editor of the Houston Chronicle, tweeted.

During the summer, California experienced wildfires and extreme heat waves that strained the state’s electrical infrastructure and caused blackouts. National and local authorities responded by urging citizens to limit their electricity consumption.

Now the Texas power grid has failed; The state’s infrastructure is largely not equipped to handle a lot of ice and snow and freezing temperatures.

In the 1970s, Texas developed a state-run and regulated power grid called ERCOT, in large part to avoid federal regulation and federal energy standards, the Texas Tribune reported in 2011. The rest of the US states contiguous are located on the Eastern Interconnect or Western Interconnection Networks.

Most of Texas is on ERCOT with the exception of El Paso and parts of the Panhandle and eastern Texas.

Read more: Tech managers want to help people better prepare for disasters with educational apps similar to Duolingo and Headspace

ERCOT operates primarily on wind and natural gas – these are well suited to heat waves when demand for water and air conditioning increases, the Chronicle reported, but Winter Storm Uri has hampered wind turbines and depleted natural gas resources .

Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday that faulty instruments at power plants and shortages of natural gas – not frozen turbines – were primarily responsible for the failure of the Texas power grid.

Power outages and continual blackouts affected warming centers and designated shelters. Two men were found dead this week in Texas; it is believed that their death was due to exposure to low temperatures.

“The ERCOT network collapsed in exactly the same way as the former Soviet Union,” Ed Hirs, an energy researcher at the University of Houston, told The Chronicle. “He limped on underinvestment and neglect until he finally broke under foreseeable circumstances.”