The "wind outperformed expectations" quote that everyone is repeating out-of-context conveniently omits the fact that those expectations were for wind to produc

The "wind outperformed expectations" quote that everyone is repeating out-of-context conveniently omits the fact that those expectations were for wind to produce a small fraction of its capacity. It "exceeded expectations" by dramatically underperforming every other power generation source, because expectations were far lower for wind than for anything else. The defense of wind is essentially, "Wind was not projected to be able to provide much power in this weather", and fossil generation is blamed because it was expected to be fully operational. The fact that fossil generation produced 2-3x what wind did relative to capacity is conveniently glossed over. If I go into town with buildings flooding from broken pipes and tell people that we've invested billions for years in wind generation which was projected not to be able to provide heat when we needed it, they're not going to say "oh, it's not wind's fault then because it was expected to be garbage in these conditions". They're going to want to know who decided to give out billions in subsidies to become a world leader in wind capacity knowing that it wouldn't work when we needed it. We could have invested in any other source of capacity instead, be it green, nuclear, or dirty, since they all performed at least 2-3x better than wind did. Wind has only been outputting 15-30% of its capacity, and around 15% when we most needed it. The article's analysis is spot on. The very last thing that Texas needs is capacity that only works in favorable weather conditions. Fossil capacity had very serious problems, but still left wind in the dust. The solutions are very debatable: Properly winterized wind generation is definitely worth looking into, as is nuclear (which had the best output of any generation source relative to capacity). But our current wind capacity is absolute garbage in this weather, and this must be acknowledged in order to make progress. Stating "wind exceeded projections" without explaining how pathetic those projections were is manipulative and dishonest.