After a week of the country’s worst power grid collapse in decades — an event that’s taken a dreadful toll in dozens of lives lost and billions of dollars in economic damage — the lights are back on in Texas. But even as the freezing temperatures that caused the crisis have waned, the political stances over who should be blamed have been hardening.
Texas Republicans including Gov. Greg Abbott have attacked the state’s growing share of clean energy, pointing to the loss of generation capacity from frozen wind turbine blades. But these attacks have run up against the cold fact that the state’s natural-gas infrastructure played a central role in its broader grid failure.
