In the Texas cold snap last February, 130 people died after “critical pieces of natural-gas infrastructure” were shut down. And, millions of American businesses and households experienced rolling blackouts as extreme winter weather blanketed the Central United States.
According to the Wall Street Journal, at the time, “natural-gas power plants wound up spending billions procuring fuel or shutting down altogether for lack of supply, exacerbating a dire shortage.” Beyond these poor decisions that led to the deadly shut down of the natural gas supply, wind turbines froze over and nearly half of Texas wind generating capacity was knocked offline.
The facts are that reliable energy isn’t just a matter of convenience—it can literally be a matter of life and death. In fact, A March 2019 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded that “the drop in natural gas prices in the late 2000s, induced largely by the boom in shale gas production, averted 11,000 winter deaths per year” in the United States.
Poor decision-making and politically-motivated agendas have guided us to unreliable sources like wind and solar. That not only costs American families more of their hard-earned money in their energy bills, but it can literally cost them their lives when disaster strikes. For more information about how reliable energy from abundant American sources like natural gas make us safer and better prepared for the future, check out the Empowerment Alliance’s Research and Data Resources.
