Rep. Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, says the U.S. can’t solely rely on renewable energy and that the U.S. has to have a baseload of predictable and sustainable sources of power to deal with disasters such as the ice storm in his state.
”We have now half a million people without power, but we had 4 million at one point,” Arrington said Thursday during an appearance on Newsmax TV’s ”Spicer & Co.”
”Yesterday there were children’s hospitals having to consolidate with others for loss of power. There are homes flooding. This is an epic disaster — 234 counties in Texas all locked up and frozen, literally.”
Hundreds of thousands of Texans have struggled for heat and water because of utility outages due to the ice storm. About 390,000 Texas homes were still without power Thursday, down from around 4.5 million earlier in the week.
”We have ERCOT, which is the independent operator of our power grid and there was some irresponsible failure on their part to not winterize hard assets, not have the rolling outages early enough, not having enough reserve power, maybe depending too much on renewable,” said Arrington.
