AUSTIN, Texas — Former Texas governor and former Secretary of Energy Rick Perry (R) said Texans would rather go without power for longer than three days, than have the federal government involved in the state's power grid.
Perry made the comments in an interview with U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-California), who wrote about the interview in his blog, The Starting Line, on Wednesday.
“Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business,” Perry told McCarthy. “Try not to let whatever the crisis of the day is take your eye off of having a resilient grid that keeps America safe personally, economically and strategically.”
Perry also said leaders should diversify energy sources to build more reliability.
“We’ve got to have diversity, we’ve got to have resiliency, and we’ve got to have a baseload that we can absolutely count on no matter what happens out there,” Perry said.
Texas' power grid is operated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT. Gov. Greg Abbott called for an investigation into the operator and the grid’s failure.
In an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Tuesday, Abbott criticized calls for a Green New Deal climate change policy, saying wind turbines and solar power “thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power in a statewide basis.”
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However, the state comptroller reports that, in 2019, electricity generation in Texas was 47.4% natural gas, 20.2% coal, 20% wind, 1.1% solar, 0.2% hydro, 0.1% biomass, and less than 0.1% comes from other sources.
And on Monday, Gov. Abbott tweeted about the issue and did not mention wind power or solar power as significant causes of the lack of power generation.