A severe winter storm that resulted in millions of homes in Texas being without power was an "avoidable tragedy" that could have been avoided if the state had a diverse energy supply, according to former Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette.
"In the previous administration under the leadership of President [Donald] Trump, what he directed me to do and what he directed my predecessor to do, Sec. Rick Perry, was to produce all forms of energy here in America," Brouillette told Fox Business' "Mornings With Maria" Tuesday.
"It's not only that we produced more energy in America, but we also produced different forms of energy that included fossil energy, it included things like natural gas and oil here in America,” he added. The United States is "now the largest producer of those products in the world.”
Electric power was out in more than 4 million homes and businesses in Texas Tuesday morning after temperatures dropped to record lows in the single digits overnight, freezing wind turbines and limiting gas supplies needed to generate enough power.
More than 1 million of the outages are reportedly in the Houston area alone, with more than 300,000 customers in the dark in San Antonio and Austin.
“The important thing about what we are seeing in Texas today is that we need a diverse energy supply,” Brouillette said. "The weather is certainly, behind some of this, but the weather is not the cause of the tragedy, it’s the policies that we’ve decided to follow. We’ve moved away from what is known as ‘baseload electricity’ and we’ve moved to intermittent and sometimes unreliable renewable energy and that technology is not yet ready for prime time."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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