FACT CHECK: Fox News aired bizarre and wildly misleading claims about Texas’ blackouts that pin blame on renewables and climate policies

FACT CHECK: Fox News aired bizarre and wildly misleading claims about Texas’ blackouts that pin blame on renewables and climate policies

While millions of Texans suffered from power outages amid extreme winter weather, a slew of Fox News hosts and guests misled their viewers by blaming the state's power grid collapse on renewable energy and progressive climate policies. 

Prominent Republicans, including the governor of Texas, President Donald Trump's former energy secretary, and Fox primetime hosts, pegged the problem on wind and solar energy, the Green New Deal, and President Joe Biden's administration for the state's infrastructure failure. 

We fact-checked those claims. 

'The windmills froze' 

"The windmills froze, so the power grids failed," Fox opinion host Tucker Carlson claimed Monday night. "It seems pretty clear that a reckless reliance on windmills is the cause of this disaster."

Fact check: The majority of energy sources that went offline in Texas were not wind turbines, but power plants that run on fossil fuels, including natural gas. While Texas produces more wind energy than any other state, the state's grid manager, ERCOT, was only expecting wind farms to produce 7% of its energy in the winter. 

The term "windmill" is also not quite correct. Windmills are used to mill corn and other grains into flour and pump water. Wind turbines generate electricity.

A spokesperson for Fox News declined to comment on the record, but pointed