When Winter Storm Fern hit Texas in January 2026, the wind stopped blowing and the sun stopped shining — and for seventeen consecutive hours, Texans paid $766 million more for electricity than they would have otherwise. Energy Bad Boys has done the math that the wind and solar lobby declined to share.
The piece arrives as a direct rebuttal to the American Clean Power Association, the primary lobbying arm of the renewable energy industry, which claimed wind and solar saved consumers more than $2 billion during the storm, including $200 million in savings specifically within the Electric Reliability Council of Texas grid. Energy Bad Boys asked how those figures were calculated. The association never responded.
The Vanishing Act
The numbers underlying the analysis are not subtle. By 10 p.m. on January 25th, the Texas thermal fleet — coal, natural gas, and nuclear — was delivering 66,087 megawatts. Wind delivered 6,025 megawatts. Solar delivered zero. Battery storage, rather than contributing, was actually consuming 319 megawatts for charging. The grid's weather-dependent resources, which on paper represented roughly 23 percent of total installed capacity across the country, were punching far below their weight at exactly the moment the grid was under maximum stress.
Day-ahead wholesale prices reached $1,832 per megawatt-hour during the spike. Real-time prices hit $871 per megawatt-hour. Energy Bad Boys blended those two markets — using the actual January 2026 split of roughly 62.5 percent day-ahead and 37.25 percent real-time — to construct an hourly cost baseline and compare it against what consumers paid during the seventeen-hour price event. Using $20 million per hour as the pre-collapse baseline (the approximate cost at 4 p.m. on January 25th, just before wind and solar output dropped), the additional cost shaded in above that line totaled $766 million.
The piece draws a sharp distinction between technical outages and the more fundamental problem of intermittency. Thermal plants had outage rates of 88 to 90 percent availability during the spike — meaning they were overwhelmingly online and generating. Wind and solar, by contrast, were not technically "on outage." They simply had no wind or sunlight to convert. As the editors put it, the reserve margin calculation was defined deliberately to capture this reality: the available margin included "wind and solar can (and did) fail to show up due to a lack of wind or sunlight, even if they are not technically on outage."
The Market That Built This Problem
The deeper argument in the piece is structural, not meteorological. Texas's grid has not added net dispatchable capacity since 2003. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas operates as an energy-only market, meaning generators are compensated for the electricity they sell, not for being available when called upon. In theory, scarcity pricing — the massive price spikes that occur when supply tightens — should attract new investment in reliable plants. In practice, the piece argues, it has done the opposite.
Wind and solar's economics work precisely because they displace thermal generation during normal hours, depressing prices and revenue for gas and coal plants. The piece quotes its own November 2023 analysis citing a 2018 report from the WindSolar Alliance of Texas, in which an article author described this dynamic approvingly: the renewable buildout would mean "more hours where coal and gas plants are not operating, and more retirements of conventional generation." Energy Bad Boys is direct about the implication — what the renewable industry called a feature, grid reliability analysts would call a flaw.
The reserve margin data from the storm makes the correlation hard to dispute. When the available reserve margin fell below approximately 26 percent, wholesale prices spiked dramatically. The statistical model built from Winter Storm Fern data shows an R-squared of 0.91 — meaning roughly 91 percent of the variation in wholesale electricity prices during that period is explained by changes in available reserve margin alone. That is an unusually tight fit for a commodity market shaped by dozens of variables.
"In a 2018 article in PVMagazine detailing a report by the WindSolar Alliance of Texas, the article author bragged about the parasitic effect [wind and solar] electricity generators have on the revenues of more reliable power plants."
The $25 Billion Counterfactual
Having established the problem, Energy Bad Boys constructs a counterfactual. What if Texas had built 10,000 megawatts of new natural gas capacity instead of continuing to rely on weather-dependent resources? At current construction costs, that would run approximately $25 billion. Using the same reserve-margin-to-price model derived from actual storm data, the editors estimate that the additional gas capacity would have saved Texans $1.27 billion in scarcity pricing during those seventeen hours alone — meaning the avoided costs during a single storm event would represent roughly 5 percent of the total capital cost of the hypothetical buildout.
The piece does not claim this is the only valid conclusion, and it openly invites statistical rebuttal in the comments. But the directional argument is clear: a grid that cannot reliably serve peak demand during a winter storm has not solved the reliability problem simply by expanding nameplate capacity. It has deferred it, while dismantling the revenue model that would otherwise attract the dispatchable generation needed to close the gap.
Energy Bad Boys notes that thermal additions have mostly offset coal retirements in Texas, but that net dispatchable capacity growth has stalled even as peak demand has grown by more than 12,000 megawatts over the last decade. Population growth, industrial expansion, and data center construction are all driving demand higher. The installed thermal base, meanwhile, has actually shrunk since 2016 in absolute terms.
Where the Argument Has Seams
Critics will note that the $20 million per hour baseline is a choice, and a consequential one. Using the hour immediately before the wind and solar drop as the counterfactual normal assumes that prices would have remained flat absent the renewable collapse — but prices were already rising with demand as the storm peaked. A more conservative baseline might reduce the estimated additional cost, though it would not eliminate it.
The piece also sidesteps what a $25 billion natural gas buildout would do to ratepayer costs outside of scarcity events. Regulated cost recovery for new gas infrastructure typically flows through to consumers in rate base, meaning the capital cost would be socialized regardless of whether the plants run. The savings during storms would need to be weighed against ongoing carrying costs during the far more numerous hours when gas capacity sits idle. This is not a fatal objection — it is precisely the trade-off that energy-only market design is supposed to resolve through scarcity pricing — but the full accounting is more complicated than storm-event savings alone.
Renewable advocates would also point to longer time horizons: wind and solar do suppress prices during the roughly 8,000 non-storm hours per year, and the piece acknowledges this directly. Energy Bad Boys concedes that "it is absolutely possible for these resources to reduce wholesale costs at times," but frames the question as whether the grid is properly valuing reliability and whether Texas has become structurally dependent on resources that will fail at the worst moments. That reframing is legitimate — the question of grid value is not the same as the question of average-hour price suppression.
What the Lobby Claimed and Didn't Show
The most damaging section of the piece is also its simplest. The American Clean Power Association published a website claiming $2 billion in consumer savings during Winter Storm Fern. Energy Bad Boys requested the methodology. The association did not respond. The editors ran their own numbers and found the opposite conclusion — not savings, but $766 million in additional costs attributable to the renewable collapse.
The piece does not allege that the association's numbers are fabricated. It cannot, because the association provided no basis for evaluation. That opacity is itself a finding. An industry lobbying group making a nine-figure savings claim during a major grid stress event, then declining to explain how it arrived at that claim, leaves the field open for exactly the kind of adversarial analysis Energy Bad Boys has conducted. The association's silence is not exculpatory.
The U.S. Department of Energy's own post-storm assessment noted that the thermal fleet carried the day during Winter Storm Fern, with coal, natural gas, nuclear, and oil providing 86 percent of power generated during the peak, while wind contributed 8 percent and solar 2 percent. That federal accounting aligns with the generation data Energy Bad Boys used in its analysis. The lobby's counter-narrative did not contest those generation figures — it claimed savings anyway, through a methodology it has not disclosed.
Bottom Line
Energy Bad Boys has produced a rigorous, data-grounded challenge to the renewable lobby's post-storm spin, and the American Clean Power Association's refusal to explain its methodology has left that spin defenseless against scrutiny. The deeper structural argument — that Texas's energy-only market has systematically failed to value dispatchable reliability, and that the consequences are measured in nine-figure scarcity bills during every major weather event — is not new, but the Winter Storm Fern data has made it harder to dismiss. Whether the answer is 10,000 megawatts of new gas, a capacity market redesign, or some combination, the status quo has a price tag that is now quantified.