The powerful winter storm stampeding across the continental United States this week blasted Texas with arctic temperatures that triggered widespread blackouts, plunging millions into darkness as snow and record cold paralyzed the countrys second-largest state.

Republican lawmakers and right-wing pundits opposed to the Biden administrations clean energy policies leaped at the chance to blame the Lone Star States burgeoning use of wind power for the outages.

But while the output from all sources of electricity plunged in Texas, frozen instruments at coal, nuclear and natural gas power plants, coupled with a limited supply of natural gas, were the main cause of the rolling blackouts, Dan Woodfin, a senior director for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, told Bloomberg News on Tuesday. (ERCOT is the states main grid operator.)

Energy analysts and electricity experts said a complete failure to plan for extreme weather scenarios caused the kind of cascading disaster that risks becoming more common as climate chaos increases pressure on human systems.

Ironically, wind energy represented one bright spot for grid operators as the resource, which tends to ebb in the winter months, actually surpassed daily production forecasts over the past weekend.

ERCOT did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.