> We are at the whims of nature, and until we figure out better solutions for these problems (battery storage, maybe), wind and solar have their disadvantages compared to thermal.

Pumped storage hydro works very well in many places. You can store as much energy as you can store water, and you can bring a lot of generation capacity online fast. Those facilities are pretty cool engineering projects. Texas hasn't got onboard yet AFAIK, but they've got enough land that they could maybe (water's a big factor, too) make it work to offset downtime of their wind and solar.

edit: I think Texas's largely go-it-alone strategy with their power grid might be pretty strategically misguided, but making it work could at least be an interesting problem

> It was, and is, a hugely meaningful factor. Sticking your head in the sand and pretending that it's a republican smear campaign doesn't help.

This could have been a really good comment if you hadn't started it out this way. Wind was one factor, but it did not suffer the largest outages of Texas's various electricity sources - someone in another comment shared a pretty good youtube video by Practical Engineering on this topic. And there really was a republican smear campaign against wind power following the event.