However, your "main cause" above is just the proximal cause, and FD's trying to rewind the clock before that - what lead up to those catastrophic NG failures.
Yes. But "led up to" implies a causal connection.
Consider the NG failures that happened before the ERCOT went into EEA3 and started shedding load at 1:23 am on the 15th. These failures happened because gas production equipment, gas supply lines, gas power stations (and I think in rare cases, electrical substations connecting power stations to the grid?) suffered from the winter storm.
The fact that wind power under-produced by a few GW didn't matter because up until then, the grid wasn't affected, except for voluntary measures: some industries can shed load when ERCOT tells them to, and likewise some smart homes can reduce consumption. The gas infrastructure still had full power.
And there is no other link between wind turbines and the gas power infrastructure than the electrical grid.
I've given plenty of quotes that clearly state NG equipment failed because it was freezing.
I don't think we have enough data yet to debunk a claim - and here I'm rewording in order to hopefully clarify, if this is not what's intended I will retract this immediately - that "without the Wind failures the blackouts wouldn't have happened".
Yes, we do have the data.
There's a demand forecast peak on the morning of Feb 15th, around 8 am, which exceeds the 1 am load by about 10 GW. For no blackout to happen, that power needs to come from somewhere. But if we look at the actual outages, wind had less than 10 GW outage at that time:
And more NG kept going offline, many because of the blackout, but some because of the fuel issues (see the gas graph in post #11) and the cold; 1.4GW of nuclear power went offline at 5:27am "
due to cold weather-related issues in the plant's feedwater system."
The shortfall was more than wind turbines could've made up even if all of them had been weatherized (as they are in colder climates).
At the same time, both wind and solar were the only power sources that actually exceeded their "extreme weather scenario" quotas.