Overview
- At an EPA event on Thursday, President Trump asked Americans to “remember” a massive television outage he blamed on wind turbines not producing power.
- Nielsen data show more than 51 million people watched the June 27, 2024 debate on television, directly contradicting the president’s claim that viewers could not watch because the wind wasn’t blowing.
- Federal energy figures show wind supplied roughly 10 percent of U.S. net electricity generation in 2024 and experts say the power grid uses multiple sources plus battery storage to keep electricity flowing when wind output falls.
- Fact-checkers and California officials also refuted two other claims from the same remarks: that California has weekend blackouts and that the U.S. received $19.2 trillion in investment in the first 12 months of his term.
- CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale and multiple outlets publicly debunked the anecdotes on air, underscoring a pattern of repeated fabricated stories from the president and leaving the administration without evidence to support the new claims.