Tim McLaughlin & Nichola Garoom

(Reuters) – U.S. Senator Joe Manchin stated that one reason he couldn’t vote for President Joe Biden’s climate and social spending bill is because its incentives to renewable energy could threaten the stability of America’s power grid.

However, West Virginia, which is reliant on coal, still has the lowest reliability of electricity in the nation, according to a Reuters study of government data. These reasons are not related to limitations of wind and solar technology.

According to U.S. Energy Information Administration data, the average West Virginia electric customer experienced 468 minutes in outages last last year. This was despite West Virginia being dependent on coal-fired power stations for 88%.

According to data, this is four times more than the national average of just 116 minutes.

The reasons for West Virginia’s power woes were not related to problems with coal-fired power plants, which are considered a reliable energy source because they can run uninterrupted regardless of sun or wind conditions, but to trouble with the state’s local power lines.

According to company spokespersons, more than half the power outages occurred in West Virginia because of its densely forested landscape.

Appalachian Power is a unit that represents the power of Appalachia. American Electric West Virginia’s largest utility is Power, which serves 460,000 of its customers.

The company also stated that the response time to an outage is longer due to the high number of rural customers.

California and Texas have seen widespread blackouts that left many people without power. These states are rich in solar and wind energy and Texas has been particularly affected.

Manchin, a conservative Democrat, reiterated those concerns this week when he said he could not vote for Biden’s sweeping Build Back Better bill, which included $300 billion in tax credits for producers and buyers of clean energy sources like wind and solar. Manchin’s vote was critical to passing the legislation.

He warned that there would be “catastrophic effects for American citizens like what we saw in Texas and California,” if the transition to renewable energy is not made “faster than technology, or the market will permit.”

According to EIA data last year, electric customers in Texas were able to experience 132 and 107 minutes respectively of outages. This is far less than the outages experienced in West Virginia.

Manchin didn’t immediately reply to a Reuters inquiry for comment.

The Texas blackouts also had little to do with the state’s renewable energy sources, according to regulators. Its natural gas generator fleet proved to be unreliable, as the equipment frozen and fuel supply seized up.

California’s blackout, meanwhile, was caused mainly by poor planning for extreme heat and the state’s inability to import power from the surrounding region due to high demand.

Appalachian Power as well as Mon Power, which are both FirstEnergy units (NYSE:), said that reliability issues in West Virginia were entirely due to West Virginia’s distribution system and not its generation sources.

West Virginia’s utility regulators had earlier this month ordered that the four state-owned investor-owned utilities improve reliability by 5%. According to the Public Service Commission, some companies have shown little or no improvement in reliability over the eight previous years.

A request for comment was not answered by the commission immediately.