You probably know that Texas, a hot place, has been dangerously hot recently. Many parts of the Lone Star State have routinely had highs exceeding 100 degrees, and the heat index, which includes humidity, climbed as high as 125 degrees in some Gulf Coast cities.
Fortunately, the state has been able to meet skyrocketing power demands, thanks to renewable energy sources. The amount of solar energy generated in Texas has doubled since the start of last year, The New York Times’ David Goodman reported. “And it is set to roughly double again by the end of next year, according to data from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. Already, the state rivals California in how much power it gets from commercial solar farms, which are sprouting across Texas at a rapid pace, from the baked-dry ranches of West Texas to the booming suburbs southwest of Houston.”
So far this year, about 7 percent of the electric power used in Texas has come from solar, and 31 percent from wind.
Solar energy and batteries played a large role in preventing power outages during the latest heat wave—even as other energy sources struggled to stay online, Kristoffer Tigue wrote in Inside Climate News.
“Yesterday at 6:31CT, one of the four nuclear units in Texas stopped producing power,” Doug Lewin, an energy consultant and president of Austin-based Stoic Energy, wrote on Twitter June 16. “A new fast acting backup reserve (ECRS, which is mostly batteries) stabilized the grid and prevented bigger problems.”
“Renewables are definitely saving the grid and saving our wallets,” said Alison Silverstein, an independent energy consultant based in Austin, referring to the impact on electricity prices.
Texas still trails California in the amount of solar power on the roofs of homes. But in the growth of solar farms, it has been rapidly outstripping the Golden State, Goodman reported in The Times. In Fort Bend County, outside Houston, there are now six large solar farms, up from one in 2020.
Some of the credit goes to former Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican who helped establish Texas as the leading state for wind power. He backed a multibillion-dollar effort in 2005 to create transmission lines to bring power from the windy western part of the state to the major population centers.
Unfortunately, the oil and gas industry remains so politically strong in Texas that the Republican-dominated State Senate passed several bills in the spring that contained provisions that would add new costs and regulations to the solar and wind industries and severely limit the number of new projects in the state, energy experts told The Times. Those bills failed to pass before the legislative session ended, but they are likely to be reintroduced when the Senate reconvenes.
“Renewables have proved a favorite scapegoat for any problems with Texas’s power system — even when they’re actually the key to alleviating those problems,” columnist Catherine Rampell wrote recently.
Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act’s incentives for development of solar and wind energy, other states may be able to catch up with Texas. The transition would be even swifter if Congress taxed carbon dioxide emissions.