Earth Protect Blog

        

By J. David Goodman

The New York Times

Strafed by powerful storms and superheated by a dome of hot air, Texas has been enduring a dangerous early heat wave this week that has broken temperature records and strained the state’s independent power grid.

But the lights and air conditioning have stayed on across the state, in large part because of an unlikely new reality in the nation’s premier oil and gas state: Texas is fast becoming a leader in solar power.

The amount of solar energy generated in Texas has doubled since the start of last year. And it is set to almost double again by the end of next year, according to data from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. 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.

“Solar is producing 15% of total energy right now,” Joshua Rhodes, a research scientist at the University of Texas, said on a sweltering day in the state capital last week, when a larger-than-usual share of power was coming from the sun.

So far this year, about 7% of the electric power used in Texas has come from solar, and 31% from wind.

The state’s increasing reliance on renewable energy has caused some Texas lawmakers, mindful of the reliable production and revenues from oil and gas, to worry. “It’s definitely ruffling some feathers,” Rhodes said.

Several bills passed by the Republican-dominated state Senate in the spring 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 said. The bills failed to pass before the legislative session ended last month, but the desire among many Republicans in the state to take similar action, and their skepticism about renewable power, remains strong.

“Wind power was the biggest infrastructure mistake in TX history,” state Rep. Jared Patterson, a conservative Dallas-area Republican, said on Twitter on Wednesday. “It’s hot and will get hotter,” he wrote in an earlier tweet. “Solar is helping, but make no mistake, the 9th largest economy in the world runs on natural gas.”

The politics around electricity generation in Texas have undergone a rapid shift in recent years, punctuated by the failure of the power grid during a deadly winter storm in February 2021.

The immediate response of many Republicans, including Gov. Greg Abbott, was to blame frozen wind turbines, although subsequent reviews found that the persistent cold caused widespread outages at power plants fueled by natural gas.

The June heat wave has renewed debate over the grid as temperatures climb to dangerous levels. The border town of Del Rio reached 113 degrees on Tuesday, the highest temperature since records began over a century ago, according to the National Weather Service. Then, on Wednesday, it was 115 degrees.

It was not an isolated event. The heat dome perched over Texas followed one that broke records in Puerto Rico at the beginning of the month and another one that dried out central Canada, sparking disastrous wildfires. Scientists have warned that the steady warming of the planet is leading to an increase in the intensity and duration of heat waves.

Many Texans have become expert at following the ebb and flow of the state’s energy market, whose curves of supply and demand are posted in close to real time by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT. If demand for energy threatens to exceed supply, rolling blackouts could be a last resort.

State leaders have taken few steps to address surging demand in the fast-growing state. On Sunday, Abbott vetoed a bill aimed at increasing the energy efficiency of new Texas homes, saying the measure was “not as important as cutting property taxes.”

Paul Rasbury, who owns a flower shop outside Fort Worth, said he has made a practice of reducing his energy use. “We’re running our temperatures up, putting foil on the windows, closing up certain rooms and praying,” he said. “Lots of prayers.”