Authored by Bret Biggart
A powerful headline in the Dallas Morning News last week should tell you all you need to know about where Texas and Texas energy are headed:
“Renewable energy developers, oil lobby and manufacturers unite against bill”
For anyone who hasn’t paid attention to energy in the last few years, a coalition of clean energy and fossil fuel industries could read like dogs and cats living together. For some of us, though, the biggest surprise is that it took this long.
Here’s a little context: there are a number of bills moving through the Texas Legislature that would, by design, knee-cap the state’s nation-leading clean energy resources. It’s a tough competition for worst bill, but the “winner” might be Senate Bill 715/House Bill 3356, which dumps heavy, unnecessary costs on future and current clean energy projects. That won’t just keep new renewables from being developed — it also will take current projects off the grid, sending electricity costs into orbit.
Obviously, that’s bad for renewables, but it’s also bad for everybody: consumers, businesses, and, yes, even oil and gas developers.
That’s because solar farms, wind farms, and battery storage facilities are generating the cheapest electricity in Texas: when the state adds costs to renewables or reduces the supply of energy, prices go up. In a report prepared for the Texas Association of Business, Aurora Energy Research said “restrictions on wind and solar development in Texas could increase wholesale power prices by 14% over the next 10 years.”
More than that, renewables increasingly offer the best way to build any new energy generation whatsoever. Right now, supply chain issues are limiting anyone’s ability to build new gas plants in the first place. So if Texas is going to build new power plants at all, those plants will probably need to run on clean energy for the next few years at least.
Renewables are also popular in Texas. Just last month, the group Conservative Texans for Energy Innovation released a poll showing 72% of Texans have a favorable opinion of renewable energy. That’s higher than it was two years ago, and it includes support from nearly two-thirds of Texas Republicans.
The oil and gas industry knows — maybe better than anyone — how valuable and important renewables have become on the Texas grid. Last year, the state approved a massive investment in transmission (i.e. big power lines that serve as superhighways to move electricity) to deliver more wind and solar power into the Permian Basin, where oil and gas operations are starved for electricity.
This is what an all-of-the-above energy strategy looks like: using Texas’s plentiful solar, wind, and other renewable energy resources to help tap Texas’s plentiful oil and gas resources — and making a big investment in a modernized power grid to do it.
Obviously, I’m a big fan of solar power. I’ve believed for a long time that the economics of solar would drive its growth. That’s happening right now: you can see it in the broad-based response to short-sighted attacks at the Texas Capitol.
Here’s hoping Texas lawmakers are catching up with the state’s big employers.