Texas Republicans Make Renewable Energy a Political Punching Bag

Texas is on a roll—an vitality use roll, that’s. This week, amid sweltering temperatures, the ability demand on the state’s grid soared to an all-time high on Wednesday, reaching 80,000 megawatts of demand. This marks the eleventh time this demand document has been damaged this 12 months alone.

Texas customers had been allowed to maintain their A/Cs cranking this week. But final week, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which manages the grid, requested customers on each Monday and Wednesday to preserve vitality throughout one other intense warmth wave.

As the grid creaks and groans below the stress, and because the widespread and lethal systemic failures throughout a freeze in February 2021 are contemporary on everybody’s thoughts, renewable vitality has as soon as once more turn into a political sizzling level on this contentious election 12 months. Texas Republicans, aided and abetted by conservative media, are fast to assign blame to renewable vitality for Texas’s issues at any time when handy. Last week, as ERCOT struggled for energy whereas the wind was low, conservative retailers like the Washington Times and Fox trumpeted how the “windmill-reliant power grid” was “strain[ing].” An editorial from the Wall Street Journal final Friday declared smugly that “unreliable renewable energy [is leading] to power outages” in Texas.

It’s onerous to pin down photo voltaic and wind’s function in Texas’s vitality combine. Some days wind and photo voltaic appear to be saving the grid, whereas low wind and cloud cowl on others signifies that the grid is faltering. Will blackouts this summer season be the fault of renewable vitality?

Regardless of what Republicans might say, wind and photo voltaic are doing an important job at offering energy to ERCOT this summer season as they’re meant. In the primary six months of this 12 months, wind and photo voltaic offered a record 36% of energy to the grid. One significantly sizzling day in mid-June noticed nearly 40% of the state’s vitality combine coming from wind. Solar has loved a very sturdy development spurt in Texas in latest months: Tright here’s now three times as much photo voltaic capability on the bottom this summer season as there was 18 months in the past. And these energies are sometimes complementary to one another, kicking in when the opposite is down.

“When the wind dies down during the day, that’s when the sun is producing the most power,” stated Joshua Rhodes, a researcher on the University of Texas, Austin’s Energy Institute. Renewables offering a lot energy, Rhodes stated, can be serving to offset the astronomically excessive fuel costs that vitality suppliers are struggling by way of worldwide, and maintain costs in Texas decrease than they might be in any other case.

The points with renewable energies on the grid are nothing new. “Sometimes wind and solar are the workhorse of the grid and they’re producing a lot of power, but sometimes the wind does die,” Rhodes stated. “We know this—we’ve had wind in ERCOT for 20 plus years. It’s not like this is a surprise.”

A wholesome grid system would have the ability to meet demand when each wind and photo voltaic are offline. This means offering dependable baseload energy like pure fuel, nuclear, or coal. (There’s additionally the promise of batteries to retailer all that further renewable juice: California has made some incredible gains in adding utility-scale batteries to its grid this 12 months.) But there are deep issues with the Texas grid particularly that predate the explosion of renewable vitality.

First, the state shouldn’t be giving its growing old energy fleet any breaks. Texan energy vegetation, which have already suffered from years of underinvestment, are being advised to principally run nonstop this summer season as a way to meet demand, providing operators little capacity to make repairs.

“Like the rest of the U.S., we’ve got an aging power plant fleet,” Rhodes stated. “They’re kind of like humans—they need time to rest. If you just sprint, you’re going to run out of energy at some point, versus if you run at a more moderate pace or take a break every once in a while. We’re not letting them do that.”

We’ve seen what occurs when excessive climate hits a stressed-out grid significantly onerous—albeit in a lot colder temperatures than what Texas is sweating by way of now. In 2021, a winter storm brought on a literal good storm of freak climate and grid failure, as demand for energy soared far past expectations and the growing old and pressured grid struggled in the course of the chilly. (Republicans tried guilty wind vitality again then, too—regardless of the widespread failure of natural gas in the course of the storm.) In the wake of that catastrophe, Texas legislators handed slender reforms to the ERCOT system, together with getting ready energy mills and transmission strains for chilly climate and shaking up ERCOT’s board. Abbot subsequently declared that “everything that needed to be done was done to fix the power grid in Texas.”

But the legislature ended up leaving a lot of attainable fixes on the desk that would have made actual progress in checking out the grid’s points. For occasion, lawmakers may have mandated constructing extra backup energy vegetation or permitting the grid to buy energy from different states throughout peak demand. ERCOT can be what’s referred to as an energy-only market, which means energy producers solely receives a commission for vitality they supply on a day-to-day foundation, quite than capacity markets, which pay assets for merely being out there; switching ERCOT over to a capability market mannequin was additionally on the desk for the legislature to contemplate within the wake of the storm final 12 months.

There’s “not a lot of transparency” to the standard of the reforms that had been really made within the wake of the storm, stated Ed Hirs, a professor of vitality economics on the University of Houston. “At this point, everyone is a political appointee, and every meeting of the public utility commission with the ERCOT CEO sounds like a stump speech. The governor is obviously quite concerned with a blackout having an impact on his reelection.”

This may clarify the right-wing eagerness to forged renewable vitality because the villain quite than confronting the complexities of Texas’s failing grid. Abbott is going through a heated governor’s race this fall, and opponent Beto O’Rourke has already seized on grid points as a key speaking level, vowing to make serious changes to ERCOT. Meanwhile, Abbott took some intense heat from pissed-off Texans who had been requested to preserve vitality throughout final week’s excessive temperatures.

There’s an opportunity the grid makes it by way of the summer season simply high-quality, saving Abbott a political disaster. But as temperatures keep excessive and should maintain getting greater, each Hirs and Rhodes say something may occur.

“It’s not hard to envision a hurricane hitting, cloud cover coming in, even—God forbid—smoke from wildfire could knock down solar and disrupt the wind patterns,” Hirs stated.

All this hullabaloo over applied sciences which are working simply as they’re meant to and serving to the grid survive shouldn’t be solely an illustration of how vitality generally is a political weapon however can be a very good reminder concerning the realities of the vitality transition.

“ERCOT is dependent on renewables—wind and solar needs to perform to keep the lights on. We can’t keep up with all this demand with traditional forms of energy,” Rhodes stated. “And we’re gonna have to make sure that we have enough capacity. We need to be clear-eyed about that, because if we’re not, that will not bode well for the energy transition we need.”