Solar, wind and batteries are helping oil-rich Texas weather the heat wave
A punishing heat dome is putting unprecedented strain on Texas’s power grid, as residents crank up their air conditioners to cope with triple-digit temperatures.
Solar, wind and batteries are helping oil-rich Texas weather the heat wave
A punishing heat dome is putting unprecedented strain on Texas’s power grid, as residents crank up their air conditioners to cope with triple-digit temperatures.
But the nation’s top oil-and-gas-producing state has managed to keep the lights on — at least so far — because of abundant solar panels, wind turbines and giant batteries that store this clean energy.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which operates the grid serving most of the state, reported a record amount of renewable energy production yesterday. Solar and wind farms generated 31,468 megawatts, helping to offset about 8 megawatts that were lost when natural gas and coal plants were knocked offline.
“Wind and solar are giving us a big enough buffer that even when we have a handful of power plants go offline, it isn’t causing disruptions,” said Dan Cohan, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University in Houston.
Texas is uniquely vulnerable to blackouts because it cannot draw power from its neighbors. It is the only state in the contiguous United States disconnected from the national grid, a deliberate move to avoid federal regulation.
Yet unlike the 2021 winter freeze that saw millions of people lose power, this summer heat wave has caused no widespread outages. Officials have only had to ask households to conserve energy on one day since extreme temperatures began blanketing Texas two weeks ago.
It’s largely renewables that have helped residents stay cool. On Tuesday evening, when demand soared to an all-time high, wind and solar farms accounted for about 35 percent of the state’s energy supply. And at one point yesterday, wind turbines were generating more power across the state than any other source, including gas plants.
“You hear these talking points all the time that renewables aren’t reliable. But there’s little that’s more reliable," said Doug Lewin, president of the Austin-based clean-energy consulting firm Stoic Energy.
Max Kanter, a visiting scholar at MIT:
‘A raging inferno’
Texas isn’t out of the woods yet. Meteorologists are forecasting that the blistering conditions will last for at least a few more days, our colleagues Erica Werner and Dan Stillman report.
The National Weather Service in Houston warned that the heat index, which accounts for the combined impact of temperature and humidity, could continue soaring above 108 into the weekend.
“If you’ve been thinking to yourself, ‘Self, it’s felt like a raging inferno for a while … ’ Well, here’s some reassurance that it has indeed been feeling spicy for what seems like an eternity. Heat Indices have been in the triple digits for most of June,” the agency tweeted Tuesday night.
Meanwhile, five of the 10 hottest U.S. cities on Friday are expected to be in Texas, according to The Washington Post’s U.S. heat tracker. Del Rio, Tex., hit 115 degrees on June 21 and could reach a 10th consecutive day of tying or breaking record highs.
The politics
Texas has long been an epicenter of the oil and gas industry, with oil drilling pads and pumpjacks dotting the landscape in the vast Permian Basin. But two decades ago, the state’s conservative leaders laid the groundwork for Texas to become a clean energy powerhouse.
In 1999, then-Gov. George W. Bush signed a law deregulating the state’s power market and calling for 2,000 megawatts of renewable power capacity by 2009.
And in 2005, then-Gov. Rick Perry supported a multibillion-dollar effort to build transmission lines to carry power from the windy western part of the state to urban centers. (Perry later served as energy secretary under President Donald Trump.)
Today, Texas leads the nation in wind production and trails only California in solar production. But the state’s Republican leaders have recently changed their tune on renewables.
During the last legislative session, GOP lawmakers passed a bill to incentivize the construction of natural gas plants. The state Senate also approved legislation to impose onerous permitting requirements on large-scale wind and solar farms, although the measure didn’t clear the House before the end of the session.
A spokeswoman for state Sen. Lois W. Kolkhorst (R), one of the primary sponsors of the measure, said she was not available for an interview yesterday. State Sen. Mayes Middleton (R), the other primary sponsor, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Regardless of what state lawmakers do, wind and solar will continue taking off in Texas because of the state’s favorable topography, economics and federal policies such as the Inflation Reduction Act, Cohan said. The amount of solar power generated in Texas is projected to double by the end of next year.
“As long as the state legislature doesn’t get in the way of the wind and solar boom,” Cohan said, “we’re likely to see continued growth of those resources.”
Agency alert
EPA launches $7 billion program to bring solar to low-income homes
The Environmental Protection Agency yesterday launched a $7 billion competitive grant program for solar projects in low-income communities across the country, marking the administration’s latest environmental justice effort.
The Solar For All program, which is funded by the Inflation Reduction Act’s $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, will make up to 60 awards to projects serving states, territories, tribes, regions and eligible nonprofits. Groups can apply through Sept. 26 for the grants, which will guarantee that participating households save at least 20 percent on their electricity bills.
“Solar for All will help increase access to affordable, resilient and clean solar energy for millions of low-income households and communities that have too long lacked access to the cost-saving benefits of clean energy generation at home,” Jahi Wise, acting director of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund program, said during a call with reporters yesterday.
EPA Administrator Michael Regan and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who championed the program in Congress, announced the program yesterday while touring a residential solar project in Vermont. House Republicans have largely opposed the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, and in March they passed an energy package that sought to repeal its unobligated funds.
FERC lets Mountain Valley Pipeline resume construction
Less than a month after Congress greenlit every permit and blocked all legal challenges to the controversial Mountain Valley Pipeline, federal regulators yesterday granted the developer’s request to resume construction, Charles Young reports for West Virginia News.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued an order Wednesday confirming that the developer has “all necessary authorizations” for the 303-mile pipeline that would carry natural gas across West Virginia and Virginia. On Friday, the Army Corps of Engineers gave the project its final approval to cross streams and wetlands in its path.
Work on the pipeline is expected to resume “shortly,” said Natalie Cox, a spokeswoman for Equitrans Midstream, which has a 48.1 percent ownership interest and will operate the pipeline.
Local residents and climate activists have spent years fighting the project, citing its potential to pollute waterways and lock in planet-warming emissions for decades to come. But House Republicans and Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) sought to fast-track the pipeline as part of the deal with the White House to raise the federal debt ceiling. Manchin tweeted yesterday that the commission’s decision is “GOOD NEWS” for West Virginia and the nation.
Pressure points
Maryland governor to join Biden’s green buildings coalition
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D) today will announce that he is joining President Biden’s National Building Performance Standards Coalition, a group of state and local governments committed to setting building codes that reduce emissions and improve equity.
Moore will make the announcement during a visit to Baltimore with White House national climate adviser Ali Zaidi. They are expected to tour the Carver House, where high school students are getting hands-on training by retrofitting a vacant rowhouse into a net-zero-emission home.
Moore will be the third governor to join the coalition after Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D) and Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D). For Zaidi, the visit comes one day after Biden delivered a speech laying out “Bidenomics,” an expansive vision for benefiting the middle class by creating millions of well-paying jobs.
The power grid
Federal solar auction nets $105 million in bids
The Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Managementyesterday announced that an auction held in Nevada this week for utility-scale solar development yielded about $105 million in high bids, marking the highest-earning onshore renewable energy sale in the agency’s history.
The auction includes four parcels of public land across 23,675 acres in the Amargosa Desert. Together, the parcels could support nearly 3 gigawatts of clean power.
“This record-breaking auction for solar energy development is further evidence that the demand for clean energy has never been greater,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement.