No, I haven't gone off my nut with blind patriotism
toward my native state. Yes, I
know that ex-governor Rick Perry said in 2014, "Calling CO2 a pollutant is
doing a disservice [to] the country, and I believe a disservice to the
world." But the fact of the
matter is that Texas has the most installed wind-generation capacity of any
state, more even than California, and shows no signs of turning back. How we got here is a lesson in the
effects of government regulation, and shows that sometimes less is more.
In an Associated Press article, reporter Michael
Biesecker points out the irony that three of the leading wind-generation
states—Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas—are also home to state and federal lawmakers
who have been the most critical of climate-change ideas and most supportive of
fossil fuel businesses such as oil and coal. He shows that in both 2014 and 2015, U. S. utilities spent
more money installing renewable-energy sources such as wind and solar than they
did building fossil-fueled power plants.
And the fossil-fuel plants they did build mostly burn natural gas, which
contributes less to the carbon-dioxide burden of the atmosphere than coal
does. The fact that natural gas is
so popular is largely because it's cheaper these days, and that's because the
largely Texas-based oil-and-gas-extraction industry figured out how to do
fracking, which has made more natural gas available now than we've had for a
long time.
A few years ago we were hearing calls for carbon taxes,
heavy regulation of fossil-fuel industries, and draconian mandates for Federal-
and state-funded renewable energy projects imposed from Washington and other
centers of governmental power.
Largely because Washington has been gridlocked for the last five or six
years, no significant Federal laws were passed, although the Obama
administration has done what it could through executive actions in those directions.
Meanwhile, in Texas we enjoy some peculiar advantages
when it comes to doing new things with electric power. Because years ago, Texas refused to
interconnect in a major way with the electric grids in the rest of the country,
most of the state gets power from an entity called ERCOT—the Electric
Reliability Council of Texas. Both
physically and legally, ERCOT is independent from both the rest of the U. S.
power grid and from the tangle of regulatory requirements that the rest of the
country has to deal with whenever a power utility wants to do something
different.
As Kyle Downey points out in an article at
lawstreetmedia.com, this freedom from outside utility regulations has allowed
Texas to pass innovative laws such as the Renewable Portfolio Standard in 1999,
which created mandates and funded incentives for utilities to develop renewable
energy sources such as wind and solar.
Modified over the years and threatened with repeal but never revoked,
the Standard has succeeded beyond most people's expectations. From barely 1,000 MW of installed
wind-generation capacity in 2002, wind power has grown to the extent that about
ten percent of all power produced in the state is generated by wind farms—some
17,000 MW as of 2015. Many
Texas utility customers can choose to "buy" only wind power through a
trading system that gives choices of sources and pricing plans, and this has
also allowed private individuals to vote for wind power with their wallets,
rather than much more indirectly at the ballot box.
The other factor Downey mentions that has made Texas a
wind-power leader is that we have a lot of land in the Panhandle where the wind
blows steadily almost all the time, and even conveniently gets stronger at
night when other renewables such as solar conk out. That everlasting wind on the prairie that early settlers
often found so annoying is finally turning out to be a money-making asset. The state has also provided a fund to
connect the remote wind-generation farms to the demand centers in populated
areas of the eastern and central part of the state with transmission lines, an
essential ingredient of the process that legislatures often overlook when
planning renewable-energy futures for their constituents. Overall, the wind-power picture has
never looked brighter in Texas, and there are more wind farms yet to be
built. One study has shown that
even without government incentives, building a wind farm is now the cheapest
way to install new generating capacity—even cheaper than fossil-fuel plants.
What are the implications of this story for the current
debate over carbon emissions and global climate change? For one thing, it tells me that
predicting what people are going to do is hard, unless you restrict them with
so many regulations that they don't have much choice. Few forecasters a decade ago would have foreseen the U. S.
getting to a point where it is nearly independent of oil imports, as we are
now. And even I thought that when
certain wind-power subsidies came to an end, that the bottom would fall out of
wind-generation growth in Texas. I
was wrong, obviously, and not for the first time.
On a personal level, much of what an individual worries
about does not in fact come to pass.
Something like this may be the case with carbon emissions. In researching this article, I came
across a chart showing that in 2013, China built more wind-generating power
plant capacity than nuclear-powered plants. China is still one of the world's largest offenders when it
comes to carbon emission because of its huge number of coal-fired power plants,
but it is an encouraging sign that even a highly autocratic government such as
China's recognizes the good sense in encouraging renewable energy sources.
All that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere isn't going to
go away overnight, and we will be dealing with the consequences of burning
fossil fuels, whatever they turn out to be, for many decades. But those who would like to empower a
world government with the means of forcing people to quit burning fossil fuels
should take a look at Texas, where climate-change deniers are happily building
wind farms, making money, and thumbing their noses at regulators who are
everywhere else but in Texas. It's
paradoxical, but it seems to work.
Sources: The AP article by Michael
Biesecker on how conservative states are leading the renewable-energy drive was
carried by numerous outlets and is available on the U. S. News & World
Report website at http://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2016-05-06/gop-states-benefiting-from-shift-to-wind-and-solar-energy. Kyle Downey's article "The Mystery
of Wind Energy in Texas" is at http://lawstreetmedia.com/issues/energy-and-environment/mystery-wind-energy-texas/. Rick Perry's quotation is from http://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/12/31/top-10-misguided-climate-deniers-quotes-2014
and the article about wind energy in China is at https://www.statista.com/chart/1233/wind-outpaces-nuclear-in-china/.
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