8 ms·

> In the spring of 2024, Texas’ installation of utility scale solar outpaced California’s, and jumped from 1,900 megawatts in 2019 to over 20,000 megawatts in 2

by stogot 2y ago

> In the spring of 2024, Texas’ installation of utility scale solar outpaced California’s, and jumped from 1,900 megawatts in 2019 to over 20,000 megawatts in 2024. As a result, solar met nearly 50 percent of the state’s peak power demand on some days. That’s impressive. And fairly green-friendly for a state that gets a bad rap for being in bed with oil/gas

epistasis 2y ago
My biggest fear is that Republican political correctness will come to over-regulate and stop the deployment of clean energy. You can already see it at the national level. Texas will have to decide if they like money and the free market more than being politically correct. You can already see this conflict in all the areas where the new factories have been built from Biden's IRA. These factories generally raise wages quite a bit, invigorate communities that feel like they have been forgotten, but that it's clean energy doing the good is kept on the down-low. To mix metaphors: don't poke the bear, lest the bear cuts off its nose to spite its face.
- renewiltord 2y ago
  Democrat political correctness is the one that's killing all of these in California right now. Environmentalism requires that solar and wind be banned. And Nevada's brand of environmentalism requires fighting geothermal.
  - tclancy 2y ago
    Citation needed.
  - epistasis 2y ago
    Well most of the environmental laws in the way of this were passed by California Republicans, and then expanded by the courts (whatever partisanship that is), and broadly supported by Democrats. But today it is not "politically incorrect" to advocate for changes to the environmental regulations for California Democrats. And they are definitely pursuing changes to regulations! So you are very correct that regulations are in the way, and that Democrats are in power, but you are wrong that it's politically incorrect to change the regulations.
    - renewiltord 2y ago
      A universal phenomenon of California democrats is that they're always advocating and pursuing changes but never changing anything. It's been some twenty years of CEQA reform pursuit. Democratic Party control: Legislature from 1996-present day; executive from 1999-2003, 2011-present day. In California politics, only Republicans pass things. Democrats always pursue and advocate.
    - gamblor956 2y ago
      All of the landmark CA laws (CEQA, CCCA, CCA, CESA, CDPA) were passed by Democratic legislatures. Most of them were signed by Reagan (who subsequently repudiated all of those laws as President) or Pete Wilson (who did not). The CSRA and CSGMA are the only two major CA environmental laws recent enough to be signed by a Democratic governor. Notably, by today's political standards, (gubernatorial-era) Reagan and Wilson would be characterized as moderate Democrats.
- stogot 2y ago
  The commission that regulates this (the Texas railroad commission) is fully republican as is most of their legislature/govenrment. The republicans are in charge of all this
  - epistasis 2y ago
    And at the moment additions to the grid are mostly an open free market. My fear is that they will change that to stop renewable energy. Many places that are extremely anti-renewable for partisan political reasons, such as Montana, have been caught on tape changing regulations to highly regulate and stymie solar. Texas has not been that way and I think there's probably a >50% chance that Texas Republicans on that commission will continue to choose the free market over blocking renewables. But there is a risk.
- rossdavidh 2y ago
  TX resident here: valid concern, but there are big moneyholders in TX investing in wind and solar here, and that has a tendency to override political orthodoxy. Lots of rich people who want their solar and wind investments to pay off, and they have pull in TX GOP.
- gnuser 2y ago
  In reality, the market will do it for them as the datacenter and energy boom requires more energy than green can provide and the money will flow anew to nuclear and fission.
  - toomuchtodo 2y ago
    Nuclear and fission take at least a decade to build. You can build the same firm renewables in 2-3 years. Regime change will occur first.
    - dralley 2y ago
      Right. As much as I like nuclear, you could overbuild solar or wind by a factor of 3 in half the time and pay the whole project off before the nuclear project even gets finished.
      - toomuchtodo 2y ago
        I am not violently allergic to nuclear, and am mindful that there will be places it is needed, although it’s going to be incredibly expensive and time consuming to build where needed. Texas has enormous wind and solar potential, they can skip it.
        tstrimple 2y ago
        Nuclear power is fundamentally incompatible with a for-profit energy sector. It makes zero sense as a profit seeking CEO to invest tens of billions of dollars and over a decade of development to something that might pay for itself over the next half century if ever. Especially when you can build wind farms that turn profits in under 16 months and solar even more quickly these days. Maybe nuclear makes sense for a country's long term energy security. But that literally has no bearing on what happens with US energy investments.
        epistasis 2y ago
        There's also the huge amount of economic risk in each construction project, which is too much financial risk for an entity the size of a utility to bear. I would argue that it makes little more sense for a nation state to take on that economic risk, either. Risk can be priced, and the bill for many the risks of nuclear are already picked up by others due to the laws around nuclear. If, even with those massive subsidies, nuclear is too economically risky for utilities, I would argue that it's too costly overall for anyone. Or at least a poor decision. Until there's some major innovation in nuclear construction, the risk should be reserved for those with no better options (e.g. Finland, maybe the UK, etc.)
- conradev 2y ago
  Solar panels are a commodity and they are getting cheaper. That will continue regardless of which political party is in charge. Moving the solar supply chain to be domestic is a massive undertaking. First Solar, one of the stronger US companies, will be at at 50/50 manufacturing in the US versus not: "We inaugurated our new $1.1 billion Alabama facility, which when, fully scaled, adds 3.5 gigawatts of vertically integrated nameplate solar manufacturing capacity. The start of commercial operation at the Alabama facility, along with our under construction Louisiana facility, which remains on track to begin operations in the second half of 2025, keeps us on course to achieve our projection of over 14 gigawatts of annual U.S. nameplate capacity and over 25 gigawatts of global nameplate capacity by 2026." https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2024/10/29/first-solar-fslr-q3-2024-earnings-call-transcript/ https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2024/10/29/fi... You are correct that it will take investment to continue to build factories here instead of Malaysia or India, but the factories will be built regardless.
  - epistasis 2y ago
    My specific fear is that connecting those cheap solar panels to the grid will be the hard part. I have no doubt that they will continue to plummet in price, and than new innovative installation methods will continue to cause installation prices to drop, etc. etc. The technology for a 100% renewable energy system for all of humanity is about 90%-95% there, the biggest impediment is political and not technical now. (Hard-to-decarbonize areas like industry is close but not there yet, and we can do all the other areas while new solutions are found for cement, chemicals, etc.)
    - ViewTrick1002 2y ago
      My personal view is that rooftop solar and home batteries are putting a price roof on what people accept their electricity bills to cost. As the solar and storage costs continue to plummet even if you can’t sell electricity to the grid we will increasingly see more and more homes with near zero electricity usage for much of the year. No matter how much you attempt to force fossil fuels down these people throats there’s nothing you can do if people simply don’t pull energy from the grid. Then the expensive facilities sit unused. Offloading these costs on the voters will quickly become politically untenable.
chasd00 2y ago
The big solar farms are really amazing in scale. The blue shimmer of the panels look just like water from far away and they’re so big it literally looks like a lake in the distance. There’s a few just outside the Permian basin like this that I’ve seen. It’s funny that they’re right near the big fracking operations but I guess that’s because of logistics, land availability, and grid access. Edit: I want one so bad, something cool about being a farmer but farming photons instead of plants and animals.
- johnea 2y ago
  Why choose? Farm both! Especially for grazing, raised photovoltaic allows the photons to be harvested along with allowing goats or cows to graze the landscape. Crops can also be grown in between rows of solar. This arrangement also mitigates the often destructive effect that large utility scale solar has on the landscape. The landscape degradation is why having generation, and transmission, be as locally contained as possible is the best technical solution. But utilities often fight this, since they make money on large utility scale project, and loose money on building and neighborhood scale generation and distribution. As always, the middle way is the best. Too bad nuance is not longer an allowed perspective...
rossdavidh 2y ago
Texas resident here. Texas has a few advantages with wind and solar: 1) most years (with notable exceptions), peak electricity happens when the sun is shining 2) west Texas is very windy One of the reasons that TX was caught flat-footed a few years ago in a cold snap, was that in a decade we went from oil-and-coal power generation to mostly natgas (which froze up), wind (which froze up, albeit not as much as the natgas), and solar (not working at night). It was the first very hard freeze under the new power mix. Not so long ago TX was talking about "clean coal"; now it is natgas, wind, and solar.
- vel0city 2y ago
  > wind (which froze up, albeit not as much as the natgas) Just a note about how much wind froze up in Texas: wind outperformed projected supply for the cold snap.
  - Animats 2y ago
    Texas energy wasn't prepared for severe freezes. You can buy the gear to run natural gas pipelines and wind turbines in arctic conditions. Natural gas has to be dried out near the source in cold climates.[1] It's water mixed with the gas that's the problem. Wind turbines with blade heaters run fine in Norway. It's a factory option. (The turbine itself provides the power to run heaters. One source says about 1/7 of output power is needed for blade heating in icing conditions.) [1] https://idc-online.com/technical_references/pdfs/electronic_engineering/057.pdf https://idc-online.com/technical_references/pdfs/electronic_...
- dralley 2y ago
  IIRC they also had problems with the water intake at one of the nuclear power plants freezing up, so that had to shut down too. There's no magic source of power that is immune from needing to prepare for exceptional weather conditions.
  - rossdavidh 2y ago
    True; it was nuclear power's turn to shine, and it, uh, didn't.
conradev 2y ago
It's unfortunate that Texas gets a bad rap. The actual thing they did is deregulate their (residential) electricity market, which only Massachusetts followed suit with. By separating what you pay for transmission (monopoly) from generation (free market), it created a persistent demand for more/better/cheaper supply. It is a much more flexible structure that allows municipalities to do cool stuff like this: https://www.cambridgema.gov/CDD/News/detail.aspx?path=/sitecore/content/home/cdd/news/2022/10/energymixlabel https://www.cambridgema.gov/CDD/News/detail.aspx?path=/sitec... Texas will have great energy infrastructure because they let developers build it.
- johnea 2y ago
  Well of course, why would anyone even use electricity unless an absentee investor was reaping ROI from it? Duh...
  - hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
    I know your comment is sarcastic, but yes, of course. I consider myself someone with "liberal values", but I don't understand why so many liberals like to pretend that the reality of economic incentives don't exist. Sure, it would be nice if we could all sing kumbaya together and build things, but the real world largely doesn't work that way. And it's not just "big developers" - most people would choose the more polluting energy source if it saved them 5 cents. Other similar situation: so many people in "liberal cities" like to rail against "big evil developers" when it comes to housing, and as a result they have a giant housing shortage that is responsible for tons of social ills. In Austin we've built a shit ton of housing, especially rental, by letting developers build, and surprise surprise housing and rental costs in Austin have fallen a ton since their (admittedly ridiculous) peak.
    - hobs 2y ago
      We're not pretending it doesn't exist, but the failures of Texas power grid have been pretty obvious the last few years with major power failures, rampant price gouging, and deaths attributable to these failures - so the "oh the incentives are fixing it!" when no states needs to have those problems is looking with rose tinted glasses.
imglorp 2y ago
Economics wins, despite public policy and misguided ideology. Fossil loses in a windy, sunny state in a fair market.
matt_heimer 2y ago
I guess we should be happy that there is now more solar energy produced than energy consumed by Bitcoin mining in the state. Super green! https://www.texastribune.org/2024/07/10/texas-bitcoin-mine-noise-power-grid-cryptocurrency/ https://www.texastribune.org/2024/07/10/texas-bitcoin-mine-n...
jeffbee 2y ago
Something readers need to know to interpret a comparison between California and Texas is that Texas uses way, way more electricity than California. Part of the reason why California need not keep pace with Texas in this race is that California pursues efficiency standards and dispersed solar generation to a greater degree. CAISO's peak load hasn't grown much in the last 20 years. The 2024 peak load minute was below the 2006 peak load minute, despite a 23% larger population. ERCOT dispatches twice as much power per capita.
throwawaymaths 2y ago
and moreover inasmuch as their oil/gas is replacing coal and even sulfur-heavy sources like athabasca sands, it's some of the cleanest (net energy to extract, transport, and refine) carbon energy available.

by stogot 2y ago

epistasis 2y ago

My biggest fear is that Republican political correctness will come to over-regulate and stop the deployment of clean energy. You can already see it at the national level. Texas will have to decide if they like money and the free market more than being politically correct. You can already see this conflict in all the areas where the new factories have been built from Biden's IRA. These factories generally raise wages quite a bit, invigorate communities that feel like they have been forgotten, but that it's clean energy doing the good is kept on the down-low. To mix metaphors: don't poke the bear, lest the bear cuts off its nose to spite its face.

renewiltord 2y ago
Democrat political correctness is the one that's killing all of these in California right now. Environmentalism requires that solar and wind be banned. And Nevada's brand of environmentalism requires fighting geothermal.
- tclancy 2y ago
  Citation needed.
- epistasis 2y ago
  Well most of the environmental laws in the way of this were passed by California Republicans, and then expanded by the courts (whatever partisanship that is), and broadly supported by Democrats. But today it is not "politically incorrect" to advocate for changes to the environmental regulations for California Democrats. And they are definitely pursuing changes to regulations! So you are very correct that regulations are in the way, and that Democrats are in power, but you are wrong that it's politically incorrect to change the regulations.
  - renewiltord 2y ago
    A universal phenomenon of California democrats is that they're always advocating and pursuing changes but never changing anything. It's been some twenty years of CEQA reform pursuit. Democratic Party control: Legislature from 1996-present day; executive from 1999-2003, 2011-present day. In California politics, only Republicans pass things. Democrats always pursue and advocate.
  - gamblor956 2y ago
    All of the landmark CA laws (CEQA, CCCA, CCA, CESA, CDPA) were passed by Democratic legislatures. Most of them were signed by Reagan (who subsequently repudiated all of those laws as President) or Pete Wilson (who did not). The CSRA and CSGMA are the only two major CA environmental laws recent enough to be signed by a Democratic governor. Notably, by today's political standards, (gubernatorial-era) Reagan and Wilson would be characterized as moderate Democrats.
stogot 2y ago
The commission that regulates this (the Texas railroad commission) is fully republican as is most of their legislature/govenrment. The republicans are in charge of all this
- epistasis 2y ago
  And at the moment additions to the grid are mostly an open free market. My fear is that they will change that to stop renewable energy. Many places that are extremely anti-renewable for partisan political reasons, such as Montana, have been caught on tape changing regulations to highly regulate and stymie solar. Texas has not been that way and I think there's probably a >50% chance that Texas Republicans on that commission will continue to choose the free market over blocking renewables. But there is a risk.
rossdavidh 2y ago
TX resident here: valid concern, but there are big moneyholders in TX investing in wind and solar here, and that has a tendency to override political orthodoxy. Lots of rich people who want their solar and wind investments to pay off, and they have pull in TX GOP.
gnuser 2y ago
In reality, the market will do it for them as the datacenter and energy boom requires more energy than green can provide and the money will flow anew to nuclear and fission.
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  Nuclear and fission take at least a decade to build. You can build the same firm renewables in 2-3 years. Regime change will occur first.
  - dralley 2y ago
    Right. As much as I like nuclear, you could overbuild solar or wind by a factor of 3 in half the time and pay the whole project off before the nuclear project even gets finished.
    - toomuchtodo 2y ago
      I am not violently allergic to nuclear, and am mindful that there will be places it is needed, although it’s going to be incredibly expensive and time consuming to build where needed. Texas has enormous wind and solar potential, they can skip it.
      - tstrimple 2y ago
        Nuclear power is fundamentally incompatible with a for-profit energy sector. It makes zero sense as a profit seeking CEO to invest tens of billions of dollars and over a decade of development to something that might pay for itself over the next half century if ever. Especially when you can build wind farms that turn profits in under 16 months and solar even more quickly these days. Maybe nuclear makes sense for a country's long term energy security. But that literally has no bearing on what happens with US energy investments.
        epistasis 2y ago
        There's also the huge amount of economic risk in each construction project, which is too much financial risk for an entity the size of a utility to bear. I would argue that it makes little more sense for a nation state to take on that economic risk, either. Risk can be priced, and the bill for many the risks of nuclear are already picked up by others due to the laws around nuclear. If, even with those massive subsidies, nuclear is too economically risky for utilities, I would argue that it's too costly overall for anyone. Or at least a poor decision. Until there's some major innovation in nuclear construction, the risk should be reserved for those with no better options (e.g. Finland, maybe the UK, etc.)
conradev 2y ago
Solar panels are a commodity and they are getting cheaper. That will continue regardless of which political party is in charge. Moving the solar supply chain to be domestic is a massive undertaking. First Solar, one of the stronger US companies, will be at at 50/50 manufacturing in the US versus not: "We inaugurated our new $1.1 billion Alabama facility, which when, fully scaled, adds 3.5 gigawatts of vertically integrated nameplate solar manufacturing capacity. The start of commercial operation at the Alabama facility, along with our under construction Louisiana facility, which remains on track to begin operations in the second half of 2025, keeps us on course to achieve our projection of over 14 gigawatts of annual U.S. nameplate capacity and over 25 gigawatts of global nameplate capacity by 2026." https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2024/10/29/first-solar-fslr-q3-2024-earnings-call-transcript/ https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2024/10/29/fi... You are correct that it will take investment to continue to build factories here instead of Malaysia or India, but the factories will be built regardless.
- epistasis 2y ago
  My specific fear is that connecting those cheap solar panels to the grid will be the hard part. I have no doubt that they will continue to plummet in price, and than new innovative installation methods will continue to cause installation prices to drop, etc. etc. The technology for a 100% renewable energy system for all of humanity is about 90%-95% there, the biggest impediment is political and not technical now. (Hard-to-decarbonize areas like industry is close but not there yet, and we can do all the other areas while new solutions are found for cement, chemicals, etc.)
  - ViewTrick1002 2y ago
    My personal view is that rooftop solar and home batteries are putting a price roof on what people accept their electricity bills to cost. As the solar and storage costs continue to plummet even if you can’t sell electricity to the grid we will increasingly see more and more homes with near zero electricity usage for much of the year. No matter how much you attempt to force fossil fuels down these people throats there’s nothing you can do if people simply don’t pull energy from the grid. Then the expensive facilities sit unused. Offloading these costs on the voters will quickly become politically untenable.

chasd00 2y ago

The big solar farms are really amazing in scale. The blue shimmer of the panels look just like water from far away and they’re so big it literally looks like a lake in the distance. There’s a few just outside the Permian basin like this that I’ve seen. It’s funny that they’re right near the big fracking operations but I guess that’s because of logistics, land availability, and grid access. Edit: I want one so bad, something cool about being a farmer but farming photons instead of plants and animals.

johnea 2y ago
Why choose? Farm both! Especially for grazing, raised photovoltaic allows the photons to be harvested along with allowing goats or cows to graze the landscape. Crops can also be grown in between rows of solar. This arrangement also mitigates the often destructive effect that large utility scale solar has on the landscape. The landscape degradation is why having generation, and transmission, be as locally contained as possible is the best technical solution. But utilities often fight this, since they make money on large utility scale project, and loose money on building and neighborhood scale generation and distribution. As always, the middle way is the best. Too bad nuance is not longer an allowed perspective...

rossdavidh 2y ago

Texas resident here. Texas has a few advantages with wind and solar: 1) most years (with notable exceptions), peak electricity happens when the sun is shining 2) west Texas is very windy One of the reasons that TX was caught flat-footed a few years ago in a cold snap, was that in a decade we went from oil-and-coal power generation to mostly natgas (which froze up), wind (which froze up, albeit not as much as the natgas), and solar (not working at night). It was the first very hard freeze under the new power mix. Not so long ago TX was talking about "clean coal"; now it is natgas, wind, and solar.

vel0city 2y ago
> wind (which froze up, albeit not as much as the natgas) Just a note about how much wind froze up in Texas: wind outperformed projected supply for the cold snap.
- Animats 2y ago
  Texas energy wasn't prepared for severe freezes. You can buy the gear to run natural gas pipelines and wind turbines in arctic conditions. Natural gas has to be dried out near the source in cold climates.[1] It's water mixed with the gas that's the problem. Wind turbines with blade heaters run fine in Norway. It's a factory option. (The turbine itself provides the power to run heaters. One source says about 1/7 of output power is needed for blade heating in icing conditions.) [1] https://idc-online.com/technical_references/pdfs/electronic_engineering/057.pdf https://idc-online.com/technical_references/pdfs/electronic_...
dralley 2y ago
IIRC they also had problems with the water intake at one of the nuclear power plants freezing up, so that had to shut down too. There's no magic source of power that is immune from needing to prepare for exceptional weather conditions.
- rossdavidh 2y ago
  True; it was nuclear power's turn to shine, and it, uh, didn't.

conradev 2y ago

It's unfortunate that Texas gets a bad rap. The actual thing they did is deregulate their (residential) electricity market, which only Massachusetts followed suit with. By separating what you pay for transmission (monopoly) from generation (free market), it created a persistent demand for more/better/cheaper supply. It is a much more flexible structure that allows municipalities to do cool stuff like this: https://www.cambridgema.gov/CDD/News/detail.aspx?path=/sitecore/content/home/cdd/news/2022/10/energymixlabel https://www.cambridgema.gov/CDD/News/detail.aspx?path=/sitec... Texas will have great energy infrastructure because they let developers build it.

johnea 2y ago
Well of course, why would anyone even use electricity unless an absentee investor was reaping ROI from it? Duh...
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  I know your comment is sarcastic, but yes, of course. I consider myself someone with "liberal values", but I don't understand why so many liberals like to pretend that the reality of economic incentives don't exist. Sure, it would be nice if we could all sing kumbaya together and build things, but the real world largely doesn't work that way. And it's not just "big developers" - most people would choose the more polluting energy source if it saved them 5 cents. Other similar situation: so many people in "liberal cities" like to rail against "big evil developers" when it comes to housing, and as a result they have a giant housing shortage that is responsible for tons of social ills. In Austin we've built a shit ton of housing, especially rental, by letting developers build, and surprise surprise housing and rental costs in Austin have fallen a ton since their (admittedly ridiculous) peak.
  - hobs 2y ago
    We're not pretending it doesn't exist, but the failures of Texas power grid have been pretty obvious the last few years with major power failures, rampant price gouging, and deaths attributable to these failures - so the "oh the incentives are fixing it!" when no states needs to have those problems is looking with rose tinted glasses.

imglorp 2y ago

Economics wins, despite public policy and misguided ideology. Fossil loses in a windy, sunny state in a fair market.

matt_heimer 2y ago

I guess we should be happy that there is now more solar energy produced than energy consumed by Bitcoin mining in the state. Super green! https://www.texastribune.org/2024/07/10/texas-bitcoin-mine-noise-power-grid-cryptocurrency/ https://www.texastribune.org/2024/07/10/texas-bitcoin-mine-n...

jeffbee 2y ago

Something readers need to know to interpret a comparison between California and Texas is that Texas uses way, way more electricity than California. Part of the reason why California need not keep pace with Texas in this race is that California pursues efficiency standards and dispersed solar generation to a greater degree. CAISO's peak load hasn't grown much in the last 20 years. The 2024 peak load minute was below the 2006 peak load minute, despite a 23% larger population. ERCOT dispatches twice as much power per capita.

throwawaymaths 2y ago

and moreover inasmuch as their oil/gas is replacing coal and even sulfur-heavy sources like athabasca sands, it's some of the cleanest (net energy to extract, transport, and refine) carbon energy available.