Of all the states in the country, Texas is the leader when it comes to wind and solar renewable energy. What lessons can we learn by looking to Texas?
Today, On Point: How Texas became America’s clean energy leader.
Guests
Michael Webber, professor of engineering and public affairs who studies energy at the University of Texas at Austin. He also runs the Webber Energy Group at UT Austin.
Kate Gordon, CEO of CA FWD, a statewide organization dedicated to a more sustainable, resilient, and inclusive economy.
Also Featured
John Davis, 5th generation Texan maintaining his family ranch in Central Texas.
Transcript
Part I
JOHN DAVIS: My name is John Davis. I’m here with my son Samuel Davis here and we’re at Stoney Lonesome Ranch. Here in Central Texas.
MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: John Davis’s family has been on Texas land since 1868. His great, great grandparents came over from Germany and became ranchers. A few decades later, the family started another ranch 30 miles away.
DAVIS: This is my ranch and I’m raising some of my Wagyu cattle back here. And we also have some Dorpers, we’re going to go look at those, and some Spanish Goats. But this has been in the family, this particular ranch since 1902. And this is an honor to be able to show it off. We have some wind turbines in the background. And we have our water, our water windmill over here to the, over here.
CHAKRABARTI: That’s John talking in an online video. And behind him are grazing cattle. John’s raising something else on the land. Profits — from wind power.
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This is On Point. I’m Meghna Chakrabarti. Back at home, John Davis described the land in more detail to us.
DAVIS: It’s rolling hills. It’s in the Edwards Plateau region central, central West Texas. We have a lot of live oaks, a lot of mesquites, a lot of cactus, a lot of rocks. You can run a cow about every 25 acres.
It’s, you know, semi-arid, but we do get around 22 to 24 inches of rain a year, and it’s beautiful country. But it’s rugged. You have to be tough to etch out a living there. It’s hard to hardly make it.
CHAKRABARTI: Stoney Lonesome is almost 1,300 acres, about two square miles. And Davis is keeping with tradition on his ranch.
He runs about 300 head of sheep, 200 goats and 50 cows. His great-great grandmother, Johanna Wilhelm, raised sheep, goats and cattle. She was known as far away as Boston as the Sheep Queen of Texas.
DAVIS: It’s always been that way. That type of making a living out of the land, and then trying to do whatever you can to make it.
And that’s where it’s led to our wind turbines, which is just give us another way to be able to make some income to keep being a producer.
CHAKRABARTI: Wind power has been a lifesaver for John. Before wind, John had hoped they’d find natural gas or oil on their land as a way to keep the ranch afloat. Here’s John and his son Samuel Davis out on the ranch again.
SAMUEL DAVIS: So not every county, not every community is blessed with oil and gas, and so they, you know, a lot of people say, well, why don’t they just drill for oil? Well, they don’t have it, and so you have to be resourceful. Every county, every school district, they have to use what is.
JOHN DAVIS: The wind’s blowing, it’s blowing back. I didn’t, I didn’t strike oil, but I struck wind. That’s right, that’s good. It blows me back. Hey, but we’re in a certain vein here. The wind blows and blows. We don’t have the resources below, but we got resources above, and this is what God gave us, a lot of wind.
And a lot of sun, let’s take advantage of it, and use that to, we’ve had windmills for thousands of years, you know, been generating, we’ve been having it for hundreds of years, getting us water, doing that, to feed our livestock, to feed everything, why not use that wind turbine that gives energy so we can live and do things, it’s crazy not to support it, I don’t, the people that are opposed to it, I don’t get it.
CHAKRABARTI: Now, John wasn’t always a proponent of wind power. At first, he thought the turbines were ugly. He also worried that wind would defy another family tradition. His father had been with Shell Oil his entire working life and so John thought he’d veto the wind idea.
But the wind company was persistent too. Back then it was called Renewable Energy Systems America. It’s now owned by the company Southern Power. And they came knocking three times before John and his family signed up. Eventually, the economics of Texas wind farming were just too good to turn down.
DAVIS: We were the last holdouts, but there are about seven of us that they agreed to. We agreed to do it because they were doing it. But no push back. It was, people were receptive because they understand. They understand you get money any way you can. I mean it, because that helps you survive, that helps you to keep being a producer.
Because, and I look at it, we’re just a new phase, a producer. This is, to me, it looks futuristic. It’s, they look to me, they look angelic to me. It makes sense. It allows us to keep ranching.
CHAKRABARTI: John now has seven wind turbines on his ranch. He’s got a 25-year agreement that pays royalties every three months, and the wind power currently makes up 35% to 40% of the income from the ranch.
Now, the Davises are part of a long term, massive boom in Texas clean energy. Consider the remarkable facts. Texas is the largest producer of wind generated electricity in the United States. If Texas were a country. Texans, I know a lot of you wish that were the case, but if Texas were a country, it would be the fifth largest in the world in terms of installed wind capacity.
In Texas itself, wind farms created 22% of the electricity generated for the state. But even as clean energy and clean energy profits grow in Texas, political opposition still runs deep in this solidly red state, particularly in the Texas state legislature where there have been legislative efforts to push back against renewables.
Also, President-elect Trump has long disliked the idea of wind power and just a few days ago he declared that, quote, no new windmills, end quote, would be built once he took office. John Davis doesn’t understand it.
DAVIS: It’s my party and I’m a strong conservative. Party has just become very divisive over energy when I mean, to me again, it makes no sense.
But, you know, so I think Trump, all of his rhetoric and that’s his talk. And that’s what he does. And he kind of loud, does it. That’s how he negotiates. But, no, I think it’s indisputable how much when it’s saved, the consumer, the working man, the working folks on their electric bills, how much they say it has paid huge dividends for people and that will, it’s not going to go away.
It’s trending that way.
CHAKRABARTI: John just doesn’t see any reason why something so profitable should be political. Last May, he attended the 2024 Texas State Republican Convention in San Antonio. And there, he walked up to an exhibit about wind turbines.
DAVIS: And you had this big old display that took up a quarter of the room, but a lot of the room, had these solar panels, had some little miniature wind turbines there, that had these dead birds, eagles were laying little stuffed animals, little eagles all laying on the ground.
And the Republican Party primary, this is the red meat, their market is this wind is killing all these birds and it’s hurting the environment and the solar panels, the rain that comes in there, drops these chemicals into the ground and it kills the, you can’t raise anything on solar panels, which is the falsity because you can raise sheep under solar panels and you can raise agriculture products under the solar panels.
You don’t want to put goats on there, but sheep. And what they do is this young, you know, attractive young lady with the TCU, it’s her first day there. And then another kid, they don’t know what they’re talking about, but I wasn’t trying to embarrass them.
I invited them to the ranch. I said, Hey, you’re here. You’re a conservative. Hey, I love it. But why don’t you come visit our plant? I gave her my card and my phone number. I said, we’ll show you. This is what it is. You’re getting misinformation, is what you’re receiving. And there are lies. And it angers me because these are conservatives.
These are my people. Anyway, I invited her to the ranch to come see it. We’ll show you what we have. But she hasn’t called yet.
CHAKRABARTI: John doesn’t like it, that renewable energy has become such a liberal versus conservative issue. But in Texas, he says, this divide is very real. Just a couple of years ago, five years ago, he was hesitant to even talk about wind power when he ran into an old friend in the state capitol building. So we’re crossing each other in the hallway, and he said, Hey, John, what do you, Hey, how you doing?
How you doing? He said, I’m starting to do some work for Conservative Texans for Energy Innovation, CTI. We promote wind and solar and that. And I said, Oh wow, Matt, that’s cool. I hadn’t seen Matt in probably eight years. And so I looked around and people walking by. So I looked to my left, to my right and make sure no one’s listening.
I was kind of, I said, I got 7 wind turbines on my ranch, why am I kind of like that, you know, and I kind of a little soul searching. Why am I nervous to talk about that, you know.
CHAKRABARTI: Well, he’s not nervous anymore, nor is he nervous to talk about why he believes in wind power. I mean, sure. It’s green energy in terms of the environment, but it’s also those green dollars that keep rolling onto his farm.
DAVIS: I know there’s climate change. I know climates change. I mean, it just, it happens. How much man causing that? I don’t know. I’m not smart enough. Does it play a role. Sure. It does. I don’t know what factor. I’m doing it for economic reasons that it helps me. But, it’s to me, I think it’s always cool to use what God gave us, the sun and the wind and use that. But on top of that, if you can do less emissions, or I mean, less emissions that go out into the environment, that’s inherently a good thing. And so you do, we do contribute to that, but that wasn’t my driving force. I’m going to go save the earth, and go hug the turbine and that’s my, you know, no.
CHAKRABARTI: John Davis, he’s owner of Stoney Lonesome Ranch in Central West Texas. He’s got seven wind turbines on his property, and they are part of the larger 43 turbine Cactus Flats Wind Project.
And therefore, he’s also part of Texas’s nation leading development of clean power. So, how did Texas become the most progressive state when it comes to renewable energy? What can the 49 other states learn? That’s what we’re going to talk about today. And to do so, Michael Webber joins us. He’s a professor of engineering and public affairs.
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He studies energy at the University of Texas at Austin. He also runs the Webber Energy Group at the University of Texas, Austin. Professor Webber, thanks so much for joining us and thanks for coming back to the show today.
MICHAEL WEBBER: Yeah, I’m glad to be here. I’m glad to be part of the conversation. Okay.
CHAKRABARTI: So the numbers, as with everything in Texas, seem really big.
I mean, how would you describe in a minute or so the size of Texas’s clean energy market?
WEBBER: The main thing to keep in mind about Texas is that we are a global scale energy state. So you would compare us not with other states, but with like Germany or Canada or Australia, something like that. We just are large scale.
We have a lot of physical area, and we have a lot of resources. So we’re number four or five or six on wind in the world, depending on how you measure, we’re cracking the top 10 on solar pretty soon. We’re in the top 10 for hydrogen. We’re really big on that. We’re big on all of this. Cause we just do everything at large scale in Texas.
The only thing we don’t do a large scale in Texas when it comes energy is water. We don’t have much water for hydroelectric power, but everything else we do a lot of. And in the end, it’s because we have the resource. We have a lot of cheap, flat land that’s sunny and windy. So we’ve got a place to get the resource, and we got a place to build it, and we got a habit or a cultural familiarity with making money from the land.
So that’s kind of who we are and what we do.
Part II
CHAKRABARTI: Professor Webber, I think one, you know, I was sort of just playing a little earlier when I was like, how did Texas become the most progressive state when it comes to clean energy?
Tongue in cheek, of course, but not entirely, right? Because in The Economist, there’s this wonderful quote from a gentleman named Matt Welch, who’s the head of Conservative Texans for Energy Innovation, right? They’re a pro-renewables group. And he told The Economist, quote, when someone says we are embracing green energy, it’s like shoving an ice pick through our ears.
We just say clean energy. So, with that in mind, give us the backstory about how the solar and wind farms and markets began developing in Texas. I mean, where would you look back to?
WEBBER: I think there’s a turning point in 1999. Then, Governor Bush, before he was President, signed into legislation two elements of a reform of the power markets in Texas. And one was to deregulate the markets, so that the markets would compete on price, and it gave a huge reward to the cheapest forms of energy. And before that, markets were regulated where it wasn’t really the cheapest forms that mattered, but we had this new deregulation of the power market that said cheap forms of energy will win.
And the second part of that legislation was a small mandate for renewables and RPS, a renewable portfolio standard. And Texas had that before California, before New York, before the UK, you name your spot in the world, and Texas had a requirement for renewables before almost all of them. And those two pieces went hand in hand, a little bit of a nudge to the market to say, you got to build some renewables.
It did not specify wind, but wind ended up being the winner in the markets. But then this change of the markets to go to the cheapest form of energy. And wind and solar are the cheapest forms of energy, because they don’t have to pay for fuel.
And we have a lot of wind and sunshine in Texas. And we have an ease of doing business in Texas. It’s just easier to get things built. So if you’ve got the resource, you have a market that rewards you for your competitiveness for being so cheap. And you have a little nudge in the market to say you got to build something that’s clean. Well, then it just took off and we’ve blown through the mandates so far by now.
It was a two-gigawatt mandate and now we have like 65 gigawatts of new clean energy. So the mandate was enough to get things started, but the competitive markets kept it going, along with this ability to build things in Texas.
CHAKRABARTI: I see. Okay. So I’m sorry to say I don’t know this, but how did that 1995 change to deregulating the energy markets?
How does that compare to other states? I mean, what were the regulatory changes that happened?
WEBBER: They had to change the market so that the market would choose which power plant would turn on and off every couple of minutes, rather than a regular saying, turn on a coal plant or turn off a nuclear power plant, that kind of thing.
A lot of markets are heavily regulated in that competitive market design is also common in Alberta, Canada, and also in parts of Australia and California and PJM. PJM is Pennsylvania, Jersey, Maryland area. So we have competitive markets in different places in the United States, but not everywhere. And some of the regulated markets tend to prefer coal or dirtier power plants and coal’s not nearly as clean as gas, wind, or solar, for example.
So that switch to competitive market was relatively new. It wasn’t that common. It’s been happening more and more other places since then. And that aligns with Texas ideology of having markets make decisions rather than some government regulator and that kind of thing. And the markets prefer winning solar.
So it really took off once we went to a market operation.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. You know, and then you also said something really interesting, that there’s a historical and cultural readiness in Texas to, I think you put it as harvest energy from the land. Can you talk about that a little bit more? Because look, I’m here in Massachusetts and the closest thing I can remember in terms of resistance to wind turbines is the Cape Wind Project, which had a lot of, that was offshore.
Correct. But the issue was, no one, the people did not want to, not no one, but many people didn’t want to see the turbines on the horizon, which doesn’t seem to be an issue in Texas.
WEBBER: Yeah. We have so much more space in Texas compared to Massachusetts or many other states. So it’s possible that you are benefiting from wind power in your city, but you never actually see a wind turbine.
There’s just so much distance. And a lot of the wind turbines are far away from Austin, Dallas and Houston, say in far West Texas or the panhandle or South Texas along the Gulf. So we don’t see a lot of them. Now, there are more getting built. So you’ll start to see them as you do road trips or if you go to the outside of the city, but we have a lot of industrialized land.
We have a lot of land that has been producing energy for over 100 years. So it’s a very common thing to see energy infrastructure or systems converting the resource and land into money. That’s what we do in Texas. We’ve done it for a long time. And before that, it was agriculture with ranching or cotton or corn or other things and we now do both. And the energy for a long time was oil and gas. But now it’s oil and gas and wind and solar and maybe some more nuclear and geothermal and some other things. It kind of doesn’t matter what form of energy, you go with whatever resource you have on your land. And if you can find a buyer, you’ll find a buyer.
And that’s just kind of who we are in Texas. To give a sense of scale on this size, Texas is a little bit bigger than France. Like, it’s a size of a country, right? It’s 30 million people, so we operate at just a different kind of scale.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. And is a lot of this land that the solar and wind farms going on, is it privately owned?
WEBBER: Yeah, Texas has very little sort of federal land, right? There’s really just some state parks and site, but it’s mostly private. And so if you compare that with other states in the mountain West, there’s a lot more federal land, so then you have to negotiate with the federal government to get access to the land.
But in Texas, it’s private land that’s privately held, privately owned, so you can negotiate with the landowner and the landowner can decide whether the tradeoffs are worth it. They might not like the look of the wind turbines, but they might like the feel of the money, and they can decide for themselves whether it’s appropriate or not.
If you go to other countries, a lot of times you can’t do that, like you need permission from the government to get something built, because the government might own the land, or they might own the view. Or they own the minerals below the land. But Texas, the private property rights that are so typical in Texas, and other states have it as well, but it’s so much easier in Texas because you’re negotiating with a landowner as opposed to some other third party.
CHAKRABARTI: I got you. And what about the transmission of the power? I’m thinking of John Davis’s farm and his seven turbines. You know, they’re twisting away, generating that power, but it’s got to get into the grid somehow. Like, how are those lines installed? Who owns them? Is there negotiation that has to go on around that?
WEBBER: There’s a lot. There’s so much. And that part of the power system is regulated. So we have what’s called common carriers, the transmission lines. They’ll carry electrons from anyone who’s generating, to anyone who’s using. And so we all sort of pay for access, think of like a tollway or something like that.
And so we have to make sure we have enough transmission capacity. Because in general, the wind is where the people aren’t. So the wind is somewhere else, and you have to move that wind power 500 miles to get it to Houston. Houston’s our biggest city and there’s a lot of industrial activity in Houston. So you’re moving the electrons hundreds of miles.
You have to build transmission lines. And in Texas, we’ve been better and faster at building transmission lines than any other state by far. And it takes us like six years to build transmission lines, and other states takes like 18 years. So we’re really fast at it, but we’re still not fast enough. Because the demand for power is growing so quickly for data centers, and artificial intelligence and factories and everything else.
We need to build more transmission lines to move more wind and solar power to market. And that’s true, whether it’s coal or gas or nuclear, whatever, you got to move the electrons to market. That’s the transmission lines. And that gets more people upset because it spans longer distance, more people will see it.
CHAKRABARTI: Right, I was going to, I was going to ask you about that. Because lower regulatory barriers, as you’re saying, do help get stuff built faster. But on the other hand, some of those regulations are there, or most of them, ostensibly, in order to protect people and protect land. So can you talk a little bit more about the complexities around that in terms of transmission?
Because, I mean, the time that it takes to build long transmission lines are on the right sort of pathways, actually makes sense to me. I can’t imagine there hasn’t been, I mean, you hinted at this, like resistance to some of these long lines.
WEBBER: There is resistance, is a real problem. If you think of the way the power sector works, there are the people who generate the power.
There are the people who use the power, and then there are the people who transmit or use the transmission lines to move the power from place to place in between. And the people who are making electricity make money on their land. So they make money, the people are using electricity, get benefit, because they get to use that electricity to run a factory or heat their home or cool at home or whatever it is.
And the people in the middle get trampled on. And they have these power lines going over the head, but they don’t make any money from that, and they don’t get any obvious benefits. So that’s the crux that the people who benefit from transmission lines are not the same people who feel the footprint of it.
And so we have to solve that. Normally you’d get there through some local tax benefits, or you have to pay people to go across their land. Or we might think of new ways of putting the lines underground or along right-of-ways, for example, on highways. So it’s less visible, but it’s a huge problem.
And that’s why it’s hard to get transmission lines built. Texas is easier than places, but it’s still hard. It still takes six years. You have to get a lot of approvals. You can’t just trample over everybody. So that’s a real problem. And if we look at how to expand the power sector to accommodate electric vehicles and heat pumps and new electric loads and decarbonize it for this warmer world.
We’re going to need more transmission. So that’s a real sticking point for the system. And there, there’s still something to learn from Texas, but in Texas, we still need to pick up the pace.
CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. But don’t call it green, right? Professor.
WEBBER: Don’t call it green. No, no, no. Call it clean or just call it energy.
Right. So you just say, Hey, make money from energy that the form doesn’t matter, right? What’s green is the money that comes in. So you just need to make your money from it. And we think of it in terms of energy abundance, instead of energy transition, energy addition, or energy expansion, like we’re going to expand the energy system.
We have to use coded words because people get frustrated if you use the wrong word with energy.
CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, well, in a moment, I want to talk to you more about the political realities in Texas, because although there has been this like massive growth in clean energy there, there is still obviously some very concerted resistance to it.
But let’s get down to what seems to be, I’m just about to use this terrible pun. The bottom line for supporters of clean energy in Texas. And that is money. I mean, you heard John Davis say it. I loved hearing him talk, right? Because he was just giving it to us straight. He’s like, I do it because it helps keep my ranch afloat.
So how would we describe the profitability of clean energy and whether, does it reduce prices for power for Texans who are far away from those turbines and solar panels? I mean, talk about the economics for a bit.
WEBBER: The economics are really compelling. So it is a money savings for consumers, dramatic savings, because every megawatt hour you consume from wind or solar is a megawatt hour of natural gas you don’t have to buy. And the natural gas, you have to pay for the fuel.
So for every megawatt hour you get from wind and solar, you’re avoiding some fuel costs somewhere. So it’s huge cost savings on the electricity. You also avoid water use for cooling, because wind turbines and solar farms are not water cooled the way a gas, coal, or nuclear power plant are.
And water is a real serious issue in Texas. So anything that saves water is really desirable. And then you also avoid the greenhouse gas emissions, which some people don’t care about. But you also avoid the criteria, air pollutants, the nitrogen oxides, the sulfur oxides that cause asthma or smog. A lot of Texans don’t care about climate change, but they do care about those air pollution, those air pollutants, the emissions, because they’ll have a kid with asthma.
They have some reason to really take that seriously. And with wind and solar, you avoid all those problems. So that’s the good news. The bad news is you have to pay for more transmission, but the additional cost for the transmission is lower than the savings you get from everything else. And so there’s a lot of savings for the consumer.
It then also makes money for the landowners. We have a lot of landowners in Texas. They make money. It helps them keep the ranches alive, which is great. That’s good. Culturally, it’s good economically, and that’s in rural areas that are desperate for rural economic development. So that money flows to those landowners locally.
But it’s not just the landowner who benefits, it’s also the counties, because now you have all these wind turbines or solar farms that is real property that can be taxed with property taxes. And that generates tax revenue that pays for schools, libraries, parks, courthouses. It benefits the local economy, even for the people who aren’t the landowners, and then it also employs some people. It definitely employs during construction. Then you also give some people on hand for maintenance and repair and inspections, that kind of thing. So now you have more jobs, and those jobs pay more than the agricultural jobs. So it’s a pay raise and there’s more property to be generating taxes, and there’s more money circulating the local economy.
It’s great for the generation. It’s great for the consumers. It’s good for the state. And then it frees up natural gas. Or other fuels, we would have used that we can then export to Europe to help them get out from under the thumb of Vladimir Putin. Or we can export it to Southeast Asia so they can have a cleaner fuel to use.
It’s really good in so many things. It’s pretty exciting.
CHAKRABARTI: But of course, fossil fuel producers in Texas do not see it that way, right? And this is where the reality check comes in, right? Because it brings in history, culture, and politics, and economics as well. I mean, there’s the, what? The Texas Public Policy Foundation, but they’re actually lobbying against clean energy.
They lobby on behalf of oil and gas, and they’ve been fighting tooth and nail in the legislature to make clean energy less attractive for power consumers and the utilities around them.
WEBBER: Yeah, Texas Public Policy Foundation is sort of actually working to make us have fewer choices for energy and make energy more expensive and dirtier.
So that’s kind of the mission. But I’d be hesitant to say that’s the view of oil and gas oil and gas doesn’t speak with one voice. And I think in Texas, we see a big difference between the multinational oil and gas companies like the Chevron’s and Exxon Mobil’s who operate in a hundred different countries, they tend to be more serious about cleaning up their mix than the independents.
The independent oil and gas companies are less serious about it. So there’s mixed view in Texas, even within oil and gas, but for sure, there’s a political effort to make it harder to build wind and solar, to create onerous setback requirements where you can’t build it within a certain number of feet of the edge of the property, there was an effort essentially to ban wind and solar in the Texas Legislature two years ago that didn’t work.
There are enough Democrats and rural Republicans who really like wind and solar that those efforts didn’t succeed, but that doesn’t mean they won’t try again. And then instead, what they did is subsidize natural gas. So we have two subsidies for natural gas in Texas, some property tax abatements for a new natural gas power plant.
And then we have something called the Texas Energy Fund, which is like low interest loans to make it easier to build gas power plants. So we are actively subsidizing natural gas in Texas and making it harder for wind and solar, but wind and solar still compete and win in the market. So we’ll see how it shakes out with the next legislative session, which just started this week.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. But would you say overall that is, I mean, that oil and gas. Not just lobby, but the political power and cultural power of oil and gas is still incredibly formidable in Texas.
WEBBER: Oh, yeah, oil and gas is very important in Texas for sure. Yeah, it’s an important employer. It pays a lot of taxes. It generates a lot of sort of jobs and wealth in Texas.
It has a lot of political influence. And the fact that oil and gas hasn’t been able to stop wind and solar is pretty interesting, but that doesn’t mean there have not been efforts.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so I’ve got a bone to pick with you. A good natured bone, Professor Webber, because in this article that appeared in The Economist, they quote you as saying, It’s not unusual for Texas to do the right thing for all the wrong reasons.
And I presume the wrong reasons are the financial and economic benefits like doing it, as John Davis said, because it’s him helping his ranch make money, versus he’s not going to hug his wind turbines, as he said. So the bone I have to pick with you is, What’s wrong with that?
WEBBER: There’s nothing wrong.
CHAKRABARTI: There should always be an economic incentive to get people, you know, to do things that are not just economically good, but environmentally good as well.
WEBBER: I love it. Yeah. So what we’re seeing right now, it’s really been playing out over the last 20 years, and we see it a lot right now in Texas, is a convergence to the same solution set for different motivations.
So the solutions are wind and solar and batteries and some natural gas. That’s kind of the solution that we’ve decided in Texas and environmentalists will come at that because of its cleanliness. And people care about economic opportunity will get there because it’s cheaper and profitable. And people who have national security or domestic sourcing concerns will also get to the same solution because they don’t want to import coal from Wyoming or other things.
They want to have a local source of energy. So you might have very different motivations, but you arrive at the same answers. And I think that’s really compelling. That means the markets are really going to take over. It’ll be hard to stop because there’s so many different reasons why we want wind solar batteries and gas in Texas, and that’s working and really winning.
Solar batteries are beating up on gas in the markets, I would say, and really beating up on coal.
CHAKRABARTI: Right, I would say this is one of the philosophical lessons that particularly Democrat, Democratic leaders in other states can take from Texas. It’s like, don’t put a progressive purity test on it. Don’t say, we need to do this because of climate change, first and foremost.
And if you don’t believe in climate change, you’re out. I mean, talk about the thing that binds everyone together, which is, hey, this could be economically beneficial. No one disagrees with that, right?
WEBBER: Yeah, it’s economically beneficial for the generators and the consumers, but it also diversifies the fuel mix, which helps with resilience and reliability.
If you depend on one form of energy, you’ve got more risks. So yeah, there’s a lot of ways we can sell this. It might’ve been sold the wrong way in many states for the last few decades.
Part III
CHAKRABARTI: I am going to ask you about the fragility of the Texas grid in a few minutes, because all this clean energy still hasn’t protected Texans from disaster. But what I want to do for the moment is turn our attention to other states, particularly California.
And that’s why Kate Gordon is joining us. She’s the CEO of California Forward. It’s a statewide organization dedicated to a more sustainable future. And she served as previously a senior advisor to U.S. Energy Secretary, former Secretary Jennifer Granholm, and also served in California state government as the director of the governor’s office of planning and research and was a senior climate policy advisor to Governor Gavin Newsom.
Kate Gordon, welcome to On Point.
KATE GORDON: Hi, Meghna, great to be here.
CHAKRABARTI: So first of all, I want to acknowledge something, the awkwardness about talking about solar and wind at a time where in Southern California and Los Angeles is, you know, an inferno because of wind and the dry climate there.
So I didn’t want to ignore the truth of that.
GORDON: Yeah. Thanks for that. It’s a devastating situation. So thanks for acknowledging it.
CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. No. And it’s just, it’s unspeakably bad. At the same time, in the long run, solar and wind are also resources that California has in abundance. So, let’s talk a little bit about what you see are, you know, what would you say is the number one obstacle in California that’s preventing it from, you know, catching up or even surpassing Texas in terms of clean energy infrastructure build and generation?
GORDON: Well, you know, first, just to say that I think like all energy sources, like oil, like gas, like coal, energy is very place based. So it really does depend. It’s very dependent on geography, on, you know, in this case, wind, solar. And so the two states are very different. They’re both huge. They both have a lot of opportunity.
California is by far the biggest solar generation state in the country, much bigger than Texas. So absolutely. And we also have the most diversified clean energy portfolio. We have solar and hydro and wind and geothermal and biomass. We have a very diversified portfolio, but really does kind of reflect the incredible diversity of the landscapes in California and also just land uses, which we have a lot of competing land uses.
So I’d probably point to the land uses. We do have a lot of competition for land. I mean, you heard a lot about how Texas has these big swaths of land used for ranching, lots of wind. We have a lot of federal and state land. We also have a lot of, you know, very high value agriculture. For instance, we have military training operations all over the state, which are a land use consideration.
So there’s just a lot of different things going on, but we are number one in solar and actually building out offshore wind pretty aggressively.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay, well, I mean, I get your point, right? Because in the Central Valley, they’re not going to just put up wind farms everywhere and replace the nation’s fruit and vegetable basket.
I totally take your point. But okay, so what about in the places where there could potentially be more development of clean energy harvesting. I mean, the other thing that Professor Webber pointed out was Texas’s very different approach to regulation, that there’s been aggressive deregulation in terms of getting more energy sources up and running.
Can the same be said for California? Leading question. Leading question.
GORDON: (LAUGHS) I mean, I think we’re actually at a bit of a turning point. You know one of the reasons I came back to California was to work on these issues. And I think we’re at a bit of a turning point in two ways. One, you know, it is true that California has had slower planning and implementation processes.
We have a very kind of slow walk transmission process, for instance. And some of the planning and zoning has been pretty slow. I think, though, we’re at a moment where there’s a lot of attention being paid to speeding that up. We actually have a state legislature legislator, Buffy Wicks, who’s doing a big permitting reform kind of roadshow right now, and she’s a staunch Democrat trying to figure out how to make these processes easier.
You see a lot of that on the housing side as well. A lot of you know, the YIMBY movement sort of started in California. So I think we’re kind of at a little bit of a turning point there. And also, frankly, Meghna, a turning point around this thing you were talking about with Michael, just thinking about this is an economic issue.
We have a number of regions in the state, particularly the Central Valley, which are really leaning into the idea of clean energy, both kind of generation, but also manufacturing the supply chain as an economic driver. And you’re starting to see that really innovative stuff happening in the Central Valley around, for instance, land that has been used for agriculture now fallowed because of water issues, looking at clean energy as a development opportunity.
You’re seeing some cool stuff like solar on top of canals in the Central Valley. So I think we’re actually kind of shifting a bit in the state from a very kind of climate forward, this is all about emissions reduction posture to much more of a look, this is about affordability. This is about you know landowners having a hedge in the face of these super volatile issues that they’re facing in agriculture and also oil and gas.
So I do think we’re kind of shifting.
CHAKRABARTI: That is so important. Let me go back to something you said. Some land that can be shifted over because they’ve been fallowed due to water issues.
GORDON: Yep.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. And so therefore, again, like, in a sense, climate is always in the background, right?
GORDON: It is. We are not living in a stable climate. I think a lot of our systems we’ve planned and designed assumed a stable climate, including the grid, which I’d love to talk about grid resilience. But we are not in a stable climate.
And so we all are sort of adapting to that.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so but the idea also, then, let me ask you this just bluntly, do you think political leadership in California or other states that are looking to really ramp up their clean energy production, that wouldn’t do them good to sort of step back a little from the climate messaging first?
GORDON: I mean, you know, I am biased on this point. I’ve spent 20 years talking about energy as an economic development and energy security issues. So I’ve always sort of done that. And I generally think that’s a smart way to go. People fundamentally care about their bottom line, about affordability, about their ability to do business, about what the world looks like in their area, in their region.
That tends to be about things that are much closer to home. Then global climate negotiations.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So Professor Webber, let me bring you back in here and talk with both of you about a major, major issue that comes. We touched on this in Texas, but that comes between the generation and the consumption, right?
And that is the grid and transmission. I do not want to like fall into being like too kumbaya about clean energy. Because I was looking at this article that was written in 2023 in the New York Times where they said that more than 8,100 energy products or energy projects, excuse me, the vast majority of them being clean, wind and solar.
We’re still waiting for permission to connect to electrical grids at the end of 2021. And so there’s all this potential generation, but it has nowhere to go. And then they further quote the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab saying, Fewer than one fifth of solar and wind proposals actually make it through the interconnection queue.
So, I mean, taking a more national view, Professor Webber, I mean, this seems to be a major problem if there’s no way to move the electrons, as you said.
WEBBER: It’s a huge problem in the infrastructure of connecting the product from where the product is made to the consumer, has always been a challenge. And in the 1860s, it was canals, Abraham Lincoln ran on a platform of building canals in a rural electrification in the early 1900s and interstate highways in the 50’s. Then rural bandwidth for internet in the early 2000’s.
And now we’re back to rural electrification again. So some of this repeats, we have to build a way to move the electrons from place to place. That’s critical. I’m not convinced we always need to make it ugly or take it across pristine areas or make it overhead. I’m a big fan of putting it underground along right-of-ways.
So get out of view because it’s a big deal. It’s not fun to look at, but we need them, and we need to accelerate how quickly we build that and how quickly we interconnect. We just have to do that. I think there’s actually some bipartisan consensus on this that there’s a national security issue now around grid reliability, around getting artificial intelligence systems going.
And so we need to expand the transmission system. So I’m hopeful that we’ll make some progress on that. As Kate already said, it’s already happening, some at the state level, but we need local, state and federal alignment on this, that it’s time to build.
CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. I mean, there are real reasons why the interconnection is a hugely important point, right?
Because before a new project can even be built, I think, like, local grid operators have to be sure that the project isn’t going to cause disruptions during construction, but also that the existing lines can handle the additional input, right? You don’t want them to fail. And so Kate Gordon, I’m just wondering, is there a way, is there a market-based solution to try and smooth and accelerate the interconnection jam?
GORDON: Yeah, I think there’s a couple of interesting things here. We spent a lot of time looking at this issue, not surprisingly, when I was in the Department of Energy. And you’d actually be kind of surprised by some of the barriers. One of them turns out to be a workforce issue. There’s a shortage in the United States of system, power system engineers.
Part of that’s because we kind of directed all of our engineering students toward computers 20 years ago, and so we have this shortage in these operation engineer, system engineers. They are the people who go through the interconnection queues and figure out what thing is in what place, and how to cluster the projects and how to assess priorities?
So that’s been an issue. I think there is some really interesting work being done on using AI to enable some of that kind of looking at the queues. The queues are hundreds and hundreds of projects long, looking at them and figuring out prioritization using AI. That’s a cool and increasingly used approach.
We also have with interconnection. I think that Texas is kind of interesting on this. Texas has these competitive renewable energy zones, which allows sort of like faster transmission build out where there is strong renewable recourse.
I think the idea of using zones for renewable energy build out is actually growing in interest all over the place and something that we should be looking at. And then I was going to say finally on interconnection. There’s some just interesting work being done around reconductoring.
So not building entirely new lines, but actually taking out sections of line and doing what’s called reconductoring, putting in higher voltage, higher efficiency lines in their places. So you’re not doing new lines. You’re doing the same lines, but better.
CHAKRABARTI: So professor Webber, I did hear you say that you’re a fan of putting stuff underground.
I would agree with that, but that’s really expensive, right? And that’s one of the things that the companies just don’t want to do. They don’t want to pay for it.
WEBBER: Well, it depends on the company. They might not mind, but the regulator might be worried what it would do to rates and it might cost five times as much money up front to put underground. But if you avoid one wildfire that didn’t get sparked because it’s underground, you get the savings and there are a lot of wildfires are sparked by the transmission lines. The reconductoring, that Kate said is a huge option. You can double the capacity, but often those reconducted lines, those new lines are stronger, so they are more reliable if you have a windstorm or other things.
Well, so you get reliability benefits in addition to the capacity. So we got to think through all of this, like it’s better lines, stronger lines, more capacity, underground, subsea on some coastal locations, where you need it, but also behind the meter solutions, which might be a solar and battery microgrid or a gas microgrid.
There are things you could do behind the meter. And that’s what people are looking at with nuclear, taking Fremont Island behind the meter, almost like a nuclear microgrid, although that’s a macrogrid. But finding solutions that don’t require you to expand the transmission system, but then also expanding the transmission system every way we can.
I think we’ve got to do all of it.
CHAKRABARTI: Well, so going back to Texas for a second, and here’s my question about the fragility of the actual grid. Texas’s power grid is isolated from other states, yes?
WEBBER: It’s mostly barely connected. Yeah. So basically, it’s an island.
CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, right. So people will remember then in 2021 when there were those big storms that basically completely disabled power generation in Texas, right?
And it was all sources of power, but the natural gas generated plants were of particular importance. So, you know, having these renewables being such a giant portion of the Texas’s power generation didn’t protect the people of Texas from, you know, having lost power for, during, you know, a major set of storms.
WEBBER: It was incredible. So I was here for that. And we’re coming up on the four-year anniversary and people still have their traumatic memories of it. Because it was really wild, that one of the most energy rich places in the world had an energy shortage. So that’s just kind of a stunning thing. And what happens in Texas is we design our power sector to operate in the peak hours of the summer.
So we design around the summer. We don’t design around the winter. And when it gets really cold in Texas, the electrical demand will also skyrocket as high as the summer, but we don’t weatherize the power plants, or importantly, we don’t weatherize the gas system. And the gas system in Texas is notoriously fragile.
It freezes when it’s cold out. So in winter storm Uri. Four years ago, that winter storm in February 2021, 85% of the gas in West Texas froze up. 50% of the gas statewide froze up, like we lost half our gas supply in Texas. And to put a number on it, Texas is the number three gas producer in the world, behind the United States and Russia.
So it’s like a global scale gas producer, lost half its production. Well, that cut off gas to gas power plants and some of those gas power plants, even if they could get gas, didn’t winterize. So we had a huge gas problem and about half our power comes from gas. So if you lose half your gas and that’s half your power, you lose a lot of your power.
Wind and solar also struggle with icing on blades or snow cover on the solar panels, but bounce back as soon as the wind came back, or as soon as the snow melted. So it was a real problem, and we responded legislatively in Texas by requiring the power sector to winterize, but we did not require the gas sector to winterize.
And therefore, whether or not we get gas with this next freeze, and the next freeze is Monday, it’s coming up in a couple days, we’ll see how it goes. The gas system continued to freeze, losing 15% to 20% of its production in the subsequent freezes, the next year or two.
CHAKRABARTI: You anticipated my question.
Yeah, I was like, so the problem is fixed? No.
WEBBER: It’s better. We built a lot of wind, solar, and batteries. We built some gas. We’ve done some winterization. It should be better. And that freeze was rough because every single county was under freezing for more than a day at the exact same moment. So that was hard, and I don’t think the storm on Monday was bad, but I feel better, but I don’t feel at peace, I’ll say it that way.
CHAKRABARTI: There is a political story, I’m sure, as to why the same new requirements weren’t applied to the gas sector. That will be for a future show, Professor Webber!
WEBBER: Yeah, it’s for a future show. It’s probably for the reasons that are as obvious as you think, right? So it’s just like they didn’t want a lot of attention and scrutiny, and they didn’t get it.
CHAKRABARTI: Well, so, Kate Gordon, we have a minute left in this truly fascinating conversation. I’m wondering, as a takeaway, like what do you actually think are the takeaways that other states can apply from Texas’s, you know, mostly great news story about clean energy?
GORDON: Yeah, I think there’s lessons to be learned for sure around kind of pre planning, kind of setting up these zones where it’s easier to build.
I think there’s lessons to be learned around really making it an economic argument for landowners. We haven’t been as good about that in California. We could be better. We could put some systems in place. But on the other side, look, I think what we were just talking about with the grid, that’s a reason you have to actually still talk about climate change.
We must start designing these systems for a climate that is going to be more extreme. And California has been pretty much a leader on thinking about that resilience built into the system. And we’re obviously, we got to do more of it. Looking at LA, but this is something I think Texas could learn from us. Is how do you design and build really for the system we are going to be experiencing for the next few decades.