State Energy Plan Advisory Committee Meeting Puts Renewables on the Chopping Block
On Friday, August 12, 2022, I attended the first publicly announced State Energy Plan Advisory Committee. The committee, which has met only twice since its formation in 2021, has taken no public testimony. In fact, the committee and its anti-renewable stance has finally gained public attention, thanks to good friend and colleague Doug Lewin.
The 12-member committee, appointed by Governor Abbott, Lt. Gov. Patrick and Speaker Phelan, includes representatives from the natural gas and utility industries only. Neither the solar nor wind industries are represented. Although the committee was created during the 87th Legislature in 2021, Patrick announced his four appointees in February 2022.
The committee was tasked with preparing a comprehensive state energy plan that includes methods to improve the reliability, affordability and stability of the Texas grid. Yet the committee held its second full meeting on August 8th to vote on and approve the State Energy Plan Report, to be delivered to the legislature by September 1, 2022, which begs the question: with only two meetings and no clean energy representatives on the committee, how will renewables fare in a state energy plan moving forward?
At the August 12th meeting, committee members discussed including renewables along new transmission lines to increase the amount of available intermittent renewable energies. Members agreed that renewables’ intermittency makes them an unreliable energy source; they may fluctuate too much to be stable for taxpayers.
Actually, the term isn’t intermittent; it’s variable. But thanks to improved weather predictions and operating experience, renewables have two things fossil plants don’t: they are highly predictable and have well over 95% availability. That is, renewables are there when you expect them and need them to be, outperforming other power plants that were offline or failed to meet expectations. Managing large amounts of renewables does take work, but as shown on recent hot peak demand days or during Winter Storm Uri, they overperform and can save Texans millions in costs.
After widespread blackouts during Uri, regulators approved a series of market reforms designed to avoid grid disruptions this summer — and the costs for those reforms are already showing up on our bills. In fact, Texas consumers are now paying about $0.20/kWh, about double what they were in January.
The issue isn’t whether renewable energy technologies aren’t advanced enough or Texas has an insufficient amount of them. During the first three months of 2022, wind and solar accounted for a record 34% of generation within ERCOT, outperforming the state’s fleet of combined-cycle gas turbines as the dominant source of electricity, according to a new report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. And in July, solar met 10% or more of demand at the peak hour on 25 of July’s 1 days. On the other four days, solar was above 9.6% of total demand at the peak hour.
The issue is transmission.
ERCOT, our power grid, is isolated from the rest of the nation’s power grids, limiting our ability to import power when we need it and export power when we have excess. During Winter Storm Uri, we were unable to receive power from neighboring power grids. And just this summer, some West Texas wind generation went offline because of transmission constraints, depriving cities like Houston, Dallas or Austin of affordable, clean power.
With an extra $27B in state coffers for the upcoming 88th Legislature, legislators have the distinct opportunity to enact smart policies like upgrading inadequate transmission capabilities so that renewables can provide grid stability during high energy demand summers and winters at competitive prices.
Rather than imposing punitive regulatory actions on renewables, despite clear evidence of their benefit to the grid, helping Texas’ decision makers recognize the enormous benefits of renewable energy technologies so they can propose sound clean energy policies that remove barriers for a 21st Century grid is the more sensible approach.
This is what TXSES does best.
For more than four decades, TXSES has been the pre-eminent statewide organization that develops independent, fact-based solar energy information and brings them to leaders in communities like yours, enabling them to make the best decisions that inspire innovation and lay the foundation for a 100% clean energy future for us all, one community at a time.