Will Texas Governor Seeks to Block more Renewables?
For a quick moment, I had hopes that the Texas grid debacle of last winter would lead to a rethinking of the Texas grids vulnerabilities. Governor Greg Abbott, with an eye toward big-money fossil fuel donors, looks ready to double down on the system that failed, while crippling hopes for Texas energy future, and locking in vulnerability to extremes. Chris Tomlinson in the Houston Chronicle:  Gov. Greg Abbott has made clear that hes more interested in boosting fossil fuel burners profits than improving the electric grid or fighting climate change, and hes rejecting new ways of generating clean, reliable and affordable energy. The two-term Republican had two chances to help Texas lead the global energy transition. First, he issued orders to his new appointees on the Public Utilities Commission, and he set the agenda for a special session of the Texas Legislature. Abbott is not letting lawmakers have a say in overhauling the wobbly Texas grid operated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, known as ERCOT. Instead, he wants to dictate solutions that benefit coal and natural gas companies over clean energy. Abbott ordered the PUC, which overseas ERCOT, to redesign the states wholesale electricity market to reward generators that can provide backup power. This is a break from the current, 20-year-old system that only pays generators for the energy they put on the grid, not their capacity to generate. Critics of the system have correctly called on ERCOT to set up some version of a capacity market that pays generators to have readily available power in an emergency. But Abbott twists this good idea by calling for more natural gas, coal, and nuclear power, not a more strategic approach. Coal plants should have no part of Texas energy mix. They produce vast amounts of greenhouse gases, and they are more expensive to operate than other sources, including wind and solar. Nuclear power does not release any emissions, but new plants are astronomically expensive and better nuclear technologies are not ready yet. The two existing nuclear plants in Texas already operate at almost full capacity; therefore, they do not require any additional incentives. Natural gas plants, meanwhile, are great in emergencies, and ERCOT should encourage companies to have enough of them for the few hours every year when demand spikes. But Abbott should be ordering the PUC to incentivize renewable energy storage technologies, such as batteries and compressed air, instead. Abbotts more disturbing order is to pile additional fees and costs onto wind and solar generators. In a complete disregard for how the wholesale electricity market operates, he perversely wants to punish them because they cannot turn on the sun and wind at will. The key to reducing wind and solar intermittency is to expand the geography where wind and solar energy are generated. If the PUC provided the right incentives, for example, wind companies could install turbines in the Gulf of Mexico, where the wind almost always blows. Instead, Abbott intends on knee-capping renewables to give old, failing fossil fuel plants a few more years of profitability at the expense of Texas customers. Lastly, Abbott ordered the PUC to accelerate the development of transmission lines to new natural gas and coal power plants, explicitly excluding wind and solar generation. He is using his power to appoint the PUC to pick and choose winners and losers.