As the Texas legislature grinds toward a June 2 sine die, T. Boone Pickens must be turning over in his grave.
In 2008 Pickens, a Texas oil man with a voracious appetite for the next bonanza, became a high-profile convert to wind energy and set out to build the world’s biggest wind farm in West Texas. His plan went bust when natural gas prices fell, but he turned out to be a prophet concerning wind.
Texas, the nation’s largest supplier and consumer of electricity, is also the nation’s leading producer of renewable energy. It’s second only to California in solar energy production, but it’s wind, which accounts for about 29 percent of the state’s total electricity production, which has made Texas the overall leader.
The Texas electric grid withstood a severe test earlier this month when it was able to supply power during a record spring heat wave without strain, at a time when some natural gas and coal-fired power plants were off-line for normal repairs. It was “a stark difference from how it fared under similar circumstances just three years ago,” before the addition to the grid of new solar and battery storage facilities, the San Antonio Express-News reported.
The state legislature appears bent on putting the brakes on this remarkable progress. A small convoy of bills imposing a truly imaginative set of regulatory burdens on renewable energy has passed the Texas state senate and is awaiting action in the house.
You’re likely to hear the term “dispatchable power” more in the future. It means electricity you can turn on and off, like a coal or gas plant. These bills are based around the idea that companies generating power from the wind and sun have an unfair advantage over the dispatchables.
Like a 1950s Soviet farming collective trying to boost its barley production, this legislative action attempts to level the playing field by penalizing the renewables for not generating power when the sun’s not shining and the wind’s not blowing. One bill says that if dispatchables don’t make up at least 50 percent of new additions to the grid, new renewable facilities will have to pay the dispatchables for the shortfall.
This outright betrayal of conservative principles by a Republican legislature would have disgusted Pickens, who believed in a completely unfettered brand of capitalism. But what really would stick in his craw is that it’s being done basically at the behest of the last presidential candidate Pickens endorsed before his death.
Pickens said in 2016 he was for Donald Trump because he was for change.
“Now, you may not like the change you get, but you’re getting ready to have change. And I’m a change advocate,” Pickens said. He would turn out to be prophetic about that as well.
The legislative activity in Texas is the most prominent state-level appearance of the Trump administration’s hostility toward renewable energy and its drive to preserve the dispatchables. Pickens didn’t attach any ideology to the wind, but Trump and many in his brain trust do. So there are other places where the same thing might happen.
Think, for instance, of another (more narrowly) red state where another newcomer to the economy that Trump doesn’t like has taken root. The electric vehicle and battery industry in Georgia has already felt the effects of reduced support from Washington. After Gov. Brian Kemp leaves office, the industry could also be more vulnerable to state-level attacks.
U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene last year introduced an amendment to the Defense budget would have prohibited the military from buying electric vehicles, but she has also bought stock in Tesla. In a theoretical primary contest with Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a strong supporter of the Rivian project, would she play the EV card? There are a variety of ways EVs could become an issue in 2026.
Ultimately, market and environmental forces may decide the balance between dispatchables and renewables. But in the meantime, politics could have a lot to do with the nation’s energy future.
