RENEWABLES ROLLING ON

Electricity generation from wind turbines rises sharply in Texas

Prices are falling as the sector keeps growing in Texas and across the United States.

A new report from the Department of Energy catalogs just how much renewable energy prices have fallen in recent years.

Since 2008 — the year President Barack Obama was elected to the White House — the costs of onshore wind turbines are down 41 percent. Rooftop solar systems are down 54 percent, government analysts say, and utility-scale solar farms cost 64 percent less.

With falling prices has come growth in the renewable energy sector that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Last year, solar panels and wind turbines accounted for more than two-thirds of the powergeneration installed in the U.S., up from 41 percent in 2008 and zero in 2000, the Department of Energy reported last week.

In Texas, which leads the nation in wind power, generation from wind turbines has increased sixfold over the past decade to 18,000 megawatts from3,000, according to the Energy Department. The state has added solar power at a much slower pace, with just 300 megawatts of utility-scale solar installed. (A megawatt can power about 200 homes onthe hottest Texas days.)

“We need to continue pushing the innovation agenda that leads to these kinds of dramatic cost reductions for all lowcarbon technologies ,” Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said in a statement, “and increase America’s competitiveness and independence in the global clean energy economy .”

The growth of the industry is built atop substantive federal tax credits for renewable energy developers, a program that now appears to be nearing its end. Last year, Congress passed legislation that would phase out subsidies for wind and solar through 2020 and 2022 respectively, with payments declining incrementally year by year.

But even without subsidies, renewable energy costs have declined so much over the past 10 years that the technologies have become competitive with coal and natural gas-fired powerplants, developers said.

At a recent event in Washington, Tom Steyer, a California billionaire who is giving heavily to politicians backing policies to address climate change, said he only expected the cost reductions in wind ands olar to continue.

“That line is going to keep going down,” he said. “In Abu Dhabi, they recently had an agreement to buy solar energy for 2.4 cents per kilowatthour. That is a tiny, tiny, tiny, number.”

The average U.S. customer paid $10.18 per kilowatt-hour in the first half of 2016, according to the Energy Department.

The growth in renewables comes as part of a far larger domestic energy revolution that has dramatically re- duced costs across the board. Thanks to hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling techniques, oil and natural gas are selling at historically low prices. And consumers are becoming far more efficient in how they use that energy.

Cars with conventional internal combustion engines are getting better gasoline mileage, while electric cars are becoming cheaper and increasing the range they can travel on a single charge, making them more attractive. The cost of energy-efficient LED bulbs has fallen by more than 90 percent since 2008, according to the Energy Department.

Last year, sales of those bulbs increased 160 percent overa 12-monthperiod.

“We need to continue pushing the innovation agenda that leads to these kinds of dramatic cost reductions.” Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz