Playing favorites with energy doesn’t work
When Abbott maligns wind and solar, it only makes the state’s power grid that much weaker.
What good is the U.S. Navy? It’s so focused on the sea that it can’t be counted on to defend America on land. Same goes for the U.S. Air Force — how can we count on a fighting force whose mission is forever in the clouds?
Besides, everybody knows the most reliable branch of the military is the U.S. Army, whose soldiers have their boots solidly planted on dry land.
Right? Of course not.
But imagine if President Biden viewed our national security with such favoritism, as though separate branches of the military were competing in a zero-sum game, as though it were OK for the leader of our country to pick winners and losers among soldiers, sailors and airmen, urging Congress to siphon funds from one group to give to another.
You’d call that approach idiotic. And you’d be right.
Yet that’s basically the biased, dangerously simple strategy that Gov. Greg Abbott has decided to take on the Texas power grid.
Unlike the military, which is a government entity, Texas’ power grid is fueled by energy from private companies in a deregulated market. Like the military, the grid that powers millions of homes and businesses is made up of critical manpower and infrastructure and its success or failure can be a matter of life or death — as we saw in February’s winter storm that killed nearly 200 people, and by some counts many more.
Protecting our country from foreign threats requires a diverse network of strategically positioned resources. So does protecting our power grid.
We use thermal resources — mostly gas but also nuclear and coal — as a base. And we keep the costs down and spread the burden of generation with cheaper, intermittent renewables, namely wind and solar.
Each energy source has its costs and quirks and vulnerabilities but together, they help provide a more robust, reliable grid. When a heat wave stills West Texas wind turbines, for instance, a sea breeze might keep the South Texas turbines turning. When the state ordered us to conserve energy last month because an unexpected number of plants were down and wind was slow, the sliver of energy that solar helped provide on those scorching, sunny days helped us squeak past without rolling blackouts.
Even with a robust mix of energies, Texas still faces challenges with reliability, of course, given the lack of oversight and regulation that seem to be contributing to
failures among an aging fleet of power plants and ongoing, unexpected and unexplained outages that threaten the grid’s stability. But that’s an issue for another day.
Bottom line at the moment: The more energy options available to ERCOT, the state’s grid operator, the more competitive the market. Then the lower the electricity bills for Texans, and the more confident we can be that when we flip on a light switch or turn on the AC during a heat wave, or summon the heat on the coldest day of the year, the electricity will be there for us.
So why on earth did the governor direct the Public Utility Commission of Texas to essentially pick winners and losers in the energy market, ordering the agency to impose “reliability costs” on wind and solar, and to create subsidies to help coal, natural gas and nuclear foot the bill for facility improvements and weatherization?
“The objective of these directives is to ensure that all Texans have access to reliable, safe and affordable power, and that this task is achieved in the quickest possible way,” Abbott wrote last week in a letter to his appointed PUC commissioners.
But Abbott’s move would do the opposite, making Texas’ grid less reliable and prices less affordable.
“It’s shooting ourselves in the foot to do this,” says Daniel Cohan, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University.
Wind and solar are the cheapest energy providers, he explains, and when they compete in the Texas marketplace, they help bring down the cost of energy. Piling extra costs on top of renewables may not only increase the cost of energy initially but also long-term if it deters wind and solar companies from building the new facilities that are in the pipeline. And less supply could reduce capacity on an already strained power grid that, during peak demand, needs every drop of energy it can get.
“Ultimately, this move would actually raise power costs for everybody,” Cohan said.
In his letter, Abbott essentially argues that wind and solar should be penalized for their “failure” at certain times “to provide enough power to meet the needs of all Texans.” He says this failure — as if it were an intentional act — creates an uneven playing field between non-renewable and renewable energy generators and instills “uncertainty” about how much energy ERCOT has to work with.
Nonsense. Blaming solar for not generating energy in the dark is, to return to the military analogy, like blaming a battleship captain stationed at sea for not stopping an inland tank attack. It’s not what he was deployed to do.
As far as the playing field goes, no one disputes that wind and solar are intermittent, but the very fact that they’re unable to ramp up on demand at any time puts them at their own built-in disadvantage. Because unless the weather cooperates, they lose out on the highest profits that thermal generators can make during peak demand.
So why is the governor mandating this market manipulation now, especially after he falsely declared after the Legislative session last month that “everything that needed to be done was done to fix the power grid in Texas?”
Abbott’s motivation is as clear as it is predictable: politics.
Before the bodies were even counted after the winter storm that killed Texans young and old in their own beds, Republicans seized on the opportunity to target wind and solar as scapegoats.
Knowing full well that the vast majority of energy capacity lost during the winter storm was attributable to gas plants — not wind and solar — Abbott jumped on the bandwagon in attacking the favorite liberal cause of renewable energy.
Only problem is that liberals aren’t the only ones benefiting from renewables, which save us all money and help us all to breathe cleaner air. Texas is a national leader in wind energy and proudly so. Abbott is not only jeopardizing the stability of our power grid and affordability of electricity, he’s stifling a growing industry important to the Texas economy.
But hey, somebody’s got to pay for the weatherization requirements that lawmakers imposed last session. Somebody also must fund the extra energy capacity that truly is needed in Texas to act as a cushion during another grid crisis. Why not renewables?
Answer: because our governor doesn’t have the courage to fight for the real reform Texas needs in our faulty energy market — or, apparently, the basic understanding of how dangerous his cynical solution is.
Our fast-growing state doesn’t need less energy from one or two industries. We need a whole army — and a navy and an air force. Call in the Marines, too, just to be safe.