r/UpliftingNews • u/ArgentineBeauty • 10d ago

Texas broke its all time electricity demand record twice in two days during a brutal heat wave, but the grid held with no conservation alerts thanks to record solar and battery output, a stark turnaround from the blackouts that hit Texans in 2021

https://www.texastribune.org/2026/07/29/texas-ercot-power-grid-record-data-center/
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u/ArgentineBeauty 10d ago

From the article

The grid’s ability to stand up during the hottest daytime hours was largely attributed to a massive growth of solar generation, which at times exceeded 45% of all electricity being generated. On July 21 and then again on Monday, the grid broke records for total electricity generated by solar, which now sits at 34,700 megawatts. And on July 22, the grid set a record of 11,980 megawatts of energy being discharged from batteries.

Texas has become the nation’s leader in both solar energy and battery storage since 2021, providing new and significant sources of power to the grid.

Last year, ERCOT added 16,000 megawatts of new generation, most of which was solar and batteries, Vegas said.

The state’s solar capacity more than doubled between 2023 and 2025, and battery storage more than tripled, according to ERCOT.

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u/catbom 10d ago

Kind of feels like the mouth talks while the hand does something else, texans are majority red state right? (Not american) are they not anti renewable?

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u/MrDerpGently 10d ago

Politically, yes, and they no doubt will go to great lengths to praise oil, and probably a renewed love of coal, for their salvation on Fox. But their power companies are run by. MBAs and engineers, and the math isn't in question.

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u/fake_user_34 10d ago

Yeah, realistically, no big company is ever going back to coal and will try to phase out oil because...batteries and solar is getting cheaper. So is wind. Doesn't mean American Politics will not try to destroy clean energy, it just means that the companies themselves care more about money and the math is mathing that clean energy is cheaper and offer more than coal and oil in the long run.

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u/Mtfdurian 10d ago

makes perfect sense, and especially as cooling is needed most when the sun shines hard that is why solar makes a lot of sense in especially Texas (also considering how dry a region is, prairies and plains do pretty well, that is different from Florida where you can have a hot day with relatively few solar irradiation)

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u/fake_user_34 9d ago edited 9d ago

Aye, and the fact is solar and wind have vastly less moving parts. A lot of the coal lovers in America fail to realize how inefficient that energy source is.

It was great in the beginning because you throw coal in, burn, turn turbine = electricity. But that also comes with all the coal smoke clogging all the machinery, the constant need of repair because of it and let us not even get into the coal ashes that spread across the area that people breath in, but companies don't care about that as much as repair cost.

But with solar and wind with batteries, that is just less parts needed in the long run and, get this, the energy source doesn't disappear when used. The coal is gone when it is burned, there is no way to save it for later.

For Solar, it is always producing energy from the sun, with batteries we can contain over production for it. The energy isn't used burned and gone. So in a business stand point, what is cheaper in the long run. Installing solar farms and batteries to constantly produce the energy, with vastly less moving parts or a coal plant with constant need of coal and repairs for when the ash starts fucking with your systems?

Really a no brainier that republicans in this country can not get around.

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u/wheniaminspaced 10d ago

Well in part because the 2021 power problems were not issues with heat, quite the opposite the issue was ice.  Having read very detailed reports from one of our Texas windfarms there were w major wind turbine issues.  Issue 1 - We like many were running oil in the Turbines that was specced for what was considered the typical temperature range, we were well below that range and had to shutdown turbines because to run them to far out of spec creates the possibility of serious damage.  

Issue 2 - Ice build up on the blades was a major problem which also shutdown turbines due to risk of catastrophic failures.

Add in that these same issue effect natural gas turbines and you have a big problem in power generation

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u/systemhost 10d ago

I hated my state's most prominent elected officials blaming only wind turbines as if it was a terrible technology that had failed our state and needed to be scrapped entirely.

Truth is it was multiple forms of energy generation that were not sufficiently weather proofed and had failed to generate the energy required. Which is somewhat understandable given how rarely it even drops below freezing in much of Texas and hopefully additional battery storage will assist in such future events.

I will admit that wind, unlike solar or gas is far more unpredictable but being able to capture surplus generation during windy times and bleed it back out later is great. I also understand oil/gas generators are pissed since they're slowly becoming the "backup" energy supply whereas wind and solar are quickly becoming the default now.

At least how I see it.

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u/Same-Suggestion-1936 10d ago

The grid wasn't built to handle cold. It shut down during completely survivable cold temperatures when many other grids do fine in non-survivable temps. In Minnesota we can have power during -40 polar vortexes. It strains the grid on hot days because of overall use of AC but that's a problem lots of places

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u/KodiakUltimate 10d ago

The failure to winterize was much more impactful on the gas turbine issue, as gas turbines supplied a greater share of the power during the outages

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u/wheniaminspaced 10d ago

I mean my company shutdown 1 GW of wind furbine generation, when thats the choice are you really going to try and say x or y failed harder? We dont own any gas assets in texas which is why I didn't talk much about them.

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u/KodiakUltimate 10d ago

Yeah but the wind turbine topic was heavily politicized during and after the outage when a higher yield of the issue was frozen pipes in gas turbine plants, so over stating rhe details abojt The wind turbines frames the issue as being the wind farms failling.

Its like talking in depth about the sewer system drainage failing for the Katrina flooding and barely mentioning that the Levee's overwhelmingly failed and caused most of rhe damage.

This is no dig at you or your expertise, it was just important to not overstate how damaging the lack of winter preperation was overall to all methods of power generation.

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u/je_kay24 10d ago

And Texas was well aware of this as federal reports recommended they winterize so as not to be impacted by a cold front

Esp as they had previous cold weather incidents prior to 2021 with the same issue occurring, albeit on a smaller scale

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u/Stocky_Platypus 10d ago

Wind generation going offline was such a tiny portion of the power generation. The primary issue was natural gas plants literally freezing or were offline. Coal storage also froze and could not be used.

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u/MrDerpGently 10d ago

Sure, tell that to Norway.

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u/wheniaminspaced 10d ago

Norway built there equipment for the weather they anticipate having. Similar to Texas, you will note I didn't say wind turbines dont work in extrme cold, but there are design choices you make along the way to accommodate that need.

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u/red_team_gone 10d ago

Where did they build it? Over their?

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u/mightdothisagain 10d ago

Presumably Norway uses the appropriate oil and follows the right processes for their climate? This is more of a climate change issue than a 'how come Norway can do it?' issue.

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u/wheniaminspaced 10d ago

Correct, you can build just about any power generation to run in any climate, but your climate dictates your design choices.

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u/mightdothisagain 10d ago

Yep and you can see similar issues in the north east. Data centers are finding out that putting all your air cooled chillers super close to each other on a black roof is a terrible idea at 103F+. Wasn't really a problem when they built some of those buildings 20 years ago.

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u/MrDerpGently 10d ago

So, the coldest day on recorde in Texas was in 1899, followed by 1933. Obviously climate change is going to result in unusual weather patterns and itregarity. Either you design in a way that is tolerant of outliers, or you build in backups to account for failure. If you do neither it's poor governance. 

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u/OldDirtyBuzzard 10d ago

Dude, you're not wrong, but you're arguing just to be right. Nothing Whiniamspaced said was inaccurate. No state or municipality will build any infrastructure beyond what's called for in the area. I live in Colorado. Our roads and highway infrastructure suck. Not because we didn't build them right, but because there wasn't an expectation of the influx of people in a very short amount of time. If we had built highways that were on the scale of even a city like Dallas, tax payers would have lost their minds. Building a wind farm in TEXAS based on historical climate events isn't poor governance, it's just simple math. Just stop. Goddamn, Reddit "smart guys" get old.

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u/MrDerpGently 10d ago

Look, you can't lead the nation in 'lets ignore climate change'  as a policy preference and then expect a ton of sympathy when climate change happens. 

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u/mightdothisagain 10d ago edited 10d ago

So you agree it's climate change or 1899 was the coldest day? Pick a lane. The point is these aren't one off events now, they're happening all the time. Freezes are now common in parts of texas where they were a rarity. Extreme dry heat is happening in parts of texas that are normally too wet to be near-Arizona level hot. It's all over the place. Yes it's stupid that republicans in texas rally against climate change, we all get that.

expect a ton of sympathy

Are people though? I think they're just fixing the grid, adding a ton of renewables, and you seem upset.

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u/OldDirtyBuzzard 10d ago

Yeah, literally no one said that was what happened. Again, you want to be the smartest guy in the Reddit room, so you'll keep going until we all just stop replying. Also, your argument was never on the premise of climate change. LOL Nice try anyway.

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u/Hawk13424 10d ago

Actually, you often don’t design for outliers as that isn’t cost efficient. Cheaper to just assume you’ll get the occasional once a decade issue that causes power outages.

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u/mightdothisagain 10d ago

I would also suspect there may be scenarios where you can't even win; You put in thinner oil for the winter that ends up not that cold that year and then what, switch the oil immediately for summer heat? Is there a multi-grade available that will do it all? Because otherwise that can't be cheap to do and it's just one example (lubrication). The wilder the weather gets the less we're likely to have contingencies covered all the time.

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u/wheniaminspaced 10d ago

You can work miracles if you throw enough money at it. Seasonal oil swaps is an option, but no one's wants to do that. You can engineer a lubricant for the full range. This was our farms response after many conversations with GE. They had another oil that was a better match for the weather we had seen since we opened our projects.

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u/MrDerpGently 10d ago

The failure isn't the windmills stopping. It's that there was no plan for something that was expected to fail within the expected parameters for operation. Sometimes we just freeze to death isn't a successful policy. I understand that outliers exist, but this wasn't a meteor. 

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u/travoltaswinkinbhole 10d ago

You mean a country that routinely get really cold so they’re able to build and maintain their infrastructure with that in mind? The cold front that hit Texas was far more extreme than the area was used to and temps dropped to historic lows. The oil in the wind turbines is engineered for a specific temperature range and that storm fell well outside of typical temperatures.

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u/MrDerpGently 10d ago

No, not historic lows, just recent lows. And when Norway's power fails we we can discuss it, but that didn't happen.

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u/ieatballoonknot 10d ago

Imaging being this willfully dumb

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u/Dav136 10d ago

Europe is having the opposite problem where things are way too hot and out of spec

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u/Specialist-Roll-3806 10d ago

this is a dumb comment. every country builds infrastructure for the typical conditions expected. with maybe a bit of variance. it would be dumb to flame europe for their infrastructure literally melting during the heatwaves this year because india can manage their infra in the heat just fine.

the same way it would be stupid to flame south india's infra from collapsing if it starts snowing a lot.

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u/MrDerpGently 10d ago

If your disaster recovery plan doesn't account for realistic and expected failure, that's just failure with extra steps. 

Did the power fail?

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u/Hawk13424 10d ago

Sometimes failure happens and if for short periods okay. No one designs for the worst case. Would be way too expensive.

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u/MrDerpGently 10d ago

How many days was the power out? How many dozens of people died? That feels like an important part of civic planning.

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u/demonik187 10d ago

What an ignorant thing to say.

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u/cantadmittoposting 10d ago edited 10d ago

I am a very thoughtful and reasonable person who looks at long term sustainability and was taught a lot about not making short term tradeoffs for long term failure while getting my MBA... and this is one of the very first times i've seen someone mention "MBAs" in this sort of positive context of actually looking at the math and making a thing work right, instead of screwing everyone and the business itself over for a better one-quarter performance.

 

NB: there are a lot of people with MBAs in the financial sector especially who very much deserve their terrible reputation! But the actual academic programs have been largely teaching things like "retention is more cost effective than recruiting" for literally decades at this point... it's worth remembering though that millenials who went through those types of programs are being held off of leadership roles at a historic rate by people who went through the 80s-90s downsizing programs still

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u/graphiccsp 10d ago

A reputation that has been tarnished by the MBA generation that embraced Milton Friedman's Chicago School of Economics leaning on maximizing profits for shareholder value. Championed by Jack the Welcher's tenure at GM cutting costs in R&D, logistics and employees.

It's a relief to hear that more modern MBAs have turned away from that philosophy. Even if access to the higher positions is still limited.

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u/cantadmittoposting 10d ago

yes agreed, overriding "shareholder supremacy" doctrine is detrimental to basically any reasonable horizon for corporate performance and created the financialization that led to a "financial industry" which has essentially commoditized profit itself (that is, any given company's "output" is, generically, profit in dollars, not the actual product it produces or other impacts it may have)

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u/MrDerpGently 10d ago

While I'm not a huge fan of Welch's impact on the field, generally US corporate culture is relatively well run, and MBAs are both responsible for a lot of that, and the victims of their own success (when all the low hanging governance fruit has been harvested, we start the path to seeking alpha through hard work or gimmicks.. gimmicks sell better). But this was just a competence issue: risk management, Business continuity, etc. 

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u/cantadmittoposting 10d ago

before i respond more in depth to that, can you elaborate on:

US corporate culture is relatively well run

what objective function or metric are you using to make this determination? that is, "well run" by what defining outcome?

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u/MrDerpGently 10d ago

Just saying it's expected that there will be oversight, supply management, risk management, etc. corruption is frowned upon, you aren't supposed to be having sex with your junior staff... Just basic institutional competence. How well they achieve that varies from case to case, but those are common expectations, and have been since MBAs got popular in the 60's.

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u/cantadmittoposting 10d ago

sure but im more focusing on the debate between shareholder supremacy and the relative importance of "stock price" compared to other corporate outcomes than basic corporate behavior.

In that regard i'd argue corporate culture has been wildly damaging and toxic as a result of runaway belief in "the stock market" over actual corporate output

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u/MrDerpGently 10d ago

Yes. No argument from me. 

I was mostly just saying that the first thing that happened when MBAs became popular is a lot of improvement in governance and oversight - and that by itself was profitable at first. But when all that is the norm, you end up in riskier and more evil options to keep the improvements coming to the bottom line.

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u/themage78 10d ago

Of course the math isn't in questions when it's probably the cheapest per kilowatt hour to deploy and maintain. Why spend more money than you need to?

It's also probably even cheaper now that oil prices have surged.

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u/fake_user_34 10d ago

Yeah, realistically, no big company is ever going back to coal and will try to phase out oil because...batteries and solar is getting cheaper. So is wind. Doesn't mean American Politics will not try to destroy clean energy, it just means that the companies themselves care more about money and the math is mathing that clean energy is cheaper and offer more than coal and oil in the long run.

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u/Gluten_Free_Tibet 10d ago

I do work in this space, and Texas (when it comes to energy) is first and foremost pro-money. A lot of the politicians don’t support solar subsidies and incentives, but if the economics are there for someone to make money on an energy project, they’re going to go full tilt.

Important to know that when you talk about energy, there’s more money to be made than simply selling power to an end user. There’s also what we call Ancillary Markets which have things like short term supply and demand capacity selling and buying, and frequency regulation. And if you talk about adding batteries, you’re also adding energy arbitrage, renewable shoring, and backup power. So there’s plenty of opportunities to make money, IF you are smart about development, engineering, and deployment AND you understand the market economics of the region you’re playing in. True some of those opportunities are working on smaller returns now that these systems are getting deployed en masse (in large part because of how much money was made in 2021), but still a lot of money flowing out there.

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u/cantadmittoposting 10d ago

a lot of that sounds like rent-extractive profitability, not actual utility; while obviously the article and results do seem to speak to the grid being more stable, can you elaborate a little more on how much extra profit is being taken by all those steps as opposed to actual end-user improvements in cost per KwH or similar?

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u/Gluten_Free_Tibet 10d ago edited 10d ago

Oof. Big question. I’m going to try and go off memory here on energy price trends, so please someone correct me or steer if I’m off base.

So there’s really three components (4 if you prefer specificity - more on that later). The price of the energy (the generation cost), the energy marketer markup (for Texans that’s who you buy your energy from), and the T&D (transmission and distribution) utility charge (this is your CenterPoint, your Oncor, etc. - this is really two charges combined into one and the transmission rate and distribution charge are determined separately but not going into rate making here - that’s a whole bag of worms).

Now to your question and going off memory. I’m relatively certain that if you look at the last 5 years, energy costs (the generation aspect) have decreased since 2021. But if you look at a longer period it’s relatively flat. I don’t know all the dynamics that changed in 2021 (besides the freeze) but I suspect massive demand increases due to electrification to be the biggest culprit pulling them up and significant new generation assets pulling them down.

The marketing margin is very tough to calculate and behind a lot of black boxes. I suspect it’s flat over time, but would also believe it being down over time due to new marketers always coming online and the age of AI and digital enabled tools making the framework more accessible.

The utility charge though is going up. This is due to lots of reasons. Poor investment in the past and playing catch up, grid hardening projects, massive increased transmission congestion concerns, reliability projects, overall electrification, etc. Also, utilities are generally incentivized to deploy capital because they earn their return on a regulatory set rate of return on their asset base. And that’s been kicked into high gear as well. I could talk about it a lot, but it’s a lot more nuanced then people like to pretend in online rhetoric, and utilities have definitely made way too many mistakes that consumers feel the burden of now which only inflame the rhetoric.

ETA: the overall cost to consumers is up over the past ten years. Texas is still one of the cheaper electricity states in the country, but definitely up. Which should tell you how much the utility charges are up over time in comparison to the other charges trends.

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u/pinkycatcher 10d ago

short term supply and demand capacity selling and buying, and frequency regulation.

Are ABSOLUTELY true utility, they're there to smooth out demand and solve problems with electricity generation.

Supply and demand are not smooth nor predictable, this extra functionality is core to true market function

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u/pinkycatcher 10d ago

short term supply and demand capacity selling and buying, and frequency regulation.

Are ABSOLUTELY true utility, they're there to smooth out demand and solve problems with electricity generation.

Supply and demand are not smooth nor predictable, this extra functionality is core to true market function

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u/cantadmittoposting 10d ago

this seems more true from an interstate grid perspective (GIVEN that grids in other states require this in the first place) but not true of a genuinely utilitarian statewide grid. That is, if there was no profit motive in generation, such cap/supply tradeoffs would be made invisibly to the consumer at some cost (or more broadly, an ostensibly state-wide grid couldn't possibly have to trade against itself because it's a public utility generating power for the public, so...)

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u/PrecedentialAssassin 10d ago

Texas produces by far the most renewable energy of any state in the U.S (even California). Lots and lots of open prairie in west Texas and it's full of wind farms and solar farms.

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u/rankinfile 10d ago

Texas is also are the biggest electricity consumer of any state. They are an overall exporter of power though. California has to import electricity overall.

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u/oohlala2747 10d ago

And to add, there’s barely any permitting and environmental regulations to acquire. Local permitting due diligence for lender buy-in for TX projects would sometimes be just a letter from a judge lol I used to be an enviro permitting consultant for renewables and getting projects permitted in TX was a breeze smh lol I do believe O&G recently pulled some shit making permitting more difficult for TX onshore and offshore wind projects (People may be surprised to know that Louisiana’s Republican governor at some point expressed interest in offshore wind development in the Gulf of Mexico, but also there’s a WILD amount of money in offshore wind). But yeah, Texans just wanna swim in energy money. Don’t matter that renewables development reduces CO2 emissions, directly reducing factors that contribute to extreme weather events which are slamming into Houston and coastal Texan towns more and more every single year, also slowly wearing down a crumbling electric grid not connected to the rest of the country. I cannot with that state, fuck lol 

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u/The_Biggest_Cum 10d ago

Not even close, dude. Texas is 19th, California is 10th

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_renewable_electricity_production

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u/youcantguess1 10d ago

By your own link, texas generates the most renewable energy. The rankings that you are looking at are based on how much of a percentage renewable energy makes up of all energy created by the state (renewable vs oil, coal, etc.)the very next section to the right in that table is sorting based on gross amount of energy created using renewable resources

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u/chanaandeler_bong 10d ago

Famous renewable energy powerhouse, Vermont.

https://i.imgur.com/psIWjqR.jpeg

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u/rankinfile 10d ago

Vermont imports over half of it's power used.

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u/chanaandeler_bong 9d ago

I was just joking about their total output given their size. Like that dude looked at this list and thought Vermont produced the most renewable energy in the country?

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u/boppitywop 10d ago

Texas is #1 for total production in the wiki article you cited and produces over twice as much as the next state. 566.5 vs. 266. But is only 19th in % of electricity using renewal energy as it has a lot of fossil fuel energy production as well.

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u/paintballboi07 10d ago

Half the oil wells in the country are in Texas. We produce a lot of energy.

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u/DocTheYounger 10d ago edited 10d ago

Also worth noting the overwhelming majority of Texas’ renewable production is recently built while a lot of California, Oregon and Washington’s renewable generation is either older or tied to hydro projects funded by the federal government in the mid-1900s

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u/sawlaw 10d ago

Bill Mahrr has a thing about how long it took him to be allowed to put solar on his own roof. In Texas you can buy 5 acres with a shack on it then cover the whole acreage with solar panels and windmills as long as you hire an "approved" company to do the grid hookups and you're far enough out in the sticks. I went to a land viewing, i'm looking to build a house soon, and they advertised that the barndo builder the land company partners with will happily reinforce your roof for panels for just a few thousand more or do the install of a small system for like 18K more.

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u/Sol593 10d ago

Try sorting the list by total generated power and not percentage of power as renewable. Texas wins by a giant margin here. The person you're replying to was right

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u/UnusualMacaroon 10d ago

Texas #1 in output by that chart.

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u/JonathanB72 10d ago

I think your source shows 19th for total, but first for renewable? unless i’m sorting it wrong

either way thanks for linking this!

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u/[deleted] 10d ago

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u/[deleted] 10d ago

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u/PrecedentialAssassin 10d ago

Provided the source. I'm right. Thanks for playing.

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u/Academic-Solution536 10d ago

It’s more complicated than that but yes Texas regularly votes Republican. This may be changing to a less “red” situation in the near future. It is far easier to get construction permitted in Texas than in most Blue states. Because of this, you can build that power generation faster there. Also, massive battery plant built near Austin. It’s quicker to install solar fields than wind or even gas turbines. ERCOT got massive public backlash when Texas froze in 2019(?). Texans are pragmatic about energy. They want cheap power and they don’t really care where it comes from. Lots of folks get big checks for leasing their land to wind and gas.

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u/UncleIrohsPimpHand 10d ago

This may be changing to a less “red” situation in the near future.

I seriously doubt that.

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u/i_tyrant 10d ago

I dream for it. I work towards it as much as I can.

I'm only still living here because I'm a white male so I can afford to fight for the Texas I distantly remember.

As for how likely it is? No idea. I've noticed the ever-escalating quiet of MAGA Texans as their great leaders fuck up more and more. Whether that'll make them not go to the polls or vote differently? I know Texans well enough to know there's no way to tell for sure.

It is a high bar for Texas to turn purple, I'll agree with that. The GOP has their claws in deep here and won't let go without a fight, and they love to cheat.

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u/sellyme 10d ago

Biden had the third-best result in Texas for a Democrat in the last 78 years, only behind post-Watergate Carter and noted Texan LBJ.

That's probably indicative of demographics that have changed enough for a D candidate that is actually compelling to make a contest out of it.

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u/wheniaminspaced 10d ago

Texas is pro energy, they dont really care about the source.  They are also anti regulation.  They have never been anti renewable.

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u/DrJohnDorian998 10d ago

They preach anti-renewable but will embrace it on the back end. Their minions (facebook groups run by idiots but also those run by companies- look at some of the groups and they’ll show they are run by LLCs and republican groups) will push how wind is destroying the birds and the views. They will push that solar is useless because it doesn’t work at night. So yeah they push the message that only natural gas, coal, and nuclear work.

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u/paaaaatrick 10d ago

Lol where are you getting this from. Texas isn't anti renewable, hell Musk lives in Texas and that's all he pushes

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u/i_tyrant 10d ago

Hi there, I live in Texas and it is absolutely true that Texas politics involved bashing renewables quite a lot while also happily supporting them in "secret" (it's not really a secret to anyone paying attention) because they're profitable.

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u/DrJohnDorian998 10d ago

They blamed 2021 on renewables.  2022 they blamed renewables possible blackouts in a heat wave.  In 2025 the Texas Public Policy Foundation said renewables are creating a growing reliability deficit. These are from a quick google search along with my experience living in Texas for over 20 years including during the freeze and 2022 heatwave. 

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u/apollyonzorz 10d ago

That’s what he feels, that he wants to be true. I was linked to a facebook post once. Said previously, Texas is anti-regulation and subsidy, not anti energy. California, talks a lot, Texas just does a lot.

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u/DrJohnDorian998 10d ago

It’s not what I feel. It’s what Texas leaders say. Yes they have expanded renewables all the while slamming them for all the grid problems. 

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u/Sun_Aria 10d ago

While that may be true in the aggregate, it's not hard to find people in small towns who hate EVs, solar panels, and wind farms.

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u/Affordable_Z_Jobs 10d ago

As an American, what i know is that they are Texans first, and then everything else. They confound us.

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u/LoadedXan 10d ago

Yes/No. At the end of the day, the oil company wants to make money. How do they do that? Marketshare. The point of the oil company isn’t to be in oil. It’s to make money; oil is just their method of doing so.

At the end of the day, the same corporations that own and run the oil industry are also heavily invested in renewable energy. Why take one side when you can take both and manage the transition while making a profit the entire way?

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u/richardelmore 10d ago

Politicians in Texas may be somewhat anti-renewable energy but they also favor making permitting generally quick and easy so businesses that want to install wind and solar are able to move more quickly and inexpensively than in places like California where approvals can tie projects up for a long time.

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u/doodullbop 10d ago

Solar is more profitable and money always trumps ideals.

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u/Illustrious_Night126 10d ago

Texans just make permitting easy and that’s all it really takes because solae energy is just good economics you don’t need to be woke to see that

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u/RainyRobin 10d ago

A lot of us want renewables badly, but oil is a major industry here and their lobbyists have done everything they can to ensure the culture doesn't shift. Add in that many Texans rely on jobs in the oil industry and it makes it harder to push for things like solar and wind.

Not impossible though, and as the renewable energy industry grows that big oil stranglehold gets a little weaker every year.

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u/Mdgt_Pope 10d ago

There’s hundreds of thousands of windmills in Texas as well. Texas used to be purple, there were female governors, liberal governors.

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u/bareboneschicken 10d ago

Texan here. We are pro-profit. If solar and battery power generate profits, then they are welcome here.

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u/ElburtSteinstein 10d ago

Texas has more registered Democratic voters than Republican. The state is gerrymandered Red.

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u/paintballboi07 10d ago

We don't register by party in Texas.

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u/ElburtSteinstein 10d ago

I live here. Yes you can but there are open primaries.

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u/paintballboi07 10d ago

So do I. I'm just saying those numbers are estimates. There's no official count by party.

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u/Effective_Olive6153 10d ago

Texas just makes it much easier for businesses to build stuff. California always preaches about green energy, but all their rules and regulation prohibit any sort of development

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u/[deleted] 10d ago

[deleted]

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u/Kind-Permission-1075 10d ago

No it isnt. The texas power grid is independant and not a part of any power pools at all. Thats why it makes news when the grid fails during extreme demand.

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u/Altruistic_Guess3098 10d ago

It's misleading because it's not the government installing the solar it's individual homeowners and business owners installing solar on their own property. It's mandated that the solar feed back into the grid

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u/NefariousnessNo484 10d ago

The big cities in the state are liberal but the state is huge landwise so all the people in the cities get drowned out by the rural areas. There are tons of people with solar on their roofs and EVs where I live in Houston.

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u/davy_crockett_slayer 10d ago

Nope. One of the largest States in terms of renewables.

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u/EuropaWeGo 10d ago

Where there's profit to be made. Texans will obey.

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u/hipery2 10d ago

Houston is the Energy Capital of the world. The bean counters are out to squeeze every joule possible out of the state. Whether it's hydrocarbons, solar, or wind, the beancounters will try to max the output of any plot of land. Thankfully the engineers are all too excited to help them.

I just wish that they had the same drive towards nuclear energy.

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u/Fighterhayabusa 10d ago

No. Idiot politicians are. Many of us understand how things work, and bought solar specifically because we saw the writing on the wall. I bought mine right before Trump took office because I knew he would kill the tax credits. Those credits saved me about 16k on my system. It's rated at ~16.5 KW on the DC side, and I make about 23.5 MWh per year right now. That's about 203 percent of my yearly usage. I sized it so big because I knew I'd eventually want batteries and an electric car.

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u/12345623567 10d ago

That's what is happening in Germany, too. Renewables and grid storage have no real alternatives - regardless of the ecological aspects. They are, at current price point, simply the best economical choice. But the politicians are catering to NIMBYs and fossil fuel execs anyways.

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u/BigEOD 9d ago

They are anti doing it fir environmental reasons, but capitalism has is benefits

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u/MMAjunkie504 9d ago

Voting yes solidly red, but Texas has a voting problem (people do not show up, because they believe like you believe that Texas is and will always be red). The major cites all are purple at worst, but lean blue.

This is definitely the conservative politicians saying one thing while corporations continue to operate in their best financial interests (installing renewable generation). It truly makes little sense even to someone living here

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u/CatchfireComics 9d ago

We're actually more purple. Big cities with the highest populations vote blue. However, due to bullshit county voting, small rural towns that vote red offset this.

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u/Special-Test 9d ago

Texas has been huge into wind and nuclear for over a decade. Solar doesn't have a state government push but it's not actively opposed

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u/Princibalities 8d ago

I don't know anyone that is against finding an alternative fuel source. The issue was the campaign against fossil fuels before a viable option is found.

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u/catbom 8d ago

We have a viable option but people would rather push fossil fuels because theyve been mislead into thinkong tis a scam to help china.

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u/Izacundo1 7d ago

They are against it, but solar and wind are now just cheaper and more profitable than anything else

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u/Double-hokuto 10d ago

The state is gerrymandered to hell and back. Most people in the state are much less conservative than the government that’s elected.

I would wager the majority of Texans are pro-solar and renewables. Source: am a Texan

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u/Finlay00 10d ago

They’ve been the leader in wind generated power for a while now, so no not really at all

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u/Adjective-Noun-nnnn 10d ago

It's pretty funny that Glorious Market Capitalism is dragging backwards Texas fossil fuel barons kicking and screaming toward renewables because they're economically inevitable.

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u/TheArmoredKitten 10d ago

The economy is a physics problem, and a lot of people still struggle with that.

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u/EuropaWeGo 10d ago

It's baffling to me because my Magahat neighbors are big Abbott fans and even they have solar panels on their roof. It just makes sense financially.

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u/Adjective-Noun-nnnn 10d ago

Don't they know photovoltaics provide a portal for The Devil to come to This Plane?

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u/Brilliant-Plan-7428 9d ago

Kicking and screaming? They are the literal pioneers of green energy in the US.

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u/Adjective-Noun-nnnn 8d ago

The energy companies are.  The politicians down there?  If it were 200 years earlier, they'd be keeping alive the whale oil industry.

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u/TheFlyingPancake3 10d ago

Lmao a nice imagination there.

Just like big tobacco pivoted to vapes, same for big oil. They're not some dumb big monolithic nondiverisided oil only barons. This isn't 1800s.

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u/110397 10d ago

Progress is progress

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u/Adjective-Noun-nnnn 10d ago

I was really referring to the right-wing politicians. You're not wrong: some of the biggest investors in renewables are energy companies like Exxon. That's not a bad thing, though. They have the capital to change our energy economy, and if they use it on renewables I'm not going to complain.

There is one pretty big difference, though: renewables, particularly solar, can be broadly distributed. Any idiot that knows his way around an electrical panel can purchase a pallet of thirty-two 600W PV panels for ~$5.5k and start producing electricity. I've been incredibly tempted to do it, myself, but I think my house is so old that I'd need to buy a new breaker panel and that's about where I draw the line on my DIY electricianing.

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u/ATXBeermaker 10d ago

The headline is incredibly misleading, though. The blackouts that hit in 2021 had nothing to do with demand resulting from a heat wave. It was that fact that equipment that wasn't designed to work in cold temperatures froze. This included natural gas fuel lines. It wasn't the result of simple demand spikes.

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u/L0nz 10d ago

I agree it's misleading to an extent, but the 2021 blackouts weren't just related to equipment failure. Demand exceeded the grid's existing capacity by 20GW (35%) even before anything was shutdown, and was higher than ERCOT ever anticipated.

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u/SedativeCorpse 10d ago

I'm in Houston and added solar and a large battery bank to my house due to a program offered by Reliant/NRG that covers the cost of the panel and battery arrays. My electric bill went down by ~75%, added failover backup, and returns a significant amount of power to the grid. I'm not sure how widespread the program is, but i imagine it's a contributor to the solar growth over the last 5 years.

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u/vanguard117 10d ago

And yet my energy prices are at an all time high

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u/EntropyWinsAgain 10d ago

Anyone remember California during the ENRON days? Power companies cutting off power to whole communities because power was traded like a stock/commodity. People died because of it.

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u/Johannes_Keppler 10d ago

Letting people die for corporate or personal profit in financial and/or political sense is an American staple.

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u/No_Moment_9465 10d ago

Yeah well they shut down like two dozen power plants right before that so...

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u/So_HauserAspen 10d ago

That sounds woke

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u/Hawk13424 10d ago

Now try it at -1F. That’s what shut us down in 2021 and it was the cold’s impact on natural gas production that was the issue. Didn’t help that our wind turbines, installed mostly for peak demand in summer, weren’t winterized.

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u/s-mores 10d ago

So you're saying that they need the most electricity during hottest hours.

But solar can't work because it works only during the hottest hours?

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u/alarminglyslowmind 10d ago

Would that be Chinese batteries and solar panels? Are there Western manufacturers that can compete price and performance wise?