Be Careful of the Lessons You Learn In Texas
Texas is building more solar than any state. It also has the state's dirtiest electric grid.
If you’ve spent any time online in the last few years, you’ve no doubt seen what I’ve come to think of as “the Texas clean energy story.”
You might have seen it in social media posts like these:
Or you might have seen it in a mainstream news article with headlines like these:
Can Blue States Build? Texas is a national leader in clean-energy generation. Democrats should take note. (The Atlantic)
How red Texas became a model for green energy. The state’s solar surge proves that the energy transition defies politics. (Financial Times)
Solar is bigger in Texas (Axios)
Or maybe you read it in my newsletter or one of my own social media posts earlier this year.
It’s been hard to miss the the story of Texas as the clean energy and climate hero. In the last few years, it’s been shared in viral social media posts, cable news segments, podcasts, and print media.
But there’s another side of this story that is often left out of these articles, including in the one that I wrote: While Texas leads the country in building clean energy, it also leads in electricity emissions and pollution. No other state’s electric grid puts as much carbon into the atmosphere each year.
Plenty of states have dirty grids, of course. Wyoming, West Virginia, and Alabama all run primarily on coal. But none of these states are put forward as a hero and model in the way that Texas has been in the last two years. The subtext of most stories about Texas’ clean energy success is that America and other states should rewrite their energy policies and regulations to look more like those in the Lone Star state.
But before doing that, we’d all be wise to look at the entire energy picture in Texas.
Texas really is building a lot of solar
There’s no doubt that Texas leads the country in new solar deployment. Over the last 12 months, the state has built more than 7 gigawatts of new capacity—more than any other state by far, as you can see in the Cleanview chart below.
Texas’ recent solar boom has helped the state surpass California in having the most installed utility-scale solar. California still leads the country in total solar electricity production thanks to its millions of rooftop solar systems. But at the rate Texas is building new solar, it’s unlikely to keep that lead for long.
The growth of solar has helped Texas cut emissions from its grid by 7% over the last five years—a period that saw total electricity consumption rise by 20%.
There are no signs that this growth will slow down in the coming years either. Using data from Cleanview—the tool I built to track clean energy trends and projects—I looked at how much clean energy is expected to come online in the next 18 months. Texas has more planned capacity than the next 9 states combined.
No matter how you cut the data, Texas is leading the country in building clean energy. And there are lessons to be learned from this success.
One lesson Texas offers is how to manage grid interconnection. When surveyed, clean energy developers often cite interconnection queues and delays as a top barrier to building new solar, wind and battery projects. Texas has figured out a better way of handling this problem than other parts of the country with its “connect and manage” approach to interconnection. As a result, clean energy projects are connecting faster in Texas than in California and the Northeast.
If you’re the type of person that enjoys the wonky details of grid interconnection policy and FERC orders, Tyler Norris, a PHD candidate and energy systems expert wrote a paper all about Texas’ “connect and manage” approach to interconnection. He also went on the Heatmap podcast recently to talk about it. I’ll spare the rest of you the details of balancing authority procedures and processes.
Texas was an early wind energy leader too
The recent solar boom in Texas isn’t the first time that renewable energy has grown quickly in the state.
In the early 2000s, Texas built more wind energy than any other state. Wind’s growth was due in large part to how Texas managed and planned its electric grid. The state set up a “Competitive Renewable Energy Zone” (CREZ) and passed policies that led to thousands of miles of high-voltage transmission lines connecting the empty plains to city centers.
Texas lawmakers also passed one of the country’s first Renewable Portfolio Standards mandating that utilities build 2 GW of clean power. After the state blew past that goal, they upped the target to 10 GW.
For all Texas talks of free markets and laissez-faire policy, it was central planning and government mandates that gave birth to the state’s wind energy industry.
“All-of-the-above” energy policy has led to a lot of coal
Former Governor Rick Perry, who led the state during its early wind boom, has said that the state’s renewable energy success can be attributed to something else though: its “all-of-the-above” approach to energy. He’s not alone either.
Earlier this year, current Governor Greg Abbott wrote in a Facebook post, “Texas is #1 in the nation for wind-powered electricity production. Texas’ robust all-of-the-above energy strategy helped to cement our state as the energy capital of the world.”
But both Abbott and Perry have always been clear in saying that “all-of-the-above” includes fossil fuels. That’s sort of the point of the phrase. And that’s why Texas doesn’t just lead the country in solar and wind electricity production; it leads in gas and coal-powered electricity production too.
Add up all the emissions from the gas and coal power plants in Texas and you get a very different picture than the one shown in viral Texas solar posts and news stories.
Over the last 12 months, the Texas power grid was responsible for 200 million tons of CO2 emissions. By comparison, the grid in California—which has a bigger population and economy—emitted roughly 50 million tons.
California and Texas have different climates, economies, and energy systems that serve different purposes. But when you look at how much carbon each grid emits for every unit of electricity produced, you’ll see that Texas has a much dirtier grid.
The primary reason that the Texas grid pollutes so much more than California’s is due to its reliance on coal. While coal generation has fallen in Texas in recent years, it still burns more of the stuff than any other state.
This is a deliberate policy choice. The state has chosen to keep its coal-fired power plants open rather than close them down as many other states have.
As of 2023, 11 states were coal-free, proving that coal isn’t necessary to run a reliable grid. In most cases, power plant owners didn’t voluntarily shut down their coal plants; they were forced to by regulations and policies aimed at mitigating climate change and improving public health.
Eventually clean energy will probably nudge out coal power plants in Texas and the rest of the country. But the difference between a fast and slow transition is the difference between billions of tons of carbon pollution in the atmosphere. For some people, it will also be the difference between life and death.
Between 1999 and 2020 pollution from coal power plants located in Texas was linked to 27,000 deaths, according to a paper published in Science.
Texas has made it clear that it would prefer a slow energy transition away from coal—or none at all. The state maintains a website that sums up regulators perspective. Its title: “Coal Energy is Good for Texas.”
In 2023, Texas legislators tried to create a $10 billion fund aimed at subsidizing fossil fuel power plants. When that failed, they sent it to the ballot where it was approved by voters. While other states are choosing to close fossil fuel power plants, Texas is throwing them a lifeline.
Be careful what lessons you learn from Texas
In recent years, YIMBYs and neoliberals have popularized the idea that environmentalists need to go from blocking projects and shutting things down to building things.
The Texas story is often put forward as an example of what it looks like to really build. The state’s success in building solar and wind is shown as proof of what happens when you let the market do what it does best and get out of the way. Delete all the regulations and clean energy is what you get.
I will confess that I’ve become YIMBY-pilled in the last few years. I’ve written at length about the small group of people that are blocking clean energy projects across the country. I live in a house of YIMBYs too. My wife recently managed a successful city council campaign that was all about making it easier to build housing, transit, and clean energy in our city. (Our two year old son is showing promising signs of becoming a YIMBY too).
But recently I’ve begun to feel like the stories that YIMBYs are telling about the Texas model overlooks important details and nuances. At a time when Congress is debating permitting reform bills and environmental review processes, I worry that policymakers on the left and right will learn the wrong lessons from Texas.
It’s clear that Texas can teach the rest of the country something about what it will take to build things. In the coming decades, electricity demand is going to grow significantly as we “electrify everything.” To meet all this new demand, we will need to build infrastructure at a speed and scale we haven’t seen in a half a century—one that you can argue we’ve never seen.
But what we build matters. Meeting even a fraction of this new demand with fossil fuel power plants would have disastrous consequences considering the scale of America’s energy needs. The speed that we choose to replace existing infrastructure—like coal power plants—matters too.
Texas may offer lessons for a clean energy future, but not a complete playbook to expand to the rest of the country.
Correction: I added the line “Or maybe you read it in my newsletter or one of my own social media posts earlier this year.” to show that I’ve contributed to this simplified Texas story myself.
Thank you for pushing back against the misleading aspects of the Texas clean energy narrative. Please keep it up!
There's a small detail here that sounds a little off to me. You say "In most cases, power plant owners didn’t voluntarily shut down their coal plants; they were forced to by regulations and policies aimed at mitigating climate change and improving public health." I think this downplays the role of economic factors. Gas really has become cheaper than coal in recent decades. Cheap wind has added more competition in some parts of the country, and cheap solar and batteries are now coming into play. Obviously regulations also play a big role, and I suppose we could imagine a world in which totally unregulated coal power is much cheaper than coal power with emissions controls. So it's complicated. But in order to eliminate coal, one needs an affordable alternative.
Nuclear nuclear nuclear please God nuclear I would love to see a cooling tower right outside my town