The Lone Star State is the leading legend in the nation that takes care of renewable energy like nobody’s business. But even Texas has way too much going against it in terms of renewable energy resources. Those resources in particular are the one and the same that power up businesses of all sorts, as well as an entire city in Texas. Is there a reason therefore that Texas isn’t able to keep up the trend and operate on 100% renewable energy? Likely, it’s a little less logical than one would think it to be, due to Texas’ long-standing marriage to fossil fuels.
Of course, there’s all sorts of rationale as to why Texas isn’t so straight up capable of keeping connected and coming in with a long past of being stuck to the hip to fossil fuels. State lawmakers aren’t all in accordance with that loser-mentality, as it’s more positive to push bills turning the effort in the direction of decarbonization in ways of making brand-new financial incentives that would allow for natural gas power plants to be created. Additionally, there are many questions to answer when considering if accessible emergency electricity could be ready when and if another storm comes around in February 2021. Through Winter Storm Uri, around 4.5 million Texas-residents had lost their power for only several days, with nearly hundreds of people dying while the electric grid has been ushered into the end of collapse.
Energy experts are led to believe legislature isn’t really quite believing in the best solution. Natural gas plants are themselves a dying breed. So because of such understanding, it’s only logical to see Texas has a difficulty of evading economic, regulatory and technological barriers. It is entirely due to the history of the power industry having direct ties into the century-long business and infrastructure model.
Just how bad is the situation in Texas…?
Reliability is a massive matter of concern as the issue only worsens via climate change, while extreme weather events continue with even more frequent and terrible. The meaning of further reliability is to say more power plants are meant to be built. With renewables, there is a future, but experts all around have are certain that fossil fuels and renewable energy isn’t able to operate in a similar manner.
Solar and Wind Projects are easily tied to batteries and various forms of storage, with consistent power as renewables aren’t able to develop electricity just as easily as gas-fired power plants.
Transmission lines matter being that renewable electricity shifting from rural environments to cities and towns where it’s most needed. Years could pass before the permits could be secured by a transmission line developer. Texas is currently using the biggest backlog of renewable energy projects as their rationale for why the power industry needs to advance. With way too many barriers, Texas is under so much pressure to pass the federal agency’s requirements for final approval.
Hopefully. energy could be better represented in the Lone Star state properly in the future.