The Texas GOP’s War on Renewable Energy
What’s behind the Legislature’s relentless campaign against wind and solar power, which are saving Texans billions?
Texas Monthly
June 2023
Greg Roach doesn’t much care for the blinking red lights atop the ninety wind turbines just outside of town. They distract from the nightly blanket of stars that’s among the benefits of life in Olney, an agricultural crossroads about a two-hour drive northwest of Fort Worth. But, says the 67-year-old superintendent of the local school district, that’s a minor quibble.
Tax payments from the Trinity Hills wind farm have allowed Olney ISD to remodel the junior high and the high school and to build a vocational building for classes in welding and agriculture, all without raising the tax rate.
It’s been “an absolute home run fiscally,” Roach says.
And those benefits have recently gotten a whole lot bigger. Trinity Hills enjoyed an enormous tax break when it began operating, in 2012, but that decade-long arrangement has come to an end. The wind farm now numbers among the district’s largest taxpayers. “You are looking at around one million dollars in revenue,” Roach says, for a district with a total annual budget of about $12 million. “There is absolutely no doubt they are a big boost.” He expects the extra money will help the district purchase a new school bus and upgrade classroom technology.
Olney ISD and countless other public entities have benefited mightily since Texas rolled out the welcome mat for renewables, in 1999, by deregulating the electricity market and setting a ten-year goal of adding two gigawatts of green energy to the grid. With ample wind and sunshine, a business-friendly regulatory regime, and state-backed construction of new high-voltage transmission wires, Texas quickly became the nation’s renewable-energy leader. It reached the two-gigawatt goal by 2005 and has since met even more ambitious benchmarks.
The state produces more wind and solar power today than the next three states (California, Iowa, and Oklahoma) combined, and that lead is growing. Last year Texas added more new renewable power generation than the next five states together. The American Clean Power Association, a trade group representing wind-, solar-, battery-, and hydrogen-energy developers, recently testified that
renewables projects have invested $93 billion in Texas during the past couple of decades and generated $684 million combined in lease payments to landowners and taxes to counties and school districts.
One recent estimate found that renewables Lowered the cost of electricity to Texans by $11 billion last year, or $423 for every customer served by the state’s predominant power grid. Over the past five years, Texas has added 2,800 jobs to support wind and solar power generation at the same time that the state has lost 44,000 oil and gas extraction jobs, in part because automation has allowed producers to drill more wells while employing fewer roughnecks.
The abundance of low-cost clean energy—a growing priority for global corporations—has also driven companies to put new facilities in Texas. It’s a trend that shows no signs of slowing. In December, for example, Pennsylvania-based Air Products and Virginia-based AES announced that they would jointly build a $4 billion plant near Wichita Falls to manufacture hydrogen from electricity generated by wind and solar.
So why, any reasonable observer might ask, have Governor Greg Abbott, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, and the Republican majority in the state legislature been tripping over themselves to upend this remarkable success? Why were about a dozen bills proposed during this year’s legislative session that seemed designed to kill the Texas renewable-energy boom?
A recent University of Houston poll found that a majority of Texans support greater access to green energy. Even among Republicans, 50 percent favored increasing the use of solar power.
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What’s behind the Legislature’s relentless campaign against wind and solar power, which are saving Texans billions?
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