“If you want to see what the cutting edge of next-gen clean energy innovation looks like, it’d be hard to find a place better than Texas,” Bill Gates wrote in a March post on his website titled, “I’m in Texas to see the future.” Gates, the liberal Microsoft founder whose organization Breakthrough Energy has invested more than $130 million into Texas-based entrepreneurs and projects, praised the red state’s greenness.
“All the companies I’ll see in Texas this week are at the heart of the energy transition. They’re driving innovation, bringing good jobs to their communities, and boosting the American economy. If you want to catch a glimpse of our country’s clean energy future, you should head on down to the Lone Star State,” Gates gushed.
Other business leaders also believe the clean energy leader isn’t California or Washington, D.C., but the Republican-run state of Texas.
Gates wrote his post during CERAWeek, the oil and gas industry’s annual conference in Texas. Despite Gates’s celebration of Texas’s role in embracing renewables, it’s neither a new idea nor a full rejection of fossil fuels — a needle that policymakers elsewhere have struggled to thread.
An article about CERAWeek originally published in the Guardian, a left-wing outlet, suggested that the powerhouses running the world’s leading oil companies “have poured scorn on efforts to move away from fossil fuels,” arguing that a transition to clean energy is not only “visibly failing” but being pushed too fast.
“We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas and instead invest in them adequately,” said Amin Nasser, CEO of Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil company. The crowd applauded.
The International Energy Agency has embraced clean energy and claimed that global demand for oil and gas will peak by 2030. Not so, according to Nasser. “In fact, in the real world, the current transition strategy is visibly failing on most fronts,” he said, pointing out that electric vehicles had little impact in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. His real beef was with the way the oil and gas industry is portrayed in the public eye. “Despite our starring role in global prosperity,” Nasser observed, “our industry is painted as transition’s archenemy.”
Energy production is bigger in Texas
Texas’s prominent role in the green boomlet isn’t surprising. The state boasts the eighth largest economy in the world, as Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) likes to remind, well, everyone.
In a PBS special called Texas goes green: How oil country became the renewable energy leader, Michael Webber, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Texas, Austin, and the chief technology officer of a clean-technology venture fund, claimed, “It’s not unusual for Texas to do all the right things for all the wrong reasons, and the rise of renewables is one of those examples. We didn’t do it for the cleanliness. We didn’t do it for climate change. We did it because it makes us a lot of money for the landowners and saves us a lot of money for the consumers.”
To many, that is a selling point rather than a design flaw. In a November Business Insider story, Advanced Power Alliance, a trade group, said renewable energy developers pay more than $70 million every year to Texas landowners who lease their property. Hundreds of millions are paid in state and local taxes, creating billions of dollars of revenue. In a report on the Texas wholesale electricity market, wind and solar power generation saved approximately $11 billion in 2022.
According to E2, an environmental business group, the renewable energy sector employed nearly half a million people in Texas, an 8.5% increase from 2021.
It was actually former Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the conservative Republican who went on to become the 43rd president, who initially sliced regulation of Texas’s energy market. Thanks to the law he signed, companies then began to price competitively, giving customers a chance to choose their power provider in a state with its own grid. Texas produced 2,000 megawatts of power from renewable energy sources by 2009. Texas has already surpassed former GOP Gov. Rick Perry’s goal of 10,000 megawatts by 2025.
Lawmakers won’t abandon fossil fuels
But businessmen like Nasser aren’t the only ones suggesting policymakers pump the break. Jason Isaac is a senior fellow with Life:Powered, a national energy initiative of the Texas Public Policy Foundation. A former Texas state representative, he isn’t convinced there is a clean energy panacea.
“Texas is a leader in many things, but leading in so-called green energy isn’t something we should be proud of,” he told the Washington Examiner. “Wind and solar energy aren’t green at all — their serious environmental consequences are one of the best-kept secrets in politics — and their unreliability is equally concerning. The more wind and solar we add to the grid, the less reliable it is.”
In February 2021, Texans saw this firsthand. After a rare but massive winter storm knocked out power for millions and resulted in over 200 deaths, causing a historic energy infrastructure failure, Abbott and other Republicans blamed the renewed focus on renewables and doubled down on fossil fuel power plants.
During the 2023 Texas legislative session, some lawmakers took a hard stand against more clean energy initiatives after decades of watching renewable energy rise in popularity.
The legislature passed provisions boosting fossil fuels. One bill created funds to support the construction of gas-fueled power plants by providing loans at 3% interest. Another changed how companies that produce electricity can make money in the Texas market.
“Renewable energy isn’t cheaper, though its sticker price can be misleading because massive taxpayer-funded subsidies drive the price lower while driving up our tax burdens, even though it’s less reliable,” Isaac said. “If we don’t refocus on maintaining an affordable, reliable electricity supply, neither of which wind and solar can provide, we’re headed toward economic decline and deindustrialization.”
Republicans say this is also better for Texas, king of oil and gas. Others think it’s just self-preservation at play.
Judd Messer, the vice president of Texas’s Advanced Power Alliance, dismissed skeptics to Business Insider as “a small but wealthy and powerful group of ultra-right conservatives who are protecting small and midsize oil and gas producers.”
There is a broader debate going on nationally. In January, President Joe Biden took what Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Matt Eagan and Brent Bennett called “an aggressive step forward in his war on American energy by halting the permitting of new liquified natural gas (LNG) export terminals.” They predicted it would have “massive global implications.”
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Not only do Republicans think it hurts states like Texas, which produce most of the United States’s LNG exports, but locking global supply and demand ultimately results in raising the cost of energy globally. They contended Biden is “appeasing the radical green cartel.”
For now, Texas remains smack in the middle of a power struggle. “As our state continues to grow and our electricity needs increase, we should be deeply concerned about how our electric market props up unreliable power sources and penalizes the reliable, affordable fossil fuels we need to power our economy and way of life,” Isaac told the Washington Examiner.
Nicole Russell is an opinion columnist for USA Today.
