Texas leads the nation in renewable energy. Solar, wind and other renewables exclusively power businesses, colleges and even one town in the state.Like any long-term relationship, it’s complicated, especially for a state that is rooted in fossil fuels.“One side certainly has a longer history and is potentially better connected,” said Felix Mormann, a professor at Texas A&M University’s Engineering Experiment Station, of the state’s long history with natural gas and other fossil fuels.
“Building a small number of power plants is something that you can easily conceive in your head instead of getting people to do something different,” said Carey King, a research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin’s Energy Institute.Texas appears to be at an energy crossroads in which reliability is at the center of the debate. The fight will only get worse as climate change makes extreme weather events more frequent and catastrophic.
Pitting renewables against fossil fuels is misguided, energy experts say, because traditional fossil fuels power plants and renewable energy don’t operate the same way. “Renewables are such a small part of the energy mix in the U.S. right now, that to meet reliability [requirements], we do need natural gas generation,” said Travis Miller, an energy and utilities strategist for Morningstar Research Services LLC.
Transmission lines are critical to move renewable electricity from the rural areas where it is largely produced to cities and towns where it is needed. But it can take years for a transmission line developer to secure key environmental and regulatory permits before the proposal hits its last stop: the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
It’s even more difficult to build transmission lines to connect Texas to other states in order to import renewable power.