Texas and California are the two populous American states often held up against one another to make a simple point: a deregulated and “abundance” focused political and planning system allows for the rapid growth of clean energy, and climate success, as seen in Texas’ remarkable explosion of wind, solar and battery storage.
California, by contrast, is a left-leaning liberal state hampered by stifling regulations — meaning you can’t build anything there, anymore.
You can find a nice example in this recent post by centre-right blogger Noah Smith, who claims that “red states have been beating blue states in the renewables race for years now”.
Smith’s hyperlink goes back a full half decade, to an article that references 2019 data. But if you look at the most recent 12 months, and the top 20 states by proportion of non-fossil energy of total, only 8 of those 20 are red states:
(In another example of the ultra-sloppy referencing in these types of pieces, Smith justifies a claim that residential opponents (“NIMBYS”) often ally with conservation groups by directly linking to a Sierra Club article (it’s a good one) very explicitly criticising NIMBYism).
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These arguments are usually held up by presenting the absolute amount of renewable energy built in Texas, and comparing it to the absolute amount of energy built in California. I’ve got a bunch of examples in the original post, but here’s a recent one:
As I lay out in my first post, it’s a silly metric to compare the climate progress of two different regions. Texas very simply consumes significantly more electrical energy than California — that means it has a far higher volume of both clean power and fossil fuels than every single other state in the US. Texas really does “build more stuff”, that much is for sure. But does that make it a more successful region in terms of successfully tackling climate change? Absolutely not.
One year later, I have checked back in on the data, and things have diverged very noticeably. California’s power sector climate progress has improved, and Texas has gotten much worse. California’s emissions have fallen to their lowest levels in years:
And Texas’ have been on an unstoppable rise for half a decade:
The first image below just shows the “absolute” power generation from non-fossil and non-bioenergy sources in both states, and that certainly makes Texas look good. But when you look at the proportion of total power generation or the carbon intensity, California comfortably wins by both metrics:
There is a lot going on here. California’s progress has accelerated largely thanks to an eye-watering influx of very large battery storage systems, which allow previously curtailed solar to be used to charge batteries instead, which is then discharged later on, particularly at times that make the operators of gas plants very angry.
Texas has specifically seen a very large and noticeable influx of solar, but that has happened alongside a very noticeable stagnation of wind power, and a reduction in the output of nuclear:
More than anything else, you can see how the volume of total demand in Texas has climbed far beyond anything prior in the state:
It is worth noting here that if this heavily Republican state has chosen to meet all this new power demand purely using fossil fuels, emissions would be far, far worse. But resolving the threat of climate change doesn’t mean “rising emissions but rising slower” — it means rapidly falling emissions; as fast as we can manage.
Recently, the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) released a blog post about Texas’ massive power demand growth. Primarily, it relates to massive growth in data centre demand from cryptocurrency mining and machine learning training and inference (“AI”). “This new electricity consumption from large computing and industrial facilities contributes to our forecast that ERCOT’s load across all customers will grow by 5% between 2024 and 2025”.
This EIA post is clear in how the rise in power demand affects the various types of generation on the Texas grid.
“Our scenario with stronger growth in large-load demand results in 8% more natural gas-fired generation in 2025 than the baseline forecast, at 213 billion kWh”, with 12% growth in coal relative to base case. Power prices for Texas are a whopping 17% higher in the high-growth scenario.
In comparison, solar only sees a 2% increase in the high-growth scenario, relative to base case.
The idea that the free market will naturally advantage cheap wind and solar simply doesn’t play out in the deregulated real world. It is cheap to get energy from old, harmful and dangerous incumbent fuel sources, and it is not particularly profitable to get energy from cheap energy technologies. Capitalism likes fossil fuels more than it likes anything else.
Skyrocketing power demand seems to be breathing most life into coal and gas: doing little for solar and absolutely nothing for wind. Data centres have the clear characteristic of causing sudden, severe and sustained expansion of electrical power demand (whether that’s crypto or generative machine learning). Fossil fuels have the power of incumbency, and so capture most of that new demand.
There is an obvious reason why both big tech and big fossil fuels absolutely love the “abundance agenda” — it enhances their symbiosis and benefits them both, quite significantly.
The deregulation of energy — both on the supply and demand side — risks undoing so much of the incredible progress of the past decade, since the signing of the Paris Climate Agreement. Honestly, I wish there was more pushback against the false narratives that are used to justify it.