{"id":84108,"date":"2025-08-21T04:30:15","date_gmt":"2025-08-21T04:30:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/84108\/"},"modified":"2025-08-21T04:30:15","modified_gmt":"2025-08-21T04:30:15","slug":"texas-shows-what-abundance-looks-like","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/84108\/","title":{"rendered":"Texas shows what ‘abundance’ looks like"},"content":{"rendered":"

Texas and California are the two populous American states often held up against one another to make a simple point: a deregulated and \u201cabundance\u201d focused political and planning system allows for the rapid growth of clean energy, and climate success, as seen in Texas\u2019 remarkable explosion of wind, solar and battery storage.<\/p>\n

California, by contrast, is a left-leaning liberal state hampered by stifling regulations \u2014 meaning you can\u2019t build anything there, anymore.<\/p>\n

You can find a nice example in this recent\u00a0post<\/a>\u00a0by centre-right blogger Noah Smith, who claims that \u201cred states have been\u00a0beating blue states<\/a>\u00a0in the renewables race for years now\u201d.<\/p>\n

Smith\u2019s hyperlink goes back a full half decade, to an\u00a0article<\/a>\u00a0that 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:<\/p>\n

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(In another example of the ultra-sloppy referencing in these types of pieces, Smith justifies a claim that residential opponents (\u201cNIMBYS\u201d) often ally with conservation groups by directly linking to a\u00a0Sierra Club article<\/a>\u00a0(it\u2019s a good one) very explicitly criticising NIMBYism).<\/p>\n

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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\u2019ve got a bunch of examples in the original post, but here\u2019s a recent one:<\/p>\n

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As I lay out in my first post<\/a>, it\u2019s a silly metric to compare the climate progress of two different regions. Texas very simply consumes significantly more electrical energy than California \u2014 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 \u201cbuild more stuff\u201d, that much is for sure. But does that make it a more successful region in terms of successfully tackling climate change? Absolutely not.<\/p>\n

One year later, I have checked back in on the data, and things have diverged very noticeably. California\u2019s power sector climate progress has improved, and Texas has gotten much worse. California\u2019s emissions have fallen to their lowest levels in years:<\/p>\n

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And Texas\u2019 have been on an unstoppable rise for half a decade:<\/p>\n

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The first image below just shows the \u201cabsolute\u201d 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:<\/p>\n

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There is a lot going on here. California\u2019s\u00a0progress<\/a>\u00a0has accelerated largely thanks to an eye-watering influx of\u00a0very large battery storage systems<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

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More than anything else, you can see how the volume of total demand in Texas has climbed far beyond anything prior in the state:<\/p>\n

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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\u2019t mean \u201crising emissions but rising slower\u201d \u2014 it means rapidly falling emissions; as fast as we can manage.<\/p>\n

Recently, the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) released a blog post about Texas\u2019 massive power demand growth. Primarily, it relates to massive growth in data centre demand from cryptocurrency mining and machine learning training and inference (\u201cAI\u201d). \u201cThis new electricity consumption from large computing and industrial facilities contributes to our forecast that ERCOT\u2019s load across all customers will grow by 5% between 2024 and 2025\u201d.<\/p>\n

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This EIA post is clear in how the rise in power demand affects the various types of generation on the Texas grid.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur 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\u201d, with 12% growth in coal relative to base case. Power prices for Texas are a whopping 17% higher in the high-growth scenario.<\/p>\n

In comparison, solar only sees a 2% increase in the high-growth scenario, relative to base case.<\/p>\n

The idea that the free market will naturally advantage cheap wind and solar simply doesn\u2019t 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\u00a0particularly profitable<\/a>\u00a0to get energy from cheap energy technologies. Capitalism likes fossil fuels more than it likes anything else.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s crypto or generative machine learning). Fossil fuels have the power of incumbency, and so capture most of that new demand.<\/p>\n

There is an obvious reason why both big tech and big fossil fuels\u00a0absolutely love<\/a>\u00a0the \u201cabundance agenda<\/a>\u201d \u2014 it enhances their symbiosis and benefits them both, quite significantly.<\/p>\n

The deregulation of energy \u2014 both on the supply and demand side \u2014 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Texas and California are the two populous American states often held up against one another to make a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":84109,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[64,63,485,68,63314,75,63315,8146,128,3370],"class_list":{"0":"post-84108","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-california","11":"tag-climate-change","12":"tag-eia","13":"tag-environment","14":"tag-paris-climate-agreement","15":"tag-renewable-energy","16":"tag-science","17":"tag-texas"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84108\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/84109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}