Who's the Greenest State of All? Texas!

As a brutal, relentless heat wave back in June sent temperatures in much of the U.S. soaring above 100 degrees day after day for weeks, the need to keep the air conditioners humming in the face of faltering, strained electric grids became a life-threatening struggle. Throughout most of the affected regions, aging nuclear and fossil-fuel power plants, which generate nearly 80 percent of the electricity in the U.S., broke down under the damaging heat and the enormous electric loads. Even California, known for its pioneering green programs, suffered rolling brown-outs.

But in Texas, the air conditioning never wavered.

That's because the Lone Star State, despite its reputation as the center of the fossil-fuel universe, may be the greenest state in the union—at least when it comes to energy.

Texas is the only state in the U.S. that generates more than a third of its electricity from wind and solar energy—energy that's unaffected by the high temperatures. Even when solar panels fizzle out at night, the state's solar farms keep the energy flowing, thanks to its investments in massive banks of batteries that soak up energy by day and release them in the dark.

As most states struggle to get to substantial generation of green energy, big wind and solar numbers are almost old news in Texas. Driven by a combination of huge power demands, copious sun and wind, a love of frictionless free-market enterprise, and surprisingly visionary leadership from past Republican politicians, Texas has steadily plowed so far ahead in big solar and wind projects that its green energy output could well surge past those of fossil-fuel plants in the state.

The irony runs as thick as crude. In Texas, home to a disproportionate share of the nation's oil reserves, the mere suggestion that climate change calls for curtailing oil and gas consumption is blasphemy. In fact, the state's pace-setting commitment to wind and solar energy sounds like something out of a red-state nightmare. Its green-energy growth is supported by federal tax credits, spurred by state clean-energy incentives, boosted by foreign investment, and mandated by government programs.

"Even Texans are surprised to learn how big a leader the state is in green energy," says Luke Metzger, Executive Director of the Environment Texas Research & Policy Center. "We're a big oil and gas state, and we're generating 55 percent more renewable energy than California."

But it's not all breezy and sunny for the future of wind and solar there. Like other states, Texas faces challenges in expanding and reshaping its power grid to get more green electricity from where it's generated to where it's needed. More ominously, the increasing stridency of the state's far-right-leaning politics may yet torpedo Texas' leadership in green energy simply because liberals like it.

"They're starting to put their thumb on the scale to restrict new wind and solar generation," says Josiah Neeley, Texas Director and Resident Senior Fellow in energy for the R Street Institute, a think tank. "It hasn't had a big effect yet, but you can see they're becoming less open to it."

Cleaner Air, More Water—And Cash Flow

Texas wind farms generated nearly 120,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity in 2022, about as much as the solar output of the four next-most-prolific states combined, and 17 times more than California. The 20 gigawatt-hours (GWh) put out by Texas solar panels in 2022 took a back seat only to California's 35 GWh—but only because California vastly exceeds Texas in the number of home-roof-mounted panels, thanks to homeowner incentives that Texas doesn't offer. The electricity from Texas' solar farms already exceeds that produced by California's—and has been doubling each year for three years. "Solar costs have dropped 80 percent in the past decade," says Metzger. "The state is pouring enormous investment into it."

Studies have shown that all this green energy has led to big reductions in smog, soot and greenhouse gas emissions. And it has freed up more water in the perennially drought-challenged state, thanks to the fact that wind and solar don't need water cooling, unlike fossil-fuel and nuclear plants, which take 4 percent of the state's water. But the big benefit that has mostly driven Texas' green-energy push is lower energy costs. According to a University of Texas study, the state has saved $12 billion in energy costs over the past decade from wind and solar generation.

It's the payoff in cheaper energy, and not the environmental benefits, that Texas has been chasing since the state deregulated its wholesale electricity markets in 1995. "In a deregulated environment, price will always win," says Cristin Lyons, energy practice leader at consultancy ScottMadden.

Wind is the cheapest way to generate electricity. But taking advantage of it requires moving huge amounts of electricity from the windy western half of the state to the much more heavily populated east. So the state pushed utilities to build the needed transmission lines, requiring them to spread the costs out over all of their customers rather than tacking it onto the price of wind energy, keeping the wind energy cheap.

All told, some 3,600 miles of new transmission lines have gone up in the past 12 years, at a cost of nearly $7 billion—an investment that has paid the state back more than twice over. "That's a model for how to enable low-cost, renewable energy resources," says Lyons. It also helps that, unlike California, Texas doesn't require energy developers to go through a complex, costly, time-consuming permitting process to build a new power-generating facility or to put in new lines.

As climate change has hit Texas especially hard with extreme weather events, another payoff has emerged: increased grid reliability. Last summer's heat wave was the perfect illustration of the resilience that wind and solar add to the energy picture. But even 2021's blockbuster winter storm Uri was a case in point, in spite of the fact that the storm is remembered for knocking out power to much of the state. The resulting deadly outages, which killed hundreds of Texans, were primarily the result of the state's natural gas pipelines freezing over and outages at fossil-fuel-generating plants, even while most of the wind and solar farms continued to churn out energy.

The icing on the cake has been the Biden administration's Inflation Reduction Act and its incentives for green energy, which are bringing the state billions more in tax savings linked to its wind and solar farms.

Partisan Electricity

But as Texas politics have moved harder to the right in recent years, anything associated with the Biden administration and Democrats tends to draw fire from a range of politicians. Increasingly, that has included the state's green energy network, despite all the benefits the state has derived from it, and the fact that it was mostly created and built up under Republican leadership.

"There was long-time bipartisan support for renewable energy," says Metzger. "Unfortunately, it's become a partisan issue in the last few years."

It's no coincidence that when Uri knocked out power, Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott and other state Republican leaders were quick to falsely claim that it was the wind and solar farms causing the problem—claims they were soon forced to publicly retract.

Republican state legislators have tried to push through a variety of laws and programs that would hamper new wind and solar projects and promote new gas-fired generating plants, including those that would slash tax breaks and other incentives to wind and solar projects, and even some that would ban such projects outright. One recent proposal would force all generating plants to prove they are protected from dropping offline—a requirement that would shutter most renewable plants, because of the intermittent nature of sunshine and wind.

Most of the bills have failed, but not all. "Some of this stuff is actually going through, including restrictions on where wind and solar farms can be sited," says Neeley. Local politicians, too, have in several cases tried to block new wind and solar farms, though so far state courts have sided with the energy developers. Meanwhile, the state, which is still the biggest oil producer in the U.S., recently slapped a $200-a-year fee on electric vehicle owners.

Multiple Texas Republican legislators and county commissioners who have publicly expressed skepticism of renewable energy development in the state did not respond to Newsweek's requests for comments.

But wind and solar energy may have already become too big and beneficial to kill with partisan politics. "All the rhetorical hostility from public officials doesn't seem to be impeding its advancement," says Neeley. "Renewables have lowered electricity prices, and that's going to keep it expanding." He adds that the federal tax credits, which run through 2035, will likely swamp whatever costs the state legislature tries to add on to renewable ventures.

In fact, a spate of new projects already on the books leave wind and solar energy on track to double in output over the next 12 years. Just in the third quarter last year, the state has added 3,000 megawatts of solar power and 1,000 MW of wind energy. Even home rooftop solar investment is soaring, amounting now to 2.2 gigawatts of capacity.

So financially attractive is the Texas renewable energy industry that billions in foreign investment has poured into the state to grab a piece of it—the sort of money that used to flow into the state's oil business. In 2019 alone, overseas companies financed 21 different wind and solar projects. One of the latest investments is a $330 million, 232-MW solar project owned by the Turkish company Sabanci.

All together, about 250 GW of new renewable capacity is underway. No state is moving as quickly as Texas is, meaning the state's lead is only going to expand. And steadily growing investments in battery storage promise to further smooth out the loss of solar generation at night. Meanwhile, notes Metzger, the state hasn't even begun to tap into the massive amount of wind energy beckoning in the Gulf of Mexico. "Offshore wind is a huge opportunity for Texas," he says. "The wind blows much more consistently out there."

Of course, if partisan politics grows ever more nasty and irrational, Republicans might yet find a way to derail the renewable industry's torrid expansion, warns Neeley. "The sky's the limit when it comes to bad policy," he says. "It's always possible somebody steps in to do something to throttle growth."

But if that happens, contends Lyons, the state's voters may well take their own corrective action to restore progress—especially if extreme weather events and swelling demand for energy leave consumers with black- and brown-outs that could have been avoided with more renewable capacity. "People won't put up with not being able to drive their cars, watch TV and stay warm in the winter," she says.

After all, red and blue look the same when you're sitting in the dark.