Despite our state government trying their damnedest to stop it, the economics are just too appealing. Solar companies are putting up small to medium scale solar generating facilities all over West Texas, and in the process generating income for a ton of West Texas landowners who are otherwise conservative af
this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2024
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The new construction house I bought had solar panels included. It's a lease, so still an additional expense, but we already only spend like 40 bucks on electricity, so I'm hoping to go negative and earn lots of energy credits. It's also kinda weird how we have solar AND gas.
This just in: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sues the sun for giving away unconstitutional socialist energy.
Comparisons to coal are pretty... ehh.
Coal is dead technology. It just sucks. It's incredibly expensive and polluting. Outside of a few plainly-corrupt politicians (like a certain senator from West Virgina), no one is really standing up to defend coal. That's even true internationally. China's trying to export all theirs to places that have no regulation around things like flyash because only by completely externalizing those factors can it make any sense, and even then it's a huge stretch. Germany has a concrete plan to decommission all of theirs (which has way too long a timetable, but that's a separate discussion). Australia is starting to sort their shit out on the subject, too, though the politics around Aussie energy policy make wonk heads spin they're so all over the place.
There are regions in the US I know of where local utilities are buying out coal plants in order to shut them down and terminate their purchase agreements because it's cheaper than continuing to buy the coal power. That's how lousy a power source coal is. Within my lifetime, I suspect I'll see virtually all North American coal plants get sold off / decommissioned even absent the regulation we ought to be passing to shut them down immediately.
Solar is just cheap. It's cheap cheap cheap. The market is going to continue to make it explode. There are actual terrawats of solar wanting to come online with the transmission infrastructure (and FERC et al.'s broken policy regarding interconnection queues) being the main thing holding it back.
What we really need to see right now is more investment in wind. It's totally complementary to solar production -- the wind tends to be blowing when the sun isn't shining -- but wind has not experienced the same wild learning curves ~~wind~~ solar has. That's holding us back from having renewable grids and needs to change. If only backyard/rooftop wind were as easy to do as solar.
Batteries are the submerged skeleton meme then.
Coal needs to die. It won't hurt to beat the dead horse a bit harder.
Methane and gasoline and kerosine and heavy oil and diesel and coke need to die too though.
Heat pumps, e-mobility/public transport, e-transport, hydrogen steel etc. (will) need massive amounts of electric energy being produced, transported and stored - so solar, wind energy and battery industries better continue to lower costs.
Texas invested heavily in wind back in the day before Republicans went off the deep end. Rick Perry as governor lead an effort to use eminent domain to take land and build high voltage transmission lines between West Texas where the wind blows and Central/East Texas where the people live. Then wind companies started approaching land owners with contracts for guaranteed income and projects started going up all over the place.
Now almost a quarter of Texas's energy production is wind, and Texas produces over a quarter of the entire US's total wind energy output, in spite of the state political environment. Solar power is following the same trajectory, even though the current government has been trying to favor natural gas.
At 6pm today, per ERCOT almost 60% of Texas's total generation is from wind and solar, and another 8% from nuclear. It's like this pretty much every day, and solar's going to keep rising rapidly
The big question is why are seemingly environmental states so far behind.
My 2 cents based on what I've learned is Texas has a low barrier to entry in the energy market, so it's relatively easy for someone to set up a business, build a project, and connect it to the grid vs other states. What also helps is there's tons of land that isn't suitable for agriculture or intensive ranching, and in West Texas that land isn't being used for much else besides low-intensity ranching or hunting leases. Also many West Texas landowners have existing oil and gas leases dating back decades (many of them are producing little to no revenue today, besides the areas where fracking is occurring) so they're used to negotiating leases with energy companies. Someone coming to you with a contract for $3000/mo in perpetuity for the use of a few acres of your 500 acre property that you're otherwise doing nothing with can be pretty attractive.
Iowa is mumber two for wind despite some of the most valuable farmland in the world.
again I ask: what are other states doing wrong that they are so far behind. Please do some soul searchering as whatever it is, it failed you baddly.
Wow dude, take a chill pill 🤣
I'm going to do some soul searchering now, byye
Is that natural gas acquired from fracking?
That's natural gas acquired from all sources
wind is still doing well, supplying 100% of the power in my city. (i assume that is some sort of ammortization with sometimes we export wind othertimes buy gas)
Wind's not doing terribly, but in the last decade solar has seen something like a 7fold increase in prevalence while wind has only seen closer to a doubling.
There's a chicken and egg problem here. These products are on learning curves. The more you sell, the cheaper they get, the more they sell. Solar has a killer feature -- it's ridiculous modularity. It scales from facilities that are acres and acres large all the way down to the roof of a van. That scalability has been a big part of driving demand for PVs beyond anyone's predictions.
Wind needs some help. Again, these energy sources are ridiculously complementary and we need both for the future. I want to see wind keeping pace with solar PV. If it can do that, natural gas is going to be wiped out by them.
Solar has another huge advantage. No moving parts. Moving parts mean more complexity, more maintenance, and more failures. We need wind but it's never going to be as simple and reliable as solar.
I live in a coal-producing area, and I agree with all of your points and I can't wait for the coal industry to be a thing of the past. However, coal is still best for making steel. The amount of coal that we need for producing steel is miniscule compared to the amount that is being mined for energy, but as long as we need steel, we will need at least some coal to produce it economically.
'Outside of a few plainly-corrupt politicians (like a certain senator from West Virgina),' And some really manky British politicians.
Gas still delivers the lion’s share of electricity, but wind and solar have surged over the last ten years, and coal has plummeted. Last year, it only managed to supply 14% of ERCOT generation, according to data from the grid operator. Now the numbers are in from March, and coal’s share slipped below 10%, while solar surged above 10%, as noted last week by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.
This is more about the decline of coal than the rise of solar.
Not sure how you can look at utility-scale solar generation capacity quintupling over 5 years and think that's not a story
This is more because fracking killed off all the coal plants. The situation in Texas is that it's worth it to frack wells for the oil alone, so the NG that is also produced is a byproduct that is dumped on the market for ridiculously low prices.
The eclipse was a big coal conspiracy!
Ssh don't tell them.