THE VINE APRIL 13, 2009
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A few years ago, I wrote a piece for the print mag trying to puzzle out how Texas—a pollution-spewing oil state that's never been a hotbed of environmentalism—had quickly become the country's biggest wind-power producer. (The short version is that legislators inadvertently stumbled on a smart policy design back in the 1990s—a bill signed into law, as it happens, by then-Governor George W. Bush.) Seems like not much has changed. The Wall Street Journal's Keith Johnson has the latest wind-production numbers for 2008, and Texas's stunning boom isn't showing any signs of slowing down:
Leading the charge is Texas, which widened its lead over states by installing almost 2,700 megawatts of wind power last year. Only two countries in the world installed that much wind in 2008. In fact, if Texas were a country—an idea never entirely out of fashion in the Lone Star state—it would rank 6th in the world in wind power capacity.
To get an idea just how explosive wind power’s recent growth has been in Texas, look at the sprawling 19th congressional district in the northwest part of the state. That single (Republican) district has about as much wind power as all of Denmark, and more than 10% of all the wind power in the entire U.S.
Nationwide, Johnson notes that the industry's well on pace to supply 20 percent of the country's electricity by 2020, as projected by the Energy Department. There's one notable laggard, though: California, which once had more turbines than any other state, has fallen behind even Iowa in wind-power production, partly because the state's permitting process is more onerous than anywhere else, and partly because there's been plenty of opposition to new transmission lines from both local activists and environmentalists. (NIMBYs aren't unknown in Texas, there just seem to be a lot fewer of them...)
(Flickr photo credit: fieldsbh)
--Bradford Plumer
5 comments
Texas is the enrgy capital of the world. They have the knowledge and infrastructure there to harness their energy needs. Of course California is chasing its tail, like they do on every other issue except larger the size of cages farm animals shuld be kept it. I suppose we should relish Texas's largesse, given that so many other foreign sources of energy are unreliable or reliably hostile.
- dylanposer
April 13, 2009 at 7:55pm
Texas has NIMBY's, but since our backyards are generally not as scenic as the backyards in Cal., NIMBYism isn't as potent. Not to mention, there's a helluva lot of empty space here.
- Geoff G
April 13, 2009 at 10:28pm
Texas has a private grid-monopoly, ERCOT, and retail energy marketing firms which engage in all manner of discriminatory pricing -- "charging whatever thet traffic will bear". That was once a crime in Texas. Now it is the major source of campaign finance and indirect taxation.
So, Texas has the lowest marginal cost of electrical power generation in the nation but the highest retail price of electricity.
High-cost wind-power is useful for jacking-up the price of power ERCOT pays for low-cost coal-fired power. In Iraan, you can watch a wind-farms on the hill-tops export power to air-conditioners on the Gulf Coast, while electrictiy is imported from a nuclear plant on the Gulf Coast to run pump-jacks in the Permian Basin just below. Meanwhile, most of the power comes from obscenely profitiable coal-fired base-load and gas-fired peak-load plants.
"It's not a beauty-pageant, it's a scholarship program!"
Yeah, right ... whatever.
- JRBehrman
April 14, 2009 at 1:36am
California has its fair share of NIMBY's, but the killers of its wind industry and development more broadly (liquid LNG facilities for example, ensuring that other nations will secure the infrastructure) are far better described as BANANAs. Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone. It is the flipside of a culture that has lead to California's having a great environmental record, and an innovative progressive culture. Environmentalism there is akin to movement conservatism, in the sense that where movement conservatives see effectively zero value in the environment, (mostly by denying man's ability to corrupt it and all the conspirators in the science community whose work attests otherwise), California environmentalists put an infinite value on environmental impact, which will invariably be catastrophic.
Actually, it's more like they put an infinite value on the narrow direct effects of the projects their activism seeks to squash, (and is largely successful in doing so), rather than its broad indirect effects, including retarding the progress of renewables, concomitant increases in carbon emissions, and not to mention running existing nukes that they once vociferously opposed at 100% of capacity.
Basically, if their record of success were any better, California would be the land of a few million generators all running on refined petroleum where air conditioning is for the wealthy. How's that for efficiency! They're currently breaking with the Sierra Club and other major mainstream environmental groups in saying that the national transmission network envisaged in Obama's stimulus bill is a terrible idea, and deserve to be exposed almost as much as the other types do...
- I Majorajam
April 14, 2009 at 2:34pm
Great post, great comments. More like this pls. In particular, on energy policy in TX vs energy policy in CA. What is Pickens up to? Which other states can follow the Texans' lead? How do we slap some common sense into those who, like the CA greens, oppose wind power?
- teplukhin2you
April 14, 2009 at 5:13pm