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and welcome to the Texas Tribune trip Cast for June twenty third, twenty twenty
three. This is Matthew Watkins, Managing editor of News and Politics for the
Tribute, and today we're going to talk about energy, renewables, the grid,
and what it seems like every Texan can only really talk about this week,
how dang Hotada is outside. Twenty twenty three has been a fascinating year
for the renewable energy industry in Texas. For much of the year, lawmakers
have been bashing wind and solar power, promising to exclude them from economic incentives,
pushing measures that would have made it much harder for rural landowners to put
windmills or solar panels on their properties and pushing for the creation of new natural
gas plants, insensibly because renewables aren't reliable enough in high demand times. But
many of those efforts have failed this past year, and sometime this year,
if it hasn't happened already, Texas is almost certain to surpass California as the
national leader for solar power generation. The state is already been the leader for
wind power for years, and, as the New York Times columnists David Wallace
Wells decried in a column earlier this month, even in Texas, you can't
stop the green revolution. Joining me to discuss this today is Doug Lewin,
whose energy whose newsletter on the Texas energy industry was quoted in that New York
Times article. Doug is the president of Stoic Energy Consulting. His newsletter is
called the Texas Energy and Power Newsletter. You can find it on substack,
and he also hosts the Texas Power podcast. Welcome Doug, Thanks for joining
us, Thanks Matthew, thanks for having me. Yeah, so, Doug,
it's not altogether surprising that Texas would lead and wind and solar energy.
We've got a big coastline. Half the state is basically desert there's a lot
of sun. We have more land than any continental state. But there are
signs that there's a real significant transition going on here. I'm again quoting that
article from The New York Times saying that two decades earlier, clean energy accounted
for less than one percent of the state's power. Last year it was more
than a quarter. What's happening here in this you know, fossil fuel state.
What is what's causing this kind of shift that we're seeing. Yeah,
I mean, well, you put your finger on one of the things,
which is Texas just has an abundance of natural resources. Right. Not only
do we have a lot of oil and gas and the Permian and the Eagleford
and the Haynesville, but we also have an abundance of wind and sun.
Right. If you look at the wind corridor maps, it kind of comes
right down into Texas sort of where the best wind is, and as you
alluded to, the coastal wind, which has a different profile, tends to
blow much better on these hot summer days. And of course sun as well.
If you look at where the best sort of solar resources are, again,
Texas, especially West Texas smack dab in the middle of that, but
really, you know, won't be news to anybody living in Texas. It's
very, very sunny here, so that's one of the things. But you
know, another thing is the market structure that exists in Texas. It's a
highly competitive market, which and it's based on what's called economic dispatch, which
is basically a fancy way saying that resource that costs the least gets deployed first.
And what we've seen over the last few years is the cost curves have
crossed. And what I mean by that is now, for a while wind
has been cheaper, and now solar is cheaper. In fact, the International
Energy Agency called it the cheapest source of electricity in history. They declared that
a year or two ago, and that is certainly true in Texas. The
only other thing I'd say about this, Matthew, is that I sort of
steadfastly and consistently sort of resist any sort of narrative that this is oil and
gas versus renewables. A lot of the oil and gas companies are working feverishly
to connect to the grid for their oil and gas drilling operations so they can
power them with cheap renewables. This is an integrated energy system. I know
it's you know, useful, I mean not useful, easy or habitual for
people to think of sort of a you know, us versus them kind of
framing. But the way it really works in the energy industry is a lot
of the oil and gas folks, you know, want to buy renewables,
and if you look at like geothermal and offshore wind, a lot of the
skills, a lot of the knowledge and expertise that oil and gas workers,
that oil and gas executives, et cetera, have, translate really well into
renewables. So you know, I don't I don't look at it as some
kind of cage match between oil and gas and renewables. Well, yeah,
that's a really interesting point and one that I've kind of noticed a lot right
where we've seen this kind of stance from Republican leadership in this state. You
know that we're going to fight to protect oil and gas. You know that
that you know, the renewable rise of renewables might be in some ways bad
for this you know, economic driver industry in this state. But you see
a lot of these oil and gas companies, you know, not necessarily really
asking for that, right like they want to get in on that Game Tube
and everything like that. So what is it you think that's driving that kind
of anti renewable position from from the state leaders. Well, I think most
of it, um frankly, it's just coming from, like you know,
entities like Texas Public Policy Foundation that just have have an agenda and that they're
pushing hard. And there certainly are some oil and gas interests that really detest
renewables, but the oil and gas industry is not a not a monolith,
I think though. It's also true that there are a lot of Republicans I
don't know, it's probably not a majority, but a good number at the
legislature that fully understand that wind and solar have been fantastic for their districts.
Particularly if you're a rural member. You've seen, you know, across rural
tech billions. I think we're now into the tens of billions of dollars of
payments to landowners, payments to school districts and cities and counties. It's hard
if you're in rural Texas to to attract a lot of different industries there,
but with wind and solar, it is it is where the best resources.
So you're seeing that quite a bit but I just think I also think if
you're like, if you're a legislator and you really support oil and gas,
there's certainly other ways to do it than to bash renewal. There's no there's
no need to like push renewables down to lift oil and gas up. If
you look at where the oil and gas industry is going, right, they're
looking more and more at export markets, are getting paid a lot more around
the world for gas, which means the price of gas domestically here at home
is going to go up as that becomes more of a global industry, which
is another reason we should have more renewables to to mitigate against that increased price
of natural gas. Right. Yeah, And there's there's various kind of economic
argument you can make. As you already mentioned, the renewable as are very
inexpensive, right, and so if you're if you're getting those onto the grid
that you know would conceivably save consumers money and on their on their energy bills,
which is a big concern and coming you know, these years after the
winter storm. But also, as you said, there's the issue of kind
of land rights, um, you know, being free to do with what
you want with your land and things like that. You've written recently about SB
two sixty four, which was this bill that I believe past the Senate and
would have essentially put in all these kind of new regulations of kind of where
you could build a you know, where you could put a wind turbine on
your property, where you could put solar panels on your property, things like
that, and it sort of took you know, used environmentalist tactics against them,
you know. The many kind of viewed it as a if you can't
outright ban those types of things, maybe put so much red tape and be
aureaucracy in people's way that it makes it just much more difficult than time consuming
and expensive to develop those things on your property. Like I said, that
passed the Senate, but as you mentioned, it kind of hits some resistance
in a house where there were members you know, along the coastline or in
different areas who who you know slowed that down. You specifically mentioned in your
writing Todd Hunter, the state representative UM who represents sort of a coastal district
anywhere. Tell us a little bit about that kind of coalition that UM that
blocked that bill from from becoming law. Well, yeah, and it was.
It was to be clear Senate Bill six twenty four. UM. It
did, like you said, it passed the Senate, it never got a
hearing in the House. But then they the Senate actually attached it to was
perceived to be a must pass bill, the Public Utility Commission Sunset Bill,
UM, and again the House insisted that can't come out. And I think
there's a few reasons why the House insist did that come out. One is
what we've already talked about, the huge investment in a lot of these members
districts. As a matter of fact, is interesting. Senator Perry voted against
it in the Senate. He has the most wind. I don't know if
he is the most solar. Definitely is the most wind resources in his district.
So it was not a party line vote even in the Senate. And
of course in the House you have a lot more districts, right with a
lot of wind and solar. So I think that's one reason. The other
one you just alluded to, Matthew is you know, in twenty twenty two
a remarkable year for a lot of reasons, but one of the biggest,
of course, one of the biggest news stories of the year was the Russian
invasion of Ukraine and that caused gas prices to spike, and so the average
cost of gas was something like six or seven dollars. This is not gasoline
at the pump. This is you know, natural gas right that flows to
power plants and directly into into people's homes for heating six or seven dollars on
average as high as nine dollars. And compare that to twenty twenty one,
and most years throughout the twenty tens usually about two bucks. You're talking about
a three x increase. So renewable, the amount of renewables we had on
the system. There was a study by Josh Rhodes with Idea Smith, the
University of Texas Energy Institute researcher, and he quantified the savings from renewables at
eleven billion dollars. And you mentioned Chairman Hunter. He started off, you
know, I believe it was his very first hearing where they talked about energy
issues, Chair of State Affairs, which has jurisdiction over the power industry,
not energy that's an energy resources in the house, but over the power industry.
And he started off by saying, I don't hear enough people talking about
consumers. We're going to focus on consumers. And if you're focused on consumers,
you really, you know, renewables are incredibly important because I shudder to
think what our electric bills would have been in twenty twenty two. And then
the last thing about this, Matthew, you know you asked about sort of
a coalition that defeated it. There were a lot of folks that were opposed
to send it Bill six twenty four. Some of them were some of the
biggest energy users in the state. You know, if you think of the
great big factories, the manufacturers throughout our state, everything from the sort of
you know, older school which you're doing a lot of newer school kind of
things these days, you know, the BASF's, the doos that kind of
thing on through to the you know, the brand new ones like Tesla.
These are huge energy users, right, They are very, very sensitive to
energy costs. The only way they can onshore and bring those manufacturing facilities here.
I mean, you look at Samsung, like the amount of power and
entity like Samsung uses. They do not want to see renewable energy slowed down
on the grid. All of these folks, and I can't speak for any
of these folks, and just I want to speak just generally about the manufacturing
industry, but but give a few concrete examples, and you just think of
the you know, tens of millions of dollars that they're spending every year on
energy, and if you get a ten to twenty percent increase in that,
it can really have a material impact on their bottom line. So I think
the house thinking of consumers of all kinds, from renters and homeowners through the
small businesses up to the largest factories and manufacturers. You know. The tex
Association of Business was active in some of this and trying to make sure that
six twenty four didn't go through because against you know, small businesses would have
felt the impact. So it was very interesting to see just a wide variety
of different stakeholders, you know, come together and make sure that that bill,
which would have really harmed consumers, didn't make it across the finish line.
Yeah, I want to throw at you some of the kind of arguments
for why we should you know, why some people say we should be concerned
about kind of the rise of renewables. The first one being the reliability issue,
and we of course saw in twenty twenty one when the grid winter storm
caused the grid disaster. You know, you saw the frozen windmills argument,
and that was you know, pretty widely debunked by you know, many publications,
including ours, and you know, natural gas plants actually failing at a
higher rate. We saw a lot of you know, basically all different kinds
of generation kind of loss on that grid. But there's a separate, kind
of bigger picture argument that kind of goes back to what you were talking about
with um with you know the price right, which is essentially wind and solar
are cheaper. Wind and solar get bought first because those power types of power
are cheaper. But while you can maybe weatherize a windmill from an ice storm,
you can't weather itize a windmill from the wind not blowing. Or you
can't weatherize a solar panel for when it's dark outside, which means there are
going to be times when those you know, sources of power are not available.
And if you have all this solar energy going in, you know,
all this renewable energy going in when the power is the most expensive, you're
you know, long term disincinivizing natural gas and other kind of what they call
dispatchable power from ending up on the grid, creating a maybe problem where when
you are in those emergencies, when you say the weather it gets really freezing
cold on a at night, or if the wind stops blowing, you know,
on a hot summer day, that we now don't have the capacity we
need. What do you think of that case? That argument being made by
some So there's a lot there, a couple of thoughts. Number One,
we have got to get smarter about having more flexible resources on the system.
And this is not just because of renewables. You and I, Matthew were
talking on Friday, June twenty third. There are right now as we speak,
ten thousand, five hundred megawatts of gas, coal and nuclear. They're
probably all gas and coal. I think all the nuclear units are online,
but ten thousand, five hundred megabots of gas and coal plants that are offline.
That is a very high numbers. A matter of fact, according to
Urkhot's own definitions, high would be eight thousand, three hundred. Extreme would
be eleven thousand, two hundred. We're at ten thousand, five hundred right
now. Next week we're supposed to see temperatures in excess of one hundred hundred
and five degrees all week. So likely more stuff, hopefully not, but
likely more stuff is going to break. So all different resources have their their
strengths and their weaknesses. And what we see is with these increasing extremes of
climate that we're experiencing now, you know, we're going to see more and
more stuff break. And that includes the things that are often referred to as
dispatchable. They the things that have an on off switch. They can come
on and off when they work. But in extremes, as we found during
winter Storm Murie, as we saw again drink Elliott in twenty twenty two when
we saw a hundred and twenty percent increase in outages over the course of one
night, the night of December twenty second, things break in extremes. So
what we need is not only dispatchability, we need flexible resources that are backups
on our system. And those are backups to renewables for when the wind and
the sun are not strong. They're also backups to the thermal plants when they
break. We had two lessons in this in the last week. A nuclear
unit one offline on June sixteenth, and very quickly fast acting gas and batteries
jumped in and picked up the slack only a few days later, just a
couple of days ago. Earlier this week, a large coal plant about six
hundred megawatts dropped offline. Suddenly again, batteries jumped into that void stabilize the
system. So what we need is more of the flexible resources that fill in
those gaps when wind is low or when the sun goes down. But that
doesn't mean that we should be punishing renewables because sometimes the wind doesn't blow.
It sometimes just shocks me at how much policymakers, certain policy makers I want
to paint with the two broader brush. I think it's a very small group,
but it's a small but influential group that policymakers want to sit around and
whine about sometimes the wind doesn't blow. It's ridiculous. So so I'll just
say one other thing on this, Matthew. As you can tell, I
could, I could talk about this at length, but I but we only
have a limited amount of time. The only other thing I would say about
this is the ERCOT energy only market structure that we have right now. And
what just so, because I know reader, your listeners may not be as
as in the weeds. Basically, what that means is we only have a
few different pots of money that are available to pay for capacity. A lot
of markets around the United States, they're called capacity markets. They're much more
expensive. They pay for capacity just to sit around on a day and day
out basis. We have a different market structure here and after URIE, at
the end of twenty twenty one, the Public Utility Commission made a change to
the way pricing happens. It's a thing called the operating reserved Demand curve.
And I know a lot of your listeners just left. Don't leave. It
just means we pay more when there's scarcity on the system. That's all it
means. They increased that in twenty twenty two. That was a two billion
dollar increase. Eighty five percent of that went to gas and coal plants.
There are ways to plus up what you're paying for. And again, I
don't think we should just be putting that towards gas and coal. We had
to be putting it towards battery storage, we had to be putting it towards
geothermal. We had to be putting it towards demand flexibility, paying customers to
shift their usage around. There's a lot of different flexible resources that can make
our system more reliable, and we have a market that will incentivize those resources.
But the key thing here, Matthew, and I'll end on this is
we've got to get away from this kind of blaming. It's this resources fault.
It's that resources fault and look to the solutions, and there are many
of them. But as long as we're sort of trapped in the cycle of
renewables, good gas, bad get you know what vice versa. Right,
as long as we're sort of trapped in that, it makes getting to the
solutions impossible. Yeah, you've you've written a little bit about the need for
as you said, more for instance, battery storage of power, which you
know could help you know, when maybe some of that more renewables or other
energy is being produced than needed during the day or on a windy time,
you know, save that up for when you needed. What does that look
like exactly are we talking about just like massive battery farms. One thing that
you I know have said is essentially that you can kind of turn that on
immediately, whereas like a natural gas plant might take thirty minutes or so to
get moving or anything like that. So what does what does the increasing storage
capacity look like in Texas. So it looks like I think, you know,
boasts. It mostly fits into like two different buckets. One bucket is
going to be a large storage installation, might be fifty megawats, on hundred
megawats, even a couple hundred megawats, and that's going to be acres and
it's just gonna look like like sort of like a container truck, you know,
kind of a container that would go on the back of a truck or
on a big you know, ship or something. You know, it looks
like that, and then you can you can google this as he pictures of
them. They're sort of, you know, put next to each other.
It doesn't take up a ton of space. Um. The other thing it's
going to look like, and this is you know, getting more and more
interesting. It's going to look like vehicles right now on I did this calculation
a few months ago, so it's higher now. But if you just take
the number of electric vehicles that we have in the state of Texas, which
is about two hundred thousand, times that buy the average battery capacity and then
you'd you know, come out with the calculation. On the other end,
we've got about twelve gigawatts worth of power driving around and electric vehicles right now.
To put that in perspective, that's enough to power Houston for an hour
that's on the roads right now, before we've had a mass rollout of the
you know four f one fifty lightnings and the ribbings and all these that are
gonna have even bigger batteries in them. So that is going to be a
really big deal. And as long as you have the charger that will accommodate
this, that there's the manage charging, make sure that we're charging those things
up overnight and at twelve noon when we've got a lot of solar power.
But then you can actually reverse flow and put that back into the power grid.
So that's going to be a huge source too. And yes, I
think battery storage is it already is a major story. These two units that
the one nuke one gas that tripped off over the last week and a half.
Storage is already a big story for increasing grid reliability, and that story
is only going to increase as time goes on. All right, let's plus
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claims. Find more info at Gravely law dot com. Okay, Doug,
I'm gonna make one more case against renewables. I know that you're already by
streaming, but I want to ask you the question and you away. I
think it's an interesting one, and that is basically, I think the case
that the state's economy is in many ways powered by fossil fuels, that if
you look at a you know, a suburban neighborhood outside Houston, you're going
to see a bunch of people living in middle class households with you know,
oil field company trucks parked in the driveway. And that if we get into
a situation where we're transitioning, you know, in large part away from that,
we're talking about a lot of lost jobs. I know that there are
jobs and renewables too, but is it realistic to think that if we went
through a full kind of energy transition that this wouldn't have a devastating effect on
the Texas economy. Yeah, thanks for that question, Matthew. So it
is a it is a really important question. It's a question that is absolutely
vital to the future of Texas. And I think when you when you hear
about an energy transition, I think, first of all, it's important to
think about what that word means. Right, we're not talking about oil and
gas going away overnight or even next year, or you know, I don't
even know what the time period's going to be. I think there's a couple
of different things going on here. One I think it's very useful to look
at there's an organization called Texas twenty thirty six, and the way they talk
about this as an energy expansion that what we're getting into is we want Texas
to lead not only on oil and gas like we have for a long time,
but we want to also lead on geothermal, on offshore wind, on
wind and solar, on battery storage, electric vehicles, energy efficiency, using
energy, you know, in a smarter way, using software and automated or
artificial intelligence, machine learning, all these different areas of the future. We
want Texas to be positioned to lead in and on oil and gas. If
Texas wants to be an oil and gas leader long into the future. If
that's the intent of policymakers, then do everything you can to get methane.
You know, the vents and the flares that have you know that basically cause
more greenhouse gases. Get those out of the system. Make Texas the leader
overall in low carbon oil and gas production. Look at the way Occidental talks
about this, right, Vicky Hall, of the CEO of Occidental says,
we are going to be the oil company that gets the last barrel of oil
out of the ground because we're going to be the most sustainable. Texas should
adopt that kind of attitude. And I think if we do that, then
we're actually ensuring Texas' future far more than if we're just sticking our heads in
the sand, pretending like climate change doesn't exist, pretending like the entire world
isn't moving rapidly towards decarbonization, towards lower emissions, and basically just positioning ourselves,
unfortunately tragically, really to lose in the energy transition. That's what happens
if we ignore everything going on. Instead, if we actually embrace it and
say Texas could be the leader in these low carbon solutions, we're positioning ourselves
to have a strong economy, long end of the future, throughout this energy
transition or energy expansion or whatever you want to call it. So it has
of course been unbearably hot this past week, just kind of outrageously so if
you ask me, and we have had one day this week where Urcott asked
for energy conservation, not great, not what you want to see. But
we also didn't, you know, see grid failure. We didn't see rolling
blackouts or emergency measures taken or anything like that. How in your opinion has
the grid held up this past week? And and I guess let's look forward
to next week too, whereas you've already mentioned it's going to continue to be
extremely high. Yeah, I mean, obviously it's okay, there's not there's
not outages, I mean, if you're talking about the past week. But
I definitely think we are not positioned to do well if we have these kinds
of these conditions persist throughout the summer. And I do think we've got to
adjust our mentality, adjust our understanding and our attitude. These kinds of heat
waves are going to happen more and more, and we what we are not
doing a good job with, Matthew is managing the peak. And what I
mean by that again, for those that aren't necessarily energy nerds, if you
just like you go to arcot dot com, you look at their dashboard,
you see what looks like this sort of like roller coaster, this up and
down every day and the vast majority of hours during these heat even during these
heat waves, we have a lot of extra capacity. But when you get
to that peak, you get up you know, three, four or five,
and increasingly as we get more solar, it's going to be more like
seven, eight or nine in the evening because solar is really helping tremendously.
At the top peak of the day, when air conditioners are running one hundred
percent, everybody's trying to keep cool indoors, everybody who can. We need
to be thinking of our workers who are outdoors and how dangerous this is to
them. But for those that can be indoors, those air conditioners are running
at one hundred percent, Solars great. With that, we are going to
need to manage these peaks better and shift usage towards earlier in the day or
later in the day. We were talking earlier about electric vehicles. Right,
if everybody comes home from work at five, six, seven, o'clock and
plugs in their electric vehicle and charges it. At the same time, we're
going to have problems on the grid. The inverse is true if everybody comes
home and plugs it and they've got a software that says, hey, power
prices are high, things are tight. Are you okay charging for much less
money overnight? Right Would you pay a penny or two overnight versus ten fifteen
twenty cents right now? Then we're fine. We have tons of capacity through
you know, eighty percent of the hours, even ninety percent of the hours.
So that's what we're failing at, is managing that peak. I just
want to say one more thing about that, Matthew. Energy efficiency is really,
really, really important in all of this. That helps bring the peak
down. If we're helping people get the most energy efficient air conditioners, these
new high efficiency heat pumps they automatically use a lot less than the older acs,
but they also have inverters in them, just like a battery, and
can respond to a signal. So instead of just being on or off zero
or one hundred, which is how almost all air conditioning, including the unit
outside my office right here, that's how most of them work, they can
they're continuously variable. They can go zero to one hundred, so it could
be running at thirty percent or fifty percent or seventy percent and respond to a
signal. So that air conditioning management is a huge part of managing the peak
as well, and with those things. With that, specifically with managing the
peak, we're awful and we've just we have to do better at that if
we expect to have reliable power throughout the summertime. Yeah, and you mentioned
energy efficiency kind of avoiding waste and things like that, and that was another
thing that I think a lot of people were hopeful that the legislature would maybe
take on and addressing the grid. It's not something we saw a lot of
action on this legislative session. But I do wonder, I mean, with
all the federal incentives coming out, how much it even matters, you know,
how much the state wants or doesn't want to put its kind of thumb
on the scale when there's so many kind of other market incentives or federal government
incentives pushing you know, this state and other states in that direction. I
mean, is that ultimately the story here is that there's really not that much
that the state government can do to influence. No, no, I don't
think so, not in my view. I do think that the federal incentives,
for instance, on the heat pumps I was just talking about, and
people should look into this. There is right now a two thousand dollars tax
credit. So if I hope this doesn't happen for your sake, dear listener,
but if you're ac were to break this summer, look to replace it
with a high efficiency heat pump because you can get two thousand dollars tax credit.
That will drive a lot of activity, There's no doubt. But for
the state to just, you know, sit back and do nothing would be
a major mistake. And I don't think it's a question of putting a thumb
on the scale. I think it's a question of recognizing value, recognizing economic
value. The prices we saw this last week, the prices on the market
got close to five thousand dollars a megawatt hour, right, So what we're
really talking about, Matthew, is how do you recognize the value of somebody
shifting their energies. I've been talking about this for the last couple of weeks.
I've been saying folks should be pre cooling their homes. People should be
making their homes cooler at ten eleven in the morning twelve one o'clock in the
afternoon, so that they need to use less at peak. If people do
that, are they compensated for it? Is there any value that's delivered?
So if you look at the Arcot dashboard, the price of power at ten
or eleven in the morning is usually like twenty or thirty dollars a megawatt hour.
It's rising into the thousands in the afternoon. But there's no way for
the customer to get that value. So I'm asking them to do that for
the good of the grid, just like Urcott's saying, pretty please, will
you can serve between the hours of four and eight or whatever they're saying,
why not actually recognize the value in that action by the customer and compensate them
for it, because then you create a virtuous cycle where more people want to
do that, more people want to lower their energy bill and get paid.
So I don't think it's a question of putting a thumb on the scale.
I think it's actually a question of evening the scales and saying instead of just
the owners of big coal and gas plants and wind and solar for that matter,
being able to be paid. Why not let the customers be paid?
And just one other point on this right now, the big customers do get
paid for that, Bitcoin miners get paid to reduce. Why shouldn't I,
as a homeowner or a renter or a small business owner be allowed to get
paid to reduce? Right? And it's not just bitcoin miners. I don't
mean to pick on them. Anybody who owns a big box store, a
factory, if you're a bitcoin miner, any of that, you can get
paid to reduce. The small guys cannot. Why is that? So?
That's I don't think it's a question to put in the thumb on a scale.
I think it's a question of evening the scales. Okay, one last
question, What does the Texas grid look like in terms of sources of energy
ten fifteen years from now? Is this? Are we going to see this
same level of transition? More impossible to say right now? What are your
expectations for the future here? So I'm happy to take a stab at it,
but I will preface it by saying, if you would have asked me
ten years ago what our mix would be today, I would not have predicted
the amount of wind and solar we have. I would not have predicted the
decrees and coal gas actually has increased over the last ten years. I don't
know whether I would have predicted that or not. But predictions are are are
a bit of a fool's game. But I'm but I'm happy to play along.
I I you know, we'll listen to this in ten years and you'll
be like, man, Doug, were you wrong? Um? You know
who knows? Right? We're gonna be surprised to be new inventions. There's
gonna be all sorts of things we can't even imagine right now. But but
I will say I think what we are what we will likely see is I
think one of the one of the biggest things people aren't looking at as well
as you know, I just mentioned bitcoin miners, they get a lot of
attention. Uh, there are going to be a lot of other large flexible
loads on our system. I think we're going to be making a lot of
hydrogen using wind and solar. So I think we're gonna have a system with
a lot of wind and solar where we're using that for things that don't need
to run twenty four seven three sixty five. There's gonna be carbon capture machines
I mentioned are occidental earlier. They're already building some in West Texas and in
out Texas. We are going we're a growing state. We do not have
enough water. The Texas Tribute has done a great job, right the article
you guys had the other day on the aquifer and the depletion of it.
We don't have enough water. We're gonna need to desalinate water. That is
a heavy, heavy energy user. But you don't Israel As pioneered ways to
make to desalinate water where you can turn the power on and off. Right.
It's so you think electric vehicles like we were talking about all the buses
in the state are likely going to be electric within a ten or fifteen year
time period. You don't need to charge them all the time. You only
need to charge them part of the time. So I think we're gonna have
a lot more wind and solar and these large flexible loads and the small flexible
loads. We were talking about heat pumps and how they can move up and
down. Right, you know, that is how the system is going to
look. It's going to be a system that is much more a utility executive.
I was on a panel the other day and he said, you know,
it used to be that we would forecast demand and dispatch supply. And
he said, now what we're doing is forecasting supply and dispatching demand. And
I think that is the world that we are moving towards very rapidly. And
if and if we do that, we can integrate a lot more low cost,
low polluting, no polluting solar and wind and have higher reliability and lower
costs and all of these industries the future hydrogen, carbon capture, desalination.
Texas can actually lead those because we have this advantage of all this wind and
sun. Not every state or every country can do this, right, they
don't have that, They're not blessed with the kind of resources we are.
We have that advantage. We should use it and make Texas the leader of
the next hundred years of energy like we have been for the last hundred.
All right, well, we will check in in ten fifteen years and see
whether you are right. Thank you, Doug, as great talking with you.
Really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you to our producer Justin, and thank
you to our sponsors, the Texas Association of Community Colleges, the Meadows Mental
Health Policy Institute, Educate Texas, and Gravely. We'll talk to y'all next
week here from Sylvia Garcia, Sinfronia Thompson, Andrew Murr, John Sharp,
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