Weekend Listen: Study Mission 6.0 Featured in KNKX
We were thrilled to see our Study Mission 6.0: Building Bigger & Faster in Texas featured in KNKX! Here’s an excerpt from the piece:
Despite leading the nation in progressive policies for the transition to renewable energy, Washington ranks dead last in clean energy growth. Faced with a backlog of projects, lawmakers and energy developers are looking for new ways to move forward. Some say the answers might come from Texas.
Earlier this month, 45 people representing Washington businesses and government agencies went on a study mission to see how the Lone Star state is getting it done.
You can find the full story here.
Pop Quiz: Why Does Texas Have So Much Renewable Energy?
The first full day of our study mission revolved around the question: How does Texas have so much renewable energy?
This was the question that motivated our trip, and we aren’t exaggerating Texas’s meteoric rise in renewables. Check out these charts:
We met with the experts at the Webber Energy Group to start to answer our question. Thank you to Dr. Drew Kassel for the excellent briefing and discussion!
For decades now, Texas has been embracing its abundant energy resources through deliberate policy and regulatory decisions. Here are our key takeaways from Dr. Kassel’s briefing:
Connect and Manage
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which operates the state’s grid, takes a “connect and manage” approach to its interconnection queue. That means it will connect new generation even if it can’t guarantee deliverability. This allows ERCOT to bring new power online faster, while also providing direct, material insight into where transmission buildout is needed.
Washington cannot adopt the connect and manage interconnection queue approach outright because the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), our grid operator, is federally regulated, unlike ERCOT. However, we can comment on BPA proceedings and default interconnection planning to more closely align with a connect and manage framework.
Competitive Renewable Energy Zones (CREZ)
More than two decades ago, under the leadership of Governor Rick Perry, Texas passed SB 20, which allowed the creation of Competitive Renewable Energy Zones based on wind resource potential. The PUC of Texas directed transmission buildout connecting those areas with the more urban load centers, which was a key driver in what allowed Texas to develop its grid.
In recent years, Texas has again prioritized transmission buildout via the Permian Basin Reliability Plan, investing in new lines to reach even better solar resources.
Streamlined Permitting
According to the Webber Energy Group, Texas has a more “relaxed permitting structure compared to other states.” They facilitate shorter permitting times, which provide certainty and reduced costs for clean energy developers.
We’ll dive deeper into this next week, but anecdotally, the Callisto I 200 megawatt (MW) battery energy storage system (BESS) located in Houston was only in permitting for six months, which allowed the site to come online in just a year and a half.
Of note: That project still had to go through environmental, civil, building, and stormwater permitting, along with fire department review. It’s not that Texas has no permit infrastructure; it’s that they’re operating much quicker and more efficiently than we are.
Tax Policy That Generates Local Buy-In
In Texas, the vast majority of property tax revenue generated by a renewable energy project goes directly into local coffers, supporting hospitals, schools, and other critical public infrastructure.
This report from Dr. Joshua Rhodes of the Webber Energy Group finds that the existing and expected renewable energy and storage fleet in Texas will pay approximately $20 billion in local taxes and $30 billion in direct payments to landowners. That’s generating real buy-in for local communities and guaranteeing that they see material benefits from development. Washington may have a good opportunity to ensure community benefits stay local through regulatory structure.
After our briefing with the Webber Energy Group, we visited Austin Energy, the state’s greenest utility, to see how Texas’s clean energy ecosystem was playing out in practice.
General Manager Stuart Reilly walked the delegation through the history of the utility, which actually originated in a failed attempt at hydropower. We learned about Austin Energy’s power portfolio, which comes from 70 percent carbon-free resources (with no hydropower), and how the utility is transitioning to clean energy through its Resource, Generation and Climate Protection Plan to 2035.
We discussed how Austin Energy is planning for load growth, particularly with regard to large load customers. We have two main takeaways that we’d like to see utilities in Washington pursue more aggressively:
- We’re incredibly impressed with Austin Energy’s demand response program, which “manages electricity consumption during peak demand times to reduce strain on the power grid and avoid outages and high costs.” Demand response incentivizes consumers to reduce or shift their electricity use during peak times, which helps balance the grid and more efficiently manage load, without any new generation buildout.
- The utility just announced an agreement with Base Power to “deploy 40 MW of residential battery storage across the utility’s service territory.” The program creates a virtual power plant (VPP), and longtime Clean & Prosperous readers will know we are big fans of VPPs. They provide individual energy resilience on the consumer side, while feeding energy back to the grid during peak hours. Again, this creates an opportunity to help meet project load growth without fossil fuels and without new utility-scale development.
We need to pursue consumer-side solutions like demand response and VPPs to ensure we can transition off of fossil fuels and protect the stability of our grid. These offer more flexible, near-term solutions we can take as we make more transformational, systemic changes to how we develop utility-scale clean energy.
Exploring Innovative Tech and Demystifying Fleet Electrification in Texas
We had a jam-packed first full day in Austin! Alongside our conversations about Texas’s renewable buildout, we had an opportunity to see some exciting new clean tech infrastructure in action!
At UT Austin’s Hydrogen ProtoHub, we toured the first facility of its kind to connect multiple renewable hydrogen production methods with a range of real-world applications in one location. The project demonstrates what a scalable hydrogen ecosystem could look like by integrating hydrogen production, storage, distribution, and end-use applications in a single system.
At Clean & Prosperous, we support continued investment and development of emerging technologies, including hydrogen, that have the potential to decarbonize emissions-intensive sectors including aviation, heavy industry, and maritime.
After UT Austin, we visited CapMetro, the Austin area’s rail, transit, and e-bike operator, at the agency’s North Operations Center. We toured their on-site 267,000 square foot solar canopy, which supports energy resilience and covers 90 overhead bus charging stations! We heard directly from CapMetro leaders on the lessons learned from working toward one of the most ambitious fleet decarbonization goals in the country.
CapMetro currently operates 104 all-electric buses and has approximately 13.5 MW of charging infrastructure. The lesson: Achieving fleet electrification means developing infrastructure at-scale in advance so it’s ready when you need it. But it also means taking a hard, realistic look at routes and ridership to understand where an all-electric bus can reasonably operate, and where hybrid models make more sense as technologies continue to develop and range challenges are addressed.
Thank you to our sponsors for making Study Mission 6.0: Building Bigger & Faster in Texas possible!
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