George W. Bush Helped Make Texas a Clean-Energy Powerhouse

[OKIsItJustMe]

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602261/george-w-bush-helped-make-texas-a-clean-energy-powerhouse/

[font face=Serif][font size=5]George W. Bush Helped Make Texas a Clean-Energy Powerhouse[/font]

[font size=4]As governor, Bush signed a bill that set the state on a path to becoming a leader in generating carbon-free electricity.[/font]

by Michael Reilly | August 29, 2016

[font size=3]Texas is crushing its clean power goals. Ever since 1999, when then-governor George W. Bush signed a law deregulating the state’s power market, Texas has been building wind turbines like crazy. And the boom isn’t likely to end anytime soon, thanks to a combination of federal subsidies and the falling cost of both wind and solar.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, as part of the 1999 law, Bush included a provision that called for 2,000 megawatts of renewable power capacity by 2009. That milestone came four years early. Bush’s successor, Rick Perry, raised the bar to 10,000 megawatts by 2025.

The state blasted past that milestone as well. As of April this year, it had an astonishing 19,000 megawatts of renewables, enough capacity to power 4 million homes and good for about 16 percent of the state’s total energy diet. The vast majority of that is wind: nearly 18,000 megawatts, far and away the nation’s leader.

Such a massive boom in renewables comes with some problems, though. First, the Texas grid is straining to move all of that wind power from the rural places where it’s generated to the cities where it’s needed. New transmission lines are helping, but wind power figures continue to grow. There are big plans for new solar capacity as well, about 6,000 megawatts’ worth, so the transmission bottleneck is likely to remain an issue going forward.

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[tonyt53]

1. I have repeated this same story to many people - I live in the western KY coal fields.

GW's EPA passed new rules in 2006 that basically killed most coal-fired power plants, and especially the older units. The operators had ten years to comply, as with other EPA power plant rules. Ten years - that makes it 2016 for full compliance. In 2004 T. Boone Pickens started lobbying Congress to allow for more natural gas exploration and new drilling techniques, which included enhanced fracking. TX has also not permitted a traditional cola-fired power plant since 2003. People around here don;t want to accept those facts. Obama did it in their minds. Oh those silly facts get in the way sometimes.