How renewables are saving Texans billions
theclimatebrink.com
theclimatebrink.com
No more peaks of power costing ridiculous amounts (and troughs of negative power prices).
You can be anti green for all it matters on this one. The batteries are massively profitable. They are coming on mass everywhere and there’s no stopping them.
https://comptroller.texas.gov/economy/fiscal-notes/infrastru...
"Vermillion said, adding that most battery operators in Texas earn the bulk of their revenue during a handful of extreme weather days, so “there might be 15 days over the year that matter for capturing revenue.”
https://www.ess-news.com/2025/05/15/is-texas-battery-landsca...
While related insofar some electricity inevitably gets converted back into heating, I don't think its really relevant to this discussion which is explicitly about electricity.
So anything that reduces that heat demand at a lower cost is a relevant fix, this includes heat storage, district heating, general efficiency and insulation improvements etc.
A parallel and necessary step (one that has, suspiciously, suddenly become a culture war for the far right in europe) is electrification of heating with heat pumps, which lets you use your existing gas infrastructure to meet winter generation needs.
I am not arguing against intermittent energy sources but we need to address these problems.
Seasonal storage at competitive prices per megawatt hour is somewhat of a solved problem it just doesn't seem to be getting investment.
To be fair, there is an upside for such a company no longer being able to extract huge amounts of money from the general public on a regular basis. An upside to the public.
Enron was in this business and in this state.
The same story is repeating everywhere, batteries will very quickly supply all the ancillary needs for a grid at a fifth of the cost of spinning gas turbines if you let them.
The article seems written to intentionally confuse the saturation of that market with the wider abitrage market.
The high prices in a few days is likely more to do with Texas using those high prices to incentivize peaker plants rather than contract separately for capacity which some other markets do. They both still pay for it, just as different items on the total grid bill.
It would be strange if peaker style plants didn't make most of their money from peak times, whether they get paid via high market prices or capacity payments.
And when you enter a new market with batteries, it's shaving the peakiest peaks you've based your business model on. This also saves the most money (and carbon) for utility customers.
But all reporting on renewables needs to act like the whole thing is about to collapse into mad max for some reason.
Since we're talking about Texas apparently most coal plants by kw-h are either offline or in some cases even decommissioned. Apparently in 2023 13.2% of generation was sourced from coal.
I wonder how they look in a US landscape that's hostile to renewables. Arbitrage works because solar and wind and very cheap and very indeterminate. The more gas, coal and biofuel (all much more expensive but more flexible) in the grid, the less opportunity for arbitrage.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve
No doubt the profits will come down (as long as the free market can do its thing) but for now it’s a crazy market. There’s a reason graphs of battery installations are a hockey stick right now.
I will call out one thing for European readers. You’re suspiciously absent on lists of battery build outs. You guys don’t have lots or lobbying from legacy power providers wanting to maintain the ridiculously high peak prices by any chance?
As in everywhere in the world except europe has a hockey stick of battery build out growth happening right now. (Not a criticism just an Australian confused at why europe as a whole has fewer battaries than australia).
If I had to pull reasons out of my ass for this, I'd suggest South Australia and Texas both have a great deal of land with shitty agricultural output (as compared to Europe) and a lot more sunlight. I suspect building batteries is obviously very profitable today in Australia and Texas today, and companies will target Europe when the tech is a bit cheaper and the most profitable markets have been saturated.
The European power grid has multiple interconnections between the various countries, and some of those counties already have their grid scale storage (mostly pumped hydro). So it's much less needed.
So why would the countries heavy on renewables in their mix invest a lot in batteries? For instance the UK can rely on French nuclear and Norwegian hydro as a grid scale alternative source. While sometimes there are continent wide issues (we've had twice a month of low winds + overcast which impacted negatively wind and solar), the grid is sufficiently diverse and dispersed that it works pretty well.
As the recent outage in Iberia showed, it's slightly more complicated than that and batteries could still have a part to play to smooth demand ups and downs. And there are still a bunch of battery projects, even in France that doesn't have that much renewables in its energy mix, being heavy on nuclear.
The plan in the UK is to build gas peaker plants to bridge the gaps where there is no wind nor sun. They are going to be contracted to work for no more than two weeks a year.
Edit: according to [1], numbers predict a coming tsunami of battery installations for Germany
[1] https://www.pv-magazine.de/2025/01/13/uebertragungsnetzbetre...
And our wind turbines seems to have crazy maintenance costs…
Don’t give our politicians more ideas, let the market just solve this please. They are already taxing energy to death because of ”fairness”.
You still need peaker plants to power the country if there are longer Dunkelflauten. I am skeptical that the total cost for m hours additional power need:
n hours battery power + (m - n) hours of peaker plants is going to be cheaper than m hours peaker plant power.
Probably not yet though, the UK government seems fairly keen for Biofuel in their net zero policy.
Banning Drax from using woodpellets from important nature (ancient forests, rainforests etc) is probably a route that'll be more likely to havesuccess.
No one here is against solar panels on their home and few are against wind farms, there's just also the realisation that for many applications, oil will remain for the time being. Aircraft, boats, tractors, and cars in many regions of the world are simply unsuitable for electric power with the current state of electric storage (batteries are heavy relative to energy stored).
I think the US is moving this way, by removing grants for green energy, continuing grants for oil, placing targetted tariffs on solar panel manufacturing countries, and blocking planning permission for wind.
Oil isn't used for grid energy generation in most parts of the world... We shut down our last diesel plant many years ago. It's way too expensive, relatively speaking. Like, here we're using renewables to power oil extraction lol. For the most part, renewables don't compete with oil since renewables power the grid and oil doesn't. Electric vehicles can reduce oil demand somewhat, but there will still be massive demand for oil for shipping, air travel, construction vehicles and farming vehicles, for the forseeable future.
They argued there would be issues with renewables unless there was a big uptake in storage. That was the key to making it all happen. Well now we have a big uptake in storage and it is starting to look like the future in that sense is very bright.
Scale is funny like that, it looks like it won't happen for the longest time and then it suddenly become ubiquitous. There is still a long way to go but improvements are happening fast.
most of the cost of peaker plants is the capital cost. The fixed costs are high and spread over few hours (peaker) or even no hours at all (just providing ready capacity if required e.g. ready in case of faults with generators or transmission).
The variable costs (fuel) are normally quite irrelevant.
This is broadly true of most developed nations.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-27/bp-emerge...
Of course if we have to pretend it is to get Texas to do it… fine I guess.
Gas and power are intertwined but still very separate markets.
Natural gas would have gone even higher had ERCOT not shed load, so if you want to make reductionist statements about complex issues, you could say that ERCOT actually took away from the bonuses of BP gas traders who were long.
They had almost uncapped max wholesale prices for energy during the blackouts. At some point it had reached 10k per megawatthour! Of course companies went bankrupt, and of course BP traders held bonus parties. The taxpayers apart from these they also had to bail out the bankrupt retailers.
The sky high energy price and the collapse of gas supply were the fundamental price drivers. The alternative scenario is that the gas market players were just price gouging. Pick what you want.
This is true of any ISO in the country during extreme conditions and you wouldn’t want it to not be.
The cap was raised to $9k to try and incentivize generation because the forward reserve margin was dwindling. ERCOT was the only electric market in the US that was actually growing and old thermal plants were retiring because they couldn’t economically compete with new renewables. Bill Hogan @ Harvard was commissioned to help solve this problem and his team created a new scarcity pricing mechanism along with higher price caps based on the value of lost load. These caps were set by the PUCT and ERCOT had no say in them.
Why are you so focused on caps and not on learning the difference between gas and power markets? You keep trying to simplify very complex systems and issues with a half baked understanding of some basic talking points and minimal understanding of how the markets actually operate.
ERCOT also didn't have the authority to implement winterization recommendations from the 2011 report outside of the already existing NERC standards. You can blame the PUCT for that or blame FERC for not actually updating those standards until 2023.
However, you still seem to have missed (and demonstrated) my point by referencing Energy Transfer -- they are a midstream company who made 99% of their profits off of NG not power. Conflating their profit with ERCOT's power prices is the problem. People refuse to educate themselves on the difference between gas and power markets, so the TRC and its massively influential O&G lobbyists have made zero changes to the intrastate gas network since the winter storm. Why? Because every layman who has read a few articles and thinks they're an expert is solely focused on ERCOT.
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/03/04/ercot-texas-electric...
I'm not sure how you decided what I'm "focused" on. Read the first two sentences of my previous post again.
The part that is really shocking to me is the cost to maintain transmission infrastructure is dramatically higher in this area too (power lines in the forest).
I think it's hard to compete with a certain combination of fuel mix and fully amortized 20th century plants.
Interesting times.
As renewable generation increases past a certain level grid stability does require additional effort and that’s a lot more difficult to price in. In Texas their grid is isolated from the rest of the US. This may create a lower ceiling on renewables since they can’t send excess generation anywhere other than their own batteries .
TVA (similar in size to ERCOT, mostly within Tennessee) is about to begin its second such facility, after Raccoon Mountain [0]. Run-of-the-river facilities exist (including two in TVA's jurisdiction), which are capable of pumping water "up" the dam (for later use during peak loads) — perhaps LCRA might explore the feasibility of this?
Regardless of how the energy is stored, it might also (eventually) make sense to join Eastern/Western interconnects (and thereby "store" the energy outside of Texas). But I know ego/"Texus"/pride mentality exists (having grown up in Austin), so I won't hold my breath on accepting Federal regulations...
[0] wikipedia.org/wiki/Raccoon_Mountain_Pumped-Storage_Plant
I'm not sure if hydro could compete on price any more, either. Batteries are so cheap.
At some point you get limited by fill/discharge rate, but the cost of storage in a big pumped hydro is still pretty cheap.
Lake Travis already has a power plant and is rarely every full for example. No one is going to start using pumped hydro there because there is no extra water to pump.
You don't actually need an excess of water, you need to be able to move enough between lakes though. You are not using any extra water from the system by adding pumps.
That's the real determining factor right, places with cheap big pumped hydro projects ideally already have big dams that are not full, so from that point it works. But then you need a reasonable amount of elevation between reasonably close lakes (or ideal new spots).
One of the big issues with renewables that the author is, I can only assume, is deliberately eliding is that energy cannot be brought on as required. Even in Texas, you still need non-renewables to fill the gap and you still need to recover the costs of running those assets in the price...Texas is the absolute best case scenario, and it isn't working (as the comments show, it is quite easy to see why: people are obsessed with politics and reality matters less than your political enemies being wrong, companies have also realized that the subsidies in this area are incredible if you tell politicians they are right). The same thing is happening with battery operators.
You also see the same thing in other countries that invested heavily in renewables (UK is one example, they are mothballed a lot of non-renewable sources ten years ago, the government had to introduce massive subsidies for retail consumers because electricity prices are so high due to the need to recover costs of the remaining non-renewable sources when the wind happens to stop blowing): it has to increase the cost of energy because you have to pay for renewables and pay for the battery operators to do nothing and pay for the gas operators to do nothing.
Better examples around the globe and within North America are non isolated grids - Texas is in a weak position to share it's excess and to get back energy from wind blowing in other states.
And the difference is that Finland has nuclear...that is it, which provides the dispatchable demand. It is extremely challenging to replicate this in many other countries because of the planning issues (the UK is building Hinkley, the cost for this is tens of billions, the funny story here is that the government decided not to proceed with this ten years ago because electricity prices were too low...can't think what has changed in the meantime? total mystery...right?).
I suspect this is an issue that looks worse in 'intuitive' foresight but not so bad in educated retrospective but we will not know until we pass through that point. I am but an armchair "expert" on this. Usually when something like this comes up, 15 people who know better than me will highlight something I was not aware of.
No, it doesn't have to increase the cost.
If you have a town powered by gas, the cost of maintaining and staffing the gas plant is locked in.
But most of the cost of that gas plant is the fuel.
If the total cost per kWh of a solar or solar+battery installation is lower than the fuel cost of the gas plant, then you build it. It saves you money even though you're paying the gas operators to do nothing part of the time.
If it's not cheaper than fuel, you don't build it. No harm no foul.
Follow that strategy and you'll end up with lots of renewables without wasting a penny.
Though honestly some idle gas plants don't cost that much. How many kilowatts do you need? 4? Okay, the fixed costs for 4 kilowatts of combined cycle gas power are $50 per year. That's all it takes to have backup production for the entire grid, even with no base load plants anywhere.
You don't have to theorize: you need substantial amounts of spare capacity because with solar, for example, there will be night and winter, the costs of maintaining this capacity have been substantial in practice and have driven up energy costs everywhere (the confusion here is about what the article is claiming to say vs what is actually happening...the article constructs a model to show that energy prices would be higher, the problem is that the model is useless).
And in the real world renewables will never go to zero so you can reduce that cost when you build a lot of renewables, even accounting for the worst case winter.
Am I saying that overbuilding solar from a financial perspective never happens? No. But I am saying that if money is your priority, it's straightforward to plan and build renewables in a way that strictly saves you money. Even though you'll sometimes be paying people to do nothing!
> Texas is the absolute best case scenario, and it isn't working
In Texas, it's private investors who shoulder the risk of whether or not an energy source is economical. And private investors are largely choosing solar, wind, and batteries, with a bit of gas.
When you say "energy brought on as required" you appear to be talking about dispatch; but that's what batteries do, right?
And solar/wind do not need to be dispatchable to be a good economic choice; as long as their are cheaper than the fuel and operating cost of a different dispatchable choice, then why run the more expensive energy source?
Correct, batteries do this but you need to pay for all the time when batteries are sitting there doing nothing.
I didn't say they did need to be dispatchable or not, the problem is the composition of supply. Renewables are more expensive, so why run them?
And last I checked, we don't harangue cars because most of the time they are "sitting there doing nothing", so in what way is that a valid criticism of energy infrastructure?
If you instead measure how much people talk about renewable energy, California comes out far ahead.
deployments are not occurring in california, that’s for sure
Is hot air a useful commodity?
If you downplay the right thing, the wrong thing for energy gets selected for other reasons.
All their hydro was built 60 years ago, by the federal government. The state deserves absolutely no credit.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_renew...
Lot of others that could be complained about (like Florida and Arizona)
They just dont want the state to fund the cause and don’t consider it the state’s role or problem or the state as a solution to a problem that isnt wholly solved by the proposed expensive solution
People outside of that group attribute the disagreement to insanity
When in reality as soon as an economical and private sector solution is there, republicans are on board
I see a way to bridge consensus so maybe I’ll run for office eventually since this is still too abstract for most
While if they dont know they are beneficiaries of a policy then they’ll proverbially eat their face by removing it
“In markets like Texas, the wholesale price of electricity is set equal to the price of electricity from the most expensive generator needed to meet demand, often referred to as the marginal generator.”
If the current market situation allows for a price of 12ct/kWh, why should I - just because I have the more effective technology - get less than the fossil guy?
Generally this is even beneficial because it could increase margins for renewable and grid scale batteries
Texas Senate Bill 819 "relating to renewable energy generation facilities; authorizing fees." would have made it the states role to create an expensive solution.
> (1) for a solar power facility, ensure that all facility equipment is located at least: (A) 100 feet from any property line, unless the applicant has obtained a written waiver from each owner of property located less than 100 feet from the facility; and (B) 200 feet from any habitable structure, unless the applicant has obtained a written waiver from each owner of the habitable structure; and
> (2)for a wind power facility, ensure that all facility equipment is located at least 1,000 feet from the property line of each property that borders the property on which the facility is located, unless the applicant has obtained a written waiver from each owner of property located less than 1,000 feet from the facility
Texas Senate Bill 388 "relating to the legislature’s goals for electric generation capacity in this state." would have made it the states role to create an expensive solution.
> (a) It is the intent of the legislature that 50 percent of the megawatts of generating capacity installed in the ERCOT power region [this state] after January 1, 2026 [2000], be sourced from dispatchable generation [use natural gas].
are the Texas bill sponsors not part of the aggregate conservative position?
The leader of the conservative party has claimed that windmills kill whales, cause cancer, are "garbage" and pledged to prevent any being built in his second term.
Ignoring that though, energy is a market defined by government policy.
To give an example, solar assets can't control when they output, so many countries have contracts where solar gets a fixed price. Without that, peak solar times might even have negative pricing.
Those are two seperate ways to frame a market, one making renewables profitable and one making them uneconomic.
We can shrug and say "make them profitable under the current conditions" but that ignores the fact that fixed prices for output makes energy cheaper and cleaner as a whole.
My point is, there is no "true market", its something governments define and control. The question should be what outcomes you want.
I'd argue for cheaper, cleaner and more diverse energy, but I'm not in the US.