Texas adds another solar farm as ERCOT grid demand soars | Hacker News Reader

Texas adds another solar farm as ERCOT grid demand soars

electrek.co

20 pointsBender9 comments

How's that work? This is Texas where fossil fuel is king, isn't it? How does that actually play with the politics?

Money talks and leads action in forward capital investment

  And despite political attacks on renewables, solar continues getting built in this red state because it’s one of the fastest and cheapest ways to add new electricity to the grid.

So that happens while public facing politico's say whatever soothes the coal rollers that want to hear another Taylor Sheridanesque bleatage about wind power and no solar at night.

While Texas is quite red. Renewables are surprisingly popular. Why should a farmer in the middle of nowhere have to rely on Texas’ power grid, when they can install a few solar panels and a battery. Especially when storms can take out power lines, or take out the entire grid.

I’m near a big city in Texas, and before any big storms here, generators frequently sell out at stores. Power outages are basically expected during any storms. Lots of people buying into solar (or backup generators/batteries) just for independence from the power grid. Especially after the huge winter storm a few years ago left people without power for days in the cold.

> Lots of people buying into solar (or backup generators/batteries) just for independence from the power grid.

Sounds like the woke mind virus has taken over /s

While fossil fuels are huge in Texas, solar and wind are too. Especially out in west Texas where there’s a lot of wide open space, wind turbines are surprisingly frequent. Texas produces the most wind power out of any state. And solar works just about anywhere in Texas. Lots of sun in the summers.

You can trace almost anything back to incentives, renewables are more profitable now in one way or another.

After ERCOT humiliated itself in front of the entire state (twice iirc?) recently, I would imagine that they’ve been compelled (whether they like it or not) to prioritize “solve the damn problem any way possible” over the usual tendencies towards “but only using carbon-emissions power plants” — especially seeing how rapidly their neighbor California solved their own woes with grid batteries years ago.

> would imagine that they’ve been compelled

Sadly, your imagination isn't cynical enough.

While the responsibility for the Texas grid failures, which led to multiple deaths and billions in damages, are diffuse across multiple people and organizations, if blame should be focused on one role it's the misleadingly named Railroad Commissioner who is primarily at fault (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_Commission_of_Texas).

Despite the deaths, shutdown economy, massive destruction of property and suffering that the grid failures caused, the position has continued to be held by Republicans and they have not fixed the underlying issue of gas power plants that have to shut down in the cold.

If Texas gets another large ice storm, the grid will fail again, people will die again, and then 51% of the state will go vote for another Republican who won't fix anything and campaigned about preventing Sharia law (this is a real thing they run on in the primaries).

Ironic, then, that they disfavor campaigning about preventing Darwin’s law.

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