Category: TEXAS_RENEWABLES

Wind and solar generators in Texas can break even selling electricity at negative prices thanks largely to federal subsidies and local tax breaks, which has spurred a bum-rush of wind turbines and solar farms into the state.

At the individual level, there are several ways to reduce carbon emissions as people move from place to place, U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said during his South by Southwest town hall session Wednesday.

The system was designed by a company called Quidnet. The agreement is for a small-scale pilot project. But according to Diego Mendoza-Moyers, the technology can be easily scaled. Mendoza-Moyers is a business reporter for the San Antonio Express-News. He spoke to Texas Standard about how the system works. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.

Last February, a disastrous winter storm pummeled Texas with ice and snow, threatening to topple the Texan energy grid. In the city of Denton, neighborhoods blinked off and on as the local power provider tried to conserve electricity. Places like assisted living facilities were momentarily excluded from the blackouts, but those eventually went dark too. Then the gas pipelines froze, and the power plant stopped working. Over the next four days, the city bled more than $200 million purchasing energy on the open market. It would later sue the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the grid operator also known as ERCOT, for saddling Denton with inflated energy prices that caused it to accrue $140 million in debt.

US start-up Green Hydrogen International (GHI) has announced a 60GW renewable H2 project in a sparsely populated area of South Texas, to be powered by wind and solar, with its own salt cavern for storage and a plan to produce clean rocket fuel for Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Canadian renewable energy developer Westbridge Energy has acquired the 221 MW Accalia Point Solar project from Aelius Solar. The project is located in Texas, near South Padre Island and the U.S. – Mexico border.

While mother nature can make cheap and clean electricity, she doesn’t come with a switch we can control. The sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. But the issue of intermittency has one promising solution.
“Battery storage is something that is going to be a game changer,” said Clark Bixler, senior development manager for Enel Green Power.

TotalEnergies and its partner 174 Power Global have started construction of the 80MW Midlothian Gerdau solar farm in the US state of Texas. The companies are developing the project under a 50:50 joint venture, with steel producer Gerdau Long Steel North America buying electricity generated under a 20-year power purchase agreement.

Beneath a salt dome near where the first major oil field was discovered outside Beaumont, Houston-based Renewable Storage Co. hopes to begin storing energy. But it won’t be crude or other chemicals that are typically stored beneath the salt formations across the Texas Coast.

A report released by some of the world’s foremost climate scientists in August confirms what many of us have long feared: The earth is warming even faster than previously thought and anything less than a massive and urgent effort to slow the trend will have disastrous implications for the planet and everyone living here.