Green Power to the People
June 26th, 2007 at 5:25 pm
You probably missed it — hardly anyone was paying attention — but legislators rescued renewable energy in Texas at the end of the legislative session. Lawmakers repealed an obscure provision of a 2005 law that would have gutted the consumer-driven green energy market in the last hours of the session.
Current law mandates that by 2015 at least 5 percent of the energy statewide come from renewable sources. By 2025, the target is 10 percent. But a little-noticed 2005 provision allowed utilities to count consumers’ voluntary purchases of green power towards the state’s mandatory renewable energy goals.
It was an absurd proposition: People’s good-faith efforts to stimulate clean wind, solar, and biomass energy in Texas by signing up for green electricity plans would be rendered meaningless. The only beneficiaries would be the coal-belchers and nuke-purveyors that would have an easier time fulfilling their mandate without having to change their habits.
The EPA saw the problem and stepped in. The agency promised to decertify Texas utilities, including city-owned Austin Energy and deregulated retailer Green Mountain Energy, both enrolled in the agency’s Green Power Partnership.
“Nobody had thought very hard about what that one little provision would do,” said Bee Moorhead of Texas Impact, a faith-based organization that helps churches buy renewable power. During the session, Moorhead warned lawmakers that she was actively encouraging faith groups to not purchase Texas renewable energy credits (RECs) and to instead look out of state. (RECs are stock-like certificates sold by brokers that correspond to actual megawatts.)
Wal-Mart, which bulk-purchases green power and may have plans to sell electricity directly to customers, sounded a similar note.
Lawmakers that did recognize the problem, Reps. David Swinford (R-Amarillo) and Mark Strama (D-Austin) and Sen. Kirk Watson (D-Austin), met with resistance from some utilities and industry players.
Ironically, free-market fanatics and industry heavies have seized upon consumer “choice” as the sine qua non of electricity deregulation but they’ve never been too excited about the burgeoning market for green energy. Reliant Energy tried to zap the voluntary market through the Public Utility Commission last August.
But for consumers or businesses who want to fight global warming and promote clean air, renewable power packages are a sure bet. In Texas, that means wind power.
“You can go out and watch your turbine reducing carbon. For my money it is the most robust carbon credit you can hope for,” said Moorhead. “You are cutting pollution right here in your state, today.”
June 27th, 2007 at 9:44 am
The problem with wind-power in Texas.
There are at least two huge engineering problems with putting any Dutch or Danish sort of large-bladed, wind-turbine, with a horizontal axis of rotation on the statewide grid in Texas.
One is that this simply is not the North Sea: This is the near-tropics, folks, nearer and nearer every day to the full-bore tropics it seems. All the latitudes of Texas are marginal locations for wind-power. The wind comes and goes here from various directions. It is often not there at all or much too violent for a large and rather delicate wind-turbine to operate or just survive.
So, debt-driven schemes to build “wind-farms” in Texas onshore or offshore will probably never recover the costs of promoting, financing, jobbing, building, maintaining, repairing, and replacing them, not that the front-loaders, fee-men, and policy-sales racketeers (aka “insurance industry”) give a damn.
Frankly, most of these schemes are just “land-deals” or “paper-hanging” schemes that reek of the original, Austin-centric, “South Texas Nuclear Plant” or even of the Billy Sol Estes thing with nitrogen fertilizer tanks.
The other problem is that the wind-power we could have should be on more reliable and efficient micro-grids with the capacity to store wind-energy. These are all matters of fine-scale engineering, architecture, very cunning system integration, and landscaping or just agronomy, but, first and last, thermodynamics, more ubiquitous and pervasive than the internet or the “Eyes of Texas”.
A pretty-good Texas turbine would be smaller and more rugged, “robust”, probably with a verticle axis-of-rotation. Therefore, they would be less efficient in a strictly optimized, wind-tunnel, aerodynamic sense. But, they could be part of a truly efficient system system where thermodynamic losses from transmission lines and electrical conversions are greatly minimized.
Indeed, a competent engineer, rather than a flim-flam promoter, utility lobbyist, or engineering dean would recommend wind-turbines in Texas that mainly run mechanical pumps, not electrical generators. There have been huge improvements in engineering design and materials since then, but we almost got this right back before the acquifers subsided and the stock had to be refilled by means other than an onld wind-mill.
The history of energy in Texas since the end of WWII has been one of (a) extractive industry (oil and now coal) mediated by (b) financial fads driving the sort of legendary, “world-class”, political corruption that the Texas Observer has covered well, sadly, after the fact of huge economic losses and progressive potentials never realized.
I wish there was a political forum of civics and science where the actually interesting and practical possibilities could be discussed a priori and free of the hustle and flow of “mercenary” and self-styled “advocates” for “deals” or “movements”.
The Texas Observer or for that matter, Texas Monthly, might want to think of “blogs” in that way just to differentiate them from, say, an overflow tank for the regular rag.