Texas goes green: Solar power tops coal in March - Bakersfield Now

Texas goes green: Solar power tops coal in March

WASHINGTON (TND) — The great red state of Texas is going green. It is undergoing an energy transformation, embracing wind and solar power even more.

Is this a model for the country or a political dead end?

Vice President of General Economics at the Cato Institute Scott Lincicome joined The National Desk’s Angela Brown to discuss the issue.

“They're [Texas] an outlier in one way and that's really on the regulatory side. The reason Texas is now leading the country is that it makes it easy to build and to connect new, renewable or any energy projects in the state while a lot of other states carry out protracted study requirements and other regulatory hurdles,” he said. “As a result, new power generation comes online in Texas in about half the time it takes elsewhere.”

Texas generated more electricity from solar power than coal for the first time in March. This pushed California to second place from a stronghold of more than 20 years.

Texas’ solar market shares also topped 10% in March, while the market share for coal fell 9.1%, according to the Institute for Energy, Economics and Financial Analysis.

“We are offering all of these subsidies for all these green energy projects, and some of them might just make economic sense regardless, but they get bogged down in permitting and interconnection and other regulatory things,” Lincicome said. “If we just remove those supply-side hurdles, we might get more of what we want without all of those subsidies.”