Sue Ogrocki/AP Photo
A fortunate mix of climatic and topographic elements has made Texas the leading state in the nation for wind energy generation.
On April 30, the Texas Economic Development Corporation published a blog post boasting that Texas is “rapidly becoming the renewable energy capital of the U.S. … As wind, solar, battery storage, and hydrogen energy continue to expand, the Lone Star State is helping shape a more resilient and diversified national grid.”
It may surprise some people that Texas is the American poster child for clean energy. But a fortunate mix of climatic and topographic elements has made it the leading state in the nation for wind energy generation, while second for solar and battery storage. Billions and billions of dollars of investments unlocked those resources, and its business-friendly opportunities (no corporate or personal income tax!) for all comers, from entrepreneurs to fossil fuel giants to small landowners, have sparked one of the strangest regional energy revolutions in the world. Sprinkle in generous federal clean-energy tax credits, and the country’s largest industrial and consumer energy market has been booming.
It’s never been easy being green in a Republican stronghold, but more than a few Texas Republican lawmakers were on the verge of tossing it all away. They failed, but Congress is next up to take its shot. Can renewables proponents protect clean-energy dominance in Texas, or anywhere else for that matter, in an era of ferocious political backsliding?
Several state Senate bills backed by deep-pocketed anti-renewables interests would have curbed wind and solar installation on private lands. The bills, respectively, would have implemented onerous permitting requirements; mandated that the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the state’s independent electric grid operator, be sourced from dispatchable generation (read: natural gas) and other fossil fuels rather than wind, solar, or battery storage; and required that new and existing renewables projects buy backup generation from fossil fuel plants.
Those individual bills were bad enough. But as a package, they would have been devastating for the state’s power sector. Renewables provide 30 percent of power generation in Texas, and cutting back on that capacity meant consumers would have paid even more for unreliable electricity susceptible to blackouts.
A constellation of clean-energy and environmental advocates, as well as the Texas Oil and Gas Association, the Chemical Council, the state Association of Manufacturers, and the state Energy Buyers Alliance and others all lined up to oppose the Senate bills. Desperation forces strange alliances. Oil companies, for example, have power purchasing agreements to buy from low-cost wind and solar energy producers to power their operations, which in turn reduces the cost of producing a barrel of oil.
Given the White House pressures, Congress is likely to pass some type of renewables subsidy phaseout.
The renewables bills were never taken up by the Texas House of Representatives, and therefore died when the legislature adjourned for the year on Monday. The failure comes at a time when load growth—in other words, consumer demand for power—has been rising at about a 5 percent annual rate in the state. “Why would you not want to continue to build out solar power, which is nearly perfectly correlated with air-conditioning load. It just defies logic,” says Doug Lewin, a state energy consultant who publishes The Texas Energy and Power Newsletter. “A majority understood that it would be, to put it mildly, counterproductive, and maybe to put it more on point, ruinous to the state’s economy.”
But Congress may pick up where Texas Republicans left off. In their One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the budget reconciliation bill, the House prevailed by one vote in wrecking the Inflation Reduction Act’s energy tax credits that have helped produce the robust Texas renewables sector. A 2024 analysis by Energy Innovation, a San Francisco–based think tank, found that the IRA created 23,000 new jobs in Texas, lowered household energy costs by nearly $80 annually, and prevented thousands of deaths and billions of tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere. Texas’s GDP in 2030 is projected to increase by $15 billion because of the IRA, with 100,000 jobs created in the same time frame.
Under the House version of the reconciliation bill passed last month, clean-energy investors can use the credits if they can break ground on new projects 60 days after the enactment of the bill, if they connect to the grid in three years after that. This timeline was tightened up at the behest of hard-line Republican budget hawks in the House, some of whom hail from Texas. Not surprisingly, if that version prevails, some of the biggest losers are in Texas congressional districts.
In the Senate, four Republicans have announced support for the tax credits, while others have also expressed reservations. But the Texas senators haven’t stepped in, at least publicly, to protect the valuable sector. Sen. Ted Cruz has no use for “global warming alarmists,” but he is a Bitcoin mining enthusiast likely concerned about the price of electricity. “Once you buy the equipment, the cost of power is pretty much everything,” says Lewin. “Bitcoin mining is done if the cost of power goes up a lot in Texas.” (Data centers and AI companies would also be upended by price shocks.)
On his Senate website, Sen. John Cornyn hails the state as “a trailblazer in renewable energy.” On the other hand, he’s also called climate change “pure fantasy … This is part of the cult, or religion, of renewable energy.” Attorney General Ken Paxton has already announced a far-right challenge to Cornyn in his 2026 re-election, and Paxton leads by double digits in early polling. No doubt this will figure into Cornyn’s calculus on the bill.
Given the White House pressures, Congress is likely to pass some type of renewables subsidy phaseout. The problem with the House phaseout is the timescale of 60 days, which Lewin calls “insane.” Lewin argues that a longer time period would make more sense. “If [a project is] placed in construction, pick a year: 2027, 2028, 2029, somewhere in there, you get 100 percent of the credit, and it tapers down, 80, 60, 40, 20 percent over the next five years, that kind of thing could work.”
“I don’t think that renewables need the subsidies forever,” he adds. “But you have to have an orderly sort of a process for phasing them out if you’re not going to just completely disrupt the economy and have power prices spike.” He suggests if the goal is weaning mature industries, as some consider wind and solar now, off federal subsidies, then subsidies to oil and gas and nuclear concerns deserve some further scrutiny, especially since some of those technologies are more than 100 years old.
Climate change presents a greater, more unforgiving dilemma that Republicans ignore at their peril. When nature generates heat waves, or combines record-breaking ocean temperatures with wind and rain and spits them out as hurricanes, Texas residents, among others, will suffer. These phenomena pose continual tests for ERCOT. The winding down of solar and wind generation and battery storage capabilities could have devastating consequences in those disaster scenarios.
Every Texas sector, from manufacturing and retail to restaurant owners and families, benefits from clean-energy credits. But in the wind sector alone, Texas has made substantial investments, along with Democratic behemoths like Illinois, California, and Minnesota, and smaller Republican states like Iowa, Oklahoma, and Kansas. All of these states would face cataclysmic economic meltdowns from the knock-on effects of higher energy prices and job losses.
In the wake of the collapse of federal government departments and agencies, more economic pain is something the country can ill afford but seems destined to experience. “Whoever you are, having low-cost power is good for you, and that’s why we have the subsidies; take away the subsidies, our prices go up. People get upset,” says Lewin. “So, you either do it slowly in an orderly way, or you do it suddenly, and you’ll have people out in the streets with torches and pitchforks because they’re pissed off, like the Yellow Vests in France from a few years ago. That’s what they’re looking at.”
