Close your eyes, and try to imagine a green city. Perhaps you see solar-paneled houses and bicycle boulevards along tree-lined streets that are adorned with compost and recycling bins. Maybe you hear the low hum of electric vehicles, and spot a few windmills slowly churning in fields on the city’s outskirts.
Instead, one of America’s greenest towns looks decidedly … not like that. Everything appears to be in a perpetual state of construction in and around Georgetown, Texas, a borough of roughly 80,000 people about 30 miles north of Austin. Along the interstate that skirts the town, cranes dangle over growing buildings, and half-baked off-ramps lead to as-yet unbuilt destinations. Instead of windmills and solar panels, there are box stores and chain restaurants, a few budget hotels, and a slew of new housing developments. What’s in place of cyclists, pedestrians, compost bins, electric vehicles, and public charging stations? Trucks. Lots and lots of big trucks.
Georgetown’s normalcy is kind of the point. From 2012 to 2018, the town underwent one of the fastest energy transitions in the country. By 2017, it claimed to be the largest U.S. city to go 100 percent renewable. The goal was for the greening to take place with residents scarcely noticing; the city council promised that electricity prices would remain largely the same. Dale Ross, Georgetown’s round, red-cheeked, and self-described “conservative Republican” mayor, told Smithsonian Magazine that price was a driving factor. “We’re doing this because it’s good for our citizens,” he said. “Cheaper electricity is better. Clean energy is better than fossil fuels.”
From 2012 to 2018, Georgetown, Texas, underwent one of the fastest energy transitions in the country.
Prices would remain low because Georgetown signed long-term, cheap contracts with wind and solar farms in West Texas and the Panhandle, rather than producing their own renewable energy. The deals were made possible thanks to Texas’s newly deregulated energy market, in which solar and wind were in healthy competition with coal and natural gas.
The gregarious Ross soon found himself on conference stages, and adored by media and environmental organizations. He was fond of saying that his little red city in the reddest county in red Texas was now one of the greenest in America, a quip repeated by Al Gore when he visited Georgetown in 2016 and then again when Ross was featured in An Inconvenient Sequel. Georgetown seemed to offer an elegant, palatable solution to a climate crisis caught in the political crosshairs. Perhaps all the hand-wringing could be avoided by pairing liberal goals with conservative approaches: favoring renewable energy by relying on a market-run energy grid to sort out the price details.
But a few years after Georgetown claimed to be fully renewable, media headlines began to shift as the town quietly reneged on its renewable claim and as electricity prices began to rise. Georgetown soon served as a cautionary tale for conservative pundits, who gleefully pointed to Ross’s broken promises. What they neglected to mention is that the Georgetown experiment failed not because of green energy, but because of the chaotic Texas energy market. Cheap contracts allowed Georgetown to move fast without the messy work of actually investing in long-term change. But it also paved the way for them to quickly move backward after natural gas unexpectedly flourished in the state.
As it turns out, the vaunted invisible hand of the market needs a little bit of guidance to nudge us to climate salvation.
YOU CAN’T UNDERSTAND energy in Texas without understanding the extraordinary role of the Permian Basin. The flat, 86,000-square-mile area spills across the western part of the state, reaching into northeastern New Mexico. It’s remarkable for a few reasons, including what it lacks (it is mostly desolate, with sand and dry shrubs), and what humans have made of it (some of the country’s most dangerous highways snake through the vast expanse of dust and tumbleweeds). But people know about the Permian because of what’s underground. It’s home to one of the most productive oil fields in the world, with more than four million barrels pumped daily. Oil first sprang from this dry patch of earth in the 1920s, prompting frenzied exploration. Since then, more than 33 billion barrels of oil, and 118 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, have been extracted.
In many ways, the Permian made Texas. Its natural riches have fueled banks and businesses in cities on the other side of the state and even the country, from Dallas to Houston to New York. And its boom days perfectly capture that unique Texas kitsch, like the story of an oilman who dressed up as the Easter Bunny each year, distributing not eggs but wads of cash.
The basin saw its heyday in the 1970s, with prices and production dipping in the 1980s and slowing thereafter. Texas oilmen, businessmen, and politicians worried about what the demise of the Permian might mean for the state. With the energy market transforming and chatter about climate change heating up, Gov. George W. Bush, and then his successor Rick Perry, sought to figure out how to keep Texas energy independent, while ensuring that the state’s electricity costs remained low.
After deregulation, many municipal utilities, such as those supplying Dallas and Houston, were dissolved.
Their answer was, rather unsurprisingly, the free market. The plan, which was signed into law in 2002 and enacted over the next few years, radically deregulated the energy grid. This was fairly easy to do because, unlike every other grid in the country, Texas’s was self-contained, with no element crossing state lines.
A state oversight body, the Energy Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), would ensure that electricity generated is transmitted to where it’s needed. But it doesn’t decide what kind of energy should be used, where it should be produced, or how much it should cost. All ERCOT has to do is keep residents’ and businesses’ lights on, and buy electricity at the lowest price, regardless of its source. The rest—what energy is produced, by whom, and for what price—is left up to the market. “Texas is doing this in a Texas way,” explains Daniel Cohan, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University.
After deregulation, many municipal utilities, such as those supplying Dallas and Houston, were dissolved. In these cities, individuals became responsible for signing their own energy contracts, a complicated task that includes browsing hundreds of options each year. But a few towns and cities, like Georgetown and its neighbor Austin, kept their municipally owned utilities intact. Deregulation meant that Georgetown’s city council, which oversees the utility, could now buy their energy from whomever they pleased.
The state helped ensure they had a plethora of options. Despite their Texas swagger, Bush and Perry both acted to increase renewable-energy output, which could help keep the state’s volatile energy sector less prone to boom-and-bust cycles, and place the state at the forefront of a new energy era. In 1999, Texas became the first state to establish an energy efficiency resource standard, requiring investor-owned electric utilities to reduce energy use and demand. That same year, the state set plans to install 5,000 megawatts of renewable energy by 2015, and 10,000 megawatts by 2025.
Wind and solar development were encouraged by production tax incentives and Renewable Energy Credits (RECs). These credits, distributed by ERCOT in the late 2000s to any new facility generating renewable energy, could either be handed back to ERCOT, or “retired,” against renewable energy goals, or they could be sold to other energy consumers, be they cities or businesses. This trading market made renewable energy more valuable to produce, while also giving consumers proof of their sustainable commitments. Cohan likens the REC market to a bowl of green and red M&M’s. “If all you’re doing is buying REC credits from existing wind and solar farms, then you’re just picking out the green M&M’s, making yourself more green but making it less green elsewhere,” he says. “But if your contracts help to put in new solar or wind, then you’re pouring more green M&M’s in the pot.”
The state also pumped billions of dollars into new transmission lines connecting West Texas to the rest of the state. This enabled renewable electricity produced in places like the Permian, with sparse population but a whole lot of land, sun, and wind, to be sent to places with plenty of people but less-conducive weather, like Austin, Dallas, and Houston.
Taken together, this complicated cocktail was intended to spark an energy revolution Texas needed, while keeping electricity prices among the lowest in the country.
In many ways, Bush and Perry’s dreams were realized. A new Wild West started in West Texas, this time including renewable energy. Texas blew past both its 2015 and 2025 renewable-energy goals by 2009—it hit 10,000 megawatts of ready-to-use wind energy alone by 2011. Today, Texas leads the nation in wind-generated electricity, and was America’s sixth-largest solar producer in 2019. Last year, wind and solar together surpassed coal-generated electricity for the first time.
Thanks to the boom, the Permian plays host to wind turbines and solar farms sitting next to oil rigs, with cows grazing in between. Wink, Texas, the childhood home of country legend Roy Orbison, which has one Dairy Queen nearby and about 900 people, is now dotted with windmills.
The Georgetown experiment failed not because of green energy, but because of the chaotic Texas energy market.
WERE IT NOT for Bush and Perry, and their efforts to diversify Texas’s energy landscape, Dale Ross likely would have never met Al Gore. Georgetown never had an exact plan to go green; in the late 2000s, the city set a goal to become 30 percent renewable by 2030 while still relying primarily on natural gas, coal, and hydro. But in 2010, when the city was considering re-signing with its long-standing electricity provider, the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA), officials ran into some cross-pressures.
Students and professors at Southwestern University, a small liberal arts college on the edge of town that is reliant on Georgetown electricity, wanted to move toward renewable energy (Southwestern signed a small wind contract with Georgetown in 2008). There was also a statewide reduction in coal usage, and steep natural gas prices were poised to keep rising, with the Democrats running Washington discussing a potential carbon tax. When the city left LCRA in 2011, it looked like wind and solar, now plentiful in Texas’s reformed market, were the safer and cheaper bet. “This probably couldn’t have happened elsewhere,” says Josh Long, a professor of environmental studies at Southwestern University, who has helped to document the city’s renewable transition.
Georgetown signed contracts with wind farms and a solar farm to provide energy to the grid, which in turn provides electricity to Georgetown (the city also has a small contract with a natural gas provider). The contracts were long-term, at 20 and 25 years—most renewable contracts are just 5 to 10 years—and offered a fixed price that was low at the time. This is known as “hedging,” locking in low prices well into the future to eliminate any sudden price swings. It’s how another Texas stalwart, Southwest Airlines, keeps fuel prices low.
In exchange for the contracts, the city received Renewable Energy Credits. The plan was to claim, or “retire,” the credits as it marched toward its 100 percent renewable goal, although Georgetown could also sell them—to other towns, to companies—on the ERCOT market.
City officials purposefully over-contracted with the solar and wind providers, buying more electricity than its residents needed. The plan was to sell the excess renewable energy off to ERCOT, which was then mostly reliant on relatively expensive natural gas, at a profit. This money would be used to hold down residents’ electricity prices, keeping them stable in a volatile market. This provided the key to the win-win solution Georgetown had promised its residents: We sign renewable-energy contracts, but you don’t feel a pinch in your pocketbooks.
But few in Georgetown had any experience with energy trading under a deregulated system. Final decisions were made by a volunteer city council that was wading into the Texas energy market for the first time. They made mildly informed guesses about future electricity price and demand, based on perusing the ERCOT and federal Energy Information Administration websites. And they made projections about the future of regulatory policy in part by watching the news. “From their viewpoint, oil and gas were just getting more and more expensive, and wind and solar were the safer bet,” says Long. “Rick Perry had heavily supported wind energy, Bush had heavily supported wind energy, and so everything looked like we were moving further and further towards embracing renewables. You can understand why people thought this was just a no-brainer.”
James Durbin/Midland Reporter-Telegram via AP
A man descends toward the water pool attached to Robinson Drilling rig #4 in Midland County, Texas.
What Georgetown didn’t anticipate was an energy revolution of a different kind. As the city was signing its initial contracts, the fracking boom was starting to tear open Texas’s anemic natural gas market. From 2005 to 2016, more than a third of all wells fracked in the country were located in Texas, which became America’s top natural gas producer. Then, the election of Donald Trump ended any thin possibility for a carbon tax or energy regulation. Down went the price of oil and, more importantly for electricity markets, natural gas. The prices in Georgetown’s contracts, which once looked at least reasonable if not downright cheap, now were more expensive than the fracked gas being blown out of the Permian.
This meant that the city could no longer sell renewable energy to the grid at a profit; it was too expensive to unload. And Georgetown was buying too much power for too few residents. The low prices were no longer possible to maintain.
Without telling residents what was going on, the city attempted to keep its promise of low electricity prices by quietly dipping into its general fund, essentially subsidizing residents’ bills while losing millions. In 2018, the hole got too deep, and electricity prices started to rise. Some households claim they’ve gone up by as much as a hundred bucks a month, although according to Keith Hutchinson, communications manager for the City of Georgetown, the average monthly bill went from $116 in 2009 to $144 in 2019.
The city is now backpedaling. It contracted Shell Energy, which oversees the town’s trading on the ERCOT market, to sell Georgetown’s wind and solar contracts for as much money as possible, while also buying the cheapest electricity available. The focus is no longer on being green, as the city is also trying to get out of its solar contract; Shell is agnostic about whether it buys natural gas, coal, wind, or solar. And Georgetown is already considering what will happen after the wind and solar contracts expire in 2035 and 2041, including sourcing with coal and gas producers in the future. “Our singular focus is to make sure our costs are the lowest possible,” says Daniel Bethapudi, the city’s new electricity manager.
To make up for the money that’s already been lost, the city is also selling the Renewable Energy Credits it originally received with its wind and solar contracts, making a bit of extra cash while allowing whoever purchases the RECs to claim to be a little bit more green. With those credits leaving Georgetown’s account, Hutchinson makes it clear that the city shouldn’t be referred to as 100 percent renewable anymore, although Mayor Ross points out that it could still make the claim, since Georgetown continues to contract for more renewable energy than it receives from the grid. “So we could say we’re more than 100 percent renewable,” he tells me, before receiving a side-eye from Hutchinson. “But we don’t.” (Actually, Georgetown’s website still boasts the claim, as do local companies like Rentsch Brewery.)
The foibles of the Georgetown case demonstrate a key flaw in the state’s hands-off approach.
Ross is unfazed by the turn of events. He emphasizes that the town never committed to being fully renewable, and that the 30 percent by 2030 goal is still the only one on the books. For him, the debacle is just a matter of bad luck. If fracking hadn’t happened, if Obama had imposed a carbon tax, if Trump hadn’t been elected, then maybe their renewable contracts really would be relatively cheap, not relatively expensive. Stressing that he can’t look into the future, he says, “I like to ask my critics, what would you have done differently based on the facts and the information we had at the time?”
THOSE CRITICS HAVE answers. A former member of the city’s municipal utility board, who asked not to be named because he’s had so many fights with city councilmembers over their energy decision-making, said that Georgetown got itself into this mess by signing long contracts with some of the first renewable providers it came across. The city had previously considered hosting a solar farm, but discarded the plan when the contracts came up. The city could have incentivized homeowners to put solar panels on their roofs, creating energy for themselves that could also be fed back into the grid, but “there’s this sense that ‘we don’t do that, this is Texas,’” the former utility board member says. For him, Georgetown’s renewable-energy experiment allowed the city to boast about going renewable, without having to undertake much substantive change.
Hutchinson, Georgetown’s communications manager, refutes this. He points out that the city received RECs only because it supported brand-new renewable-energy projects, and says that two wind farms, Spinning Spur 3 and Buckthorn, would not have been built without Georgetown’s financial support.
There’s no doubt that long-term contracts like Georgetown’s signaled a demand for clean energy. But the city certainly did take the easiest, least substantial route. Ross and his city council worked within Texas’s unique model, with its focus on energy trading rather than local capacity. The foibles of the Georgetown case demonstrate a key flaw in the state’s hands-off approach. Without any guidance, electricity consumers, from individuals to utilities, are left to guess what the market might do and grab at low-hanging fruit rather than long-lasting solutions. That made it easy for Georgetown to go green at breakneck speed. But it made it just as easy for them to slide back quickly.
Without a deeper understanding of why Georgetown hit bumps in the road, Rice professor Cohan is worried that the case may dissuade others from pursuing green energy. “I hear from people who are making decisions for major institutions that they don’t want to get stuck with what Georgetown did. ‘What if I sign up for $.03 and I could have gotten it for $.01 in two and a half years?’ They don’t want to lock themselves in.” To avoid this, other cities, like nearby Austin, have signed contracts with a wider range of renewable-energy producers for shorter periods of time, giving themselves the flexibility to watch the market evolve slowly while keeping costs in check. The city has also implemented some community solar farms in low-income neighborhoods where cheap, local electricity is especially desired. While Austin aspires to be carbon-neutral by 2050, the city’s utility has made it clear that the goal will not be pursued if it’s not affordable.
Georgetown’s unsteady path has also provided an opportunity for conservative groups like the Texas Public Policy Foundation to bash renewable energy. The group has received funding from the Koch brothers and ExxonMobil and promoted climate denial “facts,” and its board of directors includes some of Texas’s most prominent oilmen. The TPPF has hosted “town halls” in Georgetown, and written commentaries that mock the city and Ross.
Jason Isaac, director of the Foundation's Life:Powered program, says the group supported the local paper’s nearly yearlong investigation into the renewable-energy contracts and resultant price increases, which sparked vigorous debate. “We try to help them, we share messaging and research,” Isaac says. “We were the ones to discover that the utility was losing revenue to the tune of $30 million,” a figure that later became a talking point of the Williamson County Sun. In response, Clark Thurmond, the paper’s publisher, said, “Mr. Isaac is mistaken. We had reported the losses each year, but it was only in the third year, after the losses had reached $26 million, that it became clear that the previous losses were not outliers as the city had claimed. The TPPF did not support our work, either financially or with research, nor did we share or coordinate any messaging with them.”
Regardless, Georgetown’s perceived failure plays into conservative narratives about the futility of going green, even though the city’s ultimate culprit was the very free-market systems that the same conservative groups lionize.
“Those who are pro-oil are saying, ‘See, these guys are idiots, this renewable-energy shit is just a fart in the wind,’” says Southwestern professor Long. “And those of us who are pro-environmental feel bad because we bought into the rhetoric that the price would be better.” Hutchinson, the city’s communications manager, laments that the city has “become a ping-pong in a debate between two sides,” with Georgetown on both the TPPF’s and Sierra Club’s maps. “We feel like we’ve been consistent in our goals, which is providing cost-competitive power, and the aim of trying to provide a stable price to our customers,” he says. “It’s just that what happened in the market has challenged that.”
Those who remain pro-renewable suggest that a bit more honesty about the contracts could have helped stifle the pushback. Rachael Jonrowe is a city councilmember who co-owns Lark & Owl Booksellers, a local café-cum-bookstore on the edge of Georgetown’s scenic downtown, which offers Notorious RBG pins, handcrafted perfumes, and cocktails. She says that because of the historically conservative bent of Williamson County, Mayor Ross heavily pushed the fiscal-responsibility angle. “He played up this idea of us being the reddest area in the reddest state and this being about electricity bills,” she says. “I probably would have pitched this in a different way. For me, this is about future generations and the government needing to have sustainable practices.”
Today, Texas leads the nation in wind-generated electricity, and was America’s sixth-largest solar producer in 2019.
In many ways, the Georgetown case begs a re-examination of the city’s win-win rhetoric. What if, instead of bending to the seductive promise that going green should primarily be a fiscal decision, Georgetown had just said: Yes, we’re Republican, but we care about the environment, too. And what’s so wrong with that? It still would have been a little red town going green. But it would have been going green for different reasons.
Pro-environmental advocates like Jonrowe are emblematic of a changing Georgetown, one of America’s fastest-growing cities above 50,000 people, in one of the country’s fastest-growing regions. Jonrowe grew up in Austin but moved to Georgetown in 2006, seeking affordable housing options for her family. When she, her husband, and their twins moved, she brought some of the liberal Austin vibe with her. Since the renewable contracts were signed, Jonrowe has helped to push for other environmental changes on the city council, including an updated building code, a water usage ordinance, and a plan for electric-vehicle chargers.
Such changes make it easier for young professionals like Long to consider Georgetown as a long-term home, not just a stopover. He regularly goes to the Lark & Owl for trivia night, and frequents the new coffee shop around the corner that serves $6.50 pourovers, cardamom lattes, and Bon Iver on repeat. When we met there on a sunny Sunday morning last winter, he lovingly patted the tiny wooden table we were seated at, glancing around at happy millennials in Birkenstocks and flowy cotton pants. “We didn’t have coffee shops like this five years ago,” he said. “When I moved here in 2011, there were only two bars. Now we have live music on the square, we have an open-container law. It’s kind of a destination spot.”
But he adds that some residents are worried about “how Georgetown is ‘California-fying.’ You have people coming from big cities, the population has gotten younger, it’s more progressive,” Long says, pointing out that Williamson County, of which Georgetown is the seat, went for Beto O’Rourke in 2018. “The fact that we have Democrats in Sun City—that’s crazy,” he says, referring to a local retirement community with outsized political influence, where vehicles regularly make way for golf carts. “We’re in this tension between renewable energy and fossil fuels, but it’s really about a GOP-dominated county that’s quickly changing,” he says.
Jacob Ford/Odessa American via AP
A pump jack operates in an oil field in Texas’s Permian Basin.
Terry Williams, an 82-year-old resident enjoying an afternoon in the lounge at Sun City, has followed the changes over the years. He offered a mild complaint about his electricity bills going up between $20 and $50 a month, but makes it clear he’s not against the renewable-energy contracts, noting “for Georgetown, it’s good.” He’s more worried that everything else is getting more expensive, and all the hustling and bustling to get by. “But that’s happening everywhere in Texas right now, because people want to live here.”
Linda sits across the room from Williams at Sun City. She speaks briefly about the electricity fights in Georgetown, saying that she “doesn’t like paying higher rates, but I do like renewable energy.” But mostly, she speaks about her hometown of Wink, in the Permian Basin. She left decades ago when she desired to live somewhere that hadn’t effectively become a sacrifice zone for the rest of the country.
Wink isn’t only overrun by oil wells and tankers. There are now huge sinkholes, the result of oil and gas drilling; Linda predicts that the whole area will “sink right into the ground.” There are wind turbines and solar farms out there, too. She says she’s glad the world is moving toward renewable energy, but reminisces about star-freckled skies and open landscapes that now only exist in memories. Decades ago, as a newlywed, she took her husband—who’s from the East Coast—to the sand dunes in Kermit (population 5,000) at night. “You could just stand in one spot and look 360 degrees around you and you could see anything. We’d watch the stars come out. You could sometimes hear the wind blowing and the grasses, and that’s it. It used to be just mesquite bushes. And now there are all these turbines, just flicking away. And they’re just so big, like skyscrapers.”
She compares the new turbines to old oil derricks—both big things pointing out of the earth into the sky, creating energy that is used elsewhere. She sighs. “I miss those big, open flat lands.”
DALE ROSS REMAINS optimistic about his town’s renewable-energy contracts. “I think everyone should take a deep breath and stop hyperventilating,” he says. “I have all the confidence in the world that this is going to be fine.” When we met in January, he predicted that “since the market fluctuates so much, and since Georgetown’s electricity demand is increasing 3 to 5 percent a year thanks to population growing, maybe the contracts will rightsize soon enough.”
He may yet prove correct. When I visited Georgetown last winter, oil sold for $60 a barrel. But thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, there’s been a significant reduction in global oil demand, the lowest in nearly 25 years. As a result, prices on one spot market dropped to below zero per barrel in April, with some producers actually paying buyers to take oil they could not store. The benchmark price is now hovering in the $40 range, two-thirds of what it was last winter.
That price makes it difficult for drillers to survive. From March to May, the oil industry removed 199 drilling rigs from the Permian Basin, a decline of nearly 50 percent, and for the first time since the 1970s OPEC crisis, Texas briefly considered mandating a reduction in oil production. Natural gas prices, and production, have remained largely the same, but in Texas much natural gas production is a by-product of oil production, so a shift may soon happen. The demise of Chesapeake Energy, an icon of the fracking boom, suggests difficult times for the industry ahead.
Championing Texas as the unlikely face of green energy may act as a cloak under which to hide business-as-usual, climate-wrecking practices.
With the future of oil—and potentially gas—hanging in the balance, energy producers and consumers are again looking to wind and solar, which now seem relatively stable. Depending on the pandemic and the state of the economy, we could see a longer-term shift. Even oil and gas companies are now looking to renewables; ExxonMobil, Occidental Petroleum, and Energy Transfer Partners (of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines) have recently signed contracts with wind and solar providers. All told, Texas is not so much shifting away from fossil fuels and toward renewables, but shifting things, unpredictably, all at once. In one site in West Texas, solar farms now power oil pump jacks.
This peaceful co-existence between renewables and fossil fuels has been a theme throughout Texas’s massive energy changes. Even with the surge in wind and solar, the state has still led the nation in crude oil production for every year but one since 1970, and annually produces more than all of America’s offshore oil reserves combined. And thanks to fracking, the state also accounts for 25 percent of the country’s natural gas production. Erin Zwiener, one of the most vocal pro-environmental voices in the Texas House of Representatives, who famously went into labor at an anti-Trump protest, puts it simply. “This is a carbon-based state,” she says. “Even if we were 100 percent renewable within the state, we would still export fossil fuel.”
Put another way, the state may internally be moving toward renewables, and its role as one of the top wind and solar producers in the country should be applauded. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the state is helping the world make that shift, too. Championing Texas as the unlikely face of green energy may act as a cloak under which to hide business-as-usual, climate-wrecking practices.
What’s more, such seesawing and mixed signals make it difficult for consumers like Georgetown to know what to do. Should they continue to move away from renewables, or hope that prices swing in their direction? When their current contracts end, should they focus on community-generated wind and solar to take a long-term approach, or rely on other providers through the open market? Ross won’t have to make that decision. His term ends in November, and he isn’t seeking re-election. He says the decision not to run has nothing to do with the squabbles over electricity contracts and prices. He just wants to focus on his day job as a certified public accountant.
Energy headaches will be left to those pushing for continued change, like Daniel Cohan at Rice University. In many ways, he embraces the Texas approach, noting that “here you can build things faster than almost anywhere else.” That spurs innovation that will help the rest of the country transition, he says, and has contributed to impressive successes. “So far so good, we’ve closed six big coal plants, we’ve added over 20 megawatts of wind and kept the lights on,” boasts Cohan. But without a centralized regulator determining what should be built and sold, why, and for how much, he is worried about the precarity of renewable-energy providers, who are reliant on relatively short-term contracts that hinge on fluctuations in a fossil fuel–dominated market. Over time, Cohan has come to the conclusion that “we actually need more government involvement to make this work. The Texas electricity market is going to be evolving so fast in the next ten years, we need watchful monitors to help cultivate change.”
The story has been updated to reflect the Williamson Sun’s denial of any connection between them and the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
