Josh Rhodes at University of Texas shared this graph of the changing energy mix in Texas over 20 years.
Reading from bottom to top, you can watch coal (orange) and nuclear (green) shrink, and to a lesser degree, natural gas (blue).
Wind and solar show dramatic growth, with solar now generating as much as coal.
Texas has its own grid, called ERCOT, separate from the rest of the country. Notably, it is the most “free market” based grid, maybe in the world – and has overwhelmingly been selecting solar, wind, and now batteries, in recent years.
Josh notes: “The ERCOT grid ran on ~50% clean energy for the first 5 months of the year”
Here, in a 2023 study, Rhodes shows how renewables saved Texas consumers money over the years up to 2022.
Another graph from Rhodes shows the interconnection queue – projects lining up to get on the ERCOT transmission grid, overwhelming dominated by renewables, mainly solar – as markets make the sensible, least cost choices.
- There were 30 weather-related events in the United States and Canada that caused more than $1 billion in damages last year, but “none resulted in operator-initiated load shed, unlike previous events of a similar scale,” the North American Electric Reliability Corp. said Thursday in its annual State of Reliability report.
- On whole, the bulk power system “remained reliable but challenged by adverse weather conditions and transitions in resource mix and usage,” according to the report. “Today’s transmission system is demonstrably more reliable and resilient with the severity and duration of outages declining,” the reliability watchdog said.
- The North American grid is challenged by the proliferation of large loads, such as data centers, and the operating profile of inverter-based resources, NERC said. But “reliability improvements were observed in areas with high concentrations of battery energy storage systems,” also known as BESS.
I recognize there is political value in “percentage of grid” charts, but, as with China, we can’t really celebrate until the absolute amount of combustion emissions starts going down.
The absolute amount of CO2 emitted by ERCOT fell from 2017 till 2020, but since then has been slowly increasing or steady. This is because coal use and power output over the 8 years halved, but gas went up by about 30%, along with an increase in power consumption also of about 30%. Wind and solar combined last year made 34% of power. Nuclear output was unchanged, but as a percentage of the total fell from 10.7 to 8.3%. Methane emissions from the increased gas use are harder to estimate (the MethaneSAT satellite, funded by the Environmental Defense Fund and the previous New Zealand government, was launched to track fugitive emissions from the oil and gas industry, agriculture, and natural sources, but has just been declared to have lost contact.) @ElectricityMaps