In a week of deeply significant results, the flip of Texas to blue has got to be near the top in terms of long term impacts.
Texas is the energy engine of the United States, and has improbably become arguably the leader in renewable energy deployment, edging out California – not based on mandates, but by being as close to a free market as any electric grid in the world. In an environment where permitting is relatively easy and straightforward, entrepreneurial forces choose the best, quickest ways to generate power, and of course, renewables win out.
Even repeated attempts by the fossil-dominated Texas legislature to suppress renewables and boost gas have failed, as a coalition of urban greenies, rural landowners keen on property-rights, and chamber of commerce pragmatists has crushed those initiatives and kept clean energy on track.
Texas renewable industry was jump started under the adminstrations of well known Republican Governors, George Bush and Rick Perry.
Bush signed a bipartisan bill that broke up the local electricity monopolies and mandated that the state install more renewable energy. Under his successor, the far more conservative Rick Perry, the wind boom really took off. In 2005, Republican legislators set 20-year goals for renewable energy—and blew past them by 2010. Since then, wind energy in Texas has more than quadrupled.
In the Trump era, some Republicans in the state legislature have tried to mess with Texas’s green energy sector. Last year, they attempted to limit the development of renewable projects, but failed. This year, they proposed a quota to protect fossil fuels, as the renewables share of the state’s future electricity generation reaches 70 percent. But in Texas, 60 percent of Republican voters support renewables, and not even the oil and gas industry opposes them; after all, that industry uses renewables to power its own operations—to save money.
In addition to the Governor’s office, Democrats took control of the State House.
Democrats in Texas took control of the state House after historic wins for governor and U.S. Senate, part of a series of sweeping gains nationwide in Tuesday’s elections that shifted the balance of power across several battleground and Republican-leaning states.
It will be the first time Democrats control the House in Texas since Republicans took over after the 2002 election. Republicans are keeping control of the Senate in the state — which also elected Gina Hinojosa its first Democratic governor since George W. Bush ousted Ann Richards in 1994.
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Longer term electoral implications for Republicans are immense.
Now, Republicans are staring down an even scarier possibility than losing statewide office: The notion that they can no longer count on Texas and its 40 electoral votes on the path to the White House.
“If the Republican Party doesn’t have Texas as an anchor, then we are not going to be viable nationally going forward,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis told reporters Wednesday morning.
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Remains to be seen what initiatives Texas Dems will take, but safe to say that the state’s clean energy leadership will at least maintain, if not accelerate.