The Great Texas Energy Experiment

The story of renewable energy growth in the Lone Star State, specifically the wind and solar industries, is partly due to pioneering novel approaches to energy legislation and market design. In many ways, Texas was (and still is) an experiment on the frontier of policies, balancing legislation with market-driven approaches aimed at promoting competition among conventional and renewable energy technologies. Texas now has among the United States’ largest renewable energy portfolios, dominated by wind energy and a rapidly growing solar industry. The primary motivation for adoption of renewables in the state is an even more interesting enigma – this was not driven, at least predominantly, by an environmentalist movement to reduce CO 2 emissions, but rather economic reasons. Nonetheless, the Texas experience provides valuable lessons for other states and countries traveling down the road of decarbonization. In many ways, Texas offers an experiment, first as an opportunity to examine the past energy system changes to tease apart the relative roles of several drivers of renewable energy growth – the legislative actions, energy market design, and overcoming the technoeconomic hurdles for high penetration of utility-scale renewables in the electricity system. Second, the Texas renewable energy industry, in and of itself, is also an ongoing experiment, where the future role of renewables in the energy system is still being tested. As with any experiment, the results are uncertain.