From the Houston Chronicle: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/trump-wright-houston-wind-costs-ercot-texas-grid-20218074.php
Demand for electricity is expected to surge in the coming years with a boom in data centers. President Donald Trump foresees such a threat to the nation’s energy supply that he used his first day in office to declare a national energy emergency.
But one form of energy is being shunned by the incoming administration: wind.
Trump officials slammed wind energy this week during CERAWeek by S&P Global, a major international energy conference taking place in downtown Houston, claiming that it has driven up consumer costs and made the grid less stable.
“Wind has been singled out because it’s had a singularly poor record of driving up prices,” Energy Sec. Chris Wright said Monday during a press conference in Houston.
Here’s what industry experts say about those statements.
Is wind energy driving up Texas electricity costs?
Experts say the opposite is true. Wind energy adds electricity supply to the Texas market, and any source of supply helps to bring down the cost of electricity. Wind and solar farms are also cheap to run — they don’t have fuel costs — and so they are able to offer electricity to the market at lower rates, which drives down wholesale prices.
A diversified supply can also make for a stronger market — a study by Joshua Rhodes, an energy researcher at the University of Texas in Austin, found wind and solar reduced Texas electricity costs by about $11 billion in 2022 alone, when the war in Ukraine drove natural gas prices to nearly record highs.
The diversity of the Texas grid has been a point of state pride. Gov. Greg Abbott in December celebrated the state’s status as No. 1 for wind power and first in the nation for utility-scale solar.
“Here in Texas,” he said, “we believe in an ‘all-of-the-above’ energy approach.”
Where is this anti-wind argument coming from?
Wind energy is dependent on the weather, meaning it poses challenges for those who operate the grid. In Texas, that duty belongs to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, known as ERCOT.
ERCOT must ensure the grid has ample access to power generation at all times, whether or not the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. It accomplishes this by reserving extra power and then tapping those backup power resources — a cost borne by consumers to ensure reliability.
But wind and solar aren’t the only energy forms that go offline — aging gas- and coal-fired power plants in Texas are susceptible to weather and are regularly forced offline for unpredicted repairs. The deadly blackouts during February 2021 serve as an example.
Some also point out that the growth of wind power in Texas was subsidized by the massive build-out of long-distance power lines, paid for by ratepayers. But Texas is again looking to build another round of power lines — this time for oil and gas electrification, data centers and bitcoin mining and other industries.
Singling out wind isn’t logical, said Alison Silverstein, an independent consultant who previously worked as a senior adviser for both the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
“The demonization of wind is like a religious issue, not an economic issue,” Silverstein said. “Religious issues will never be resolved on the basis of facts.”
Does wind energy make the grid less reliable?
Every energy source has its downside, and for renewables it is that they are weather-dependent, said Ian Nieboer, head of energy transition research at Enverus.
The upside: they provide “super cheap energy.”
That’s why companies developing data centers are often co-locating gas power with solar and battery storage, providing both access to cheap solar energy — backed up with battery storage — and gas power for additional reliability.
“In composite, you end up with a really interesting power solution,” Nieboer said.
Similarly, the entire grid works best when it has a diverse mix of power generation technologies working together, Silverstein said.
What does this all mean for the AI boom?
Wind and solar are projected to be necessary to fuel the boom in artificial intelligence, especially since the turbines needed to build gas power plants are in short supply. A new study released this week by S&P Global Commodity Insights said meeting surging demand for power will require significantly more renewables than gas, citing renewables’ cost and availability advantages.
“You need a whole lot of renewables because they just are cheaper,” said Doug Lewin, president of Stoic Energy Consulting and author of the Texas Energy and Power Newsletter. “If you took away all the subsidies, they’d still be cheaper than gas.”
ERCOT faces “major risk” of supply and demand imbalances over the next five years, the study found, yet gas power turbines are largely unavailable until 2030.
“AI is not going to wait for 2030 to come. It is going to be won or lost in the next few years,” Rhodes said. “And the things you can build today are wind, solar and storage.”