Big Wind and Big Solar Got $22 Billion in Subsidies

By Robert Bryce at RealClear Energy

The oldest maxim in politics is “follow the money.” That maxim also applies to electric grids.

Following the billions of dollars that have been spent on the Texas grid explains why the state continues to have electricity shortages. On Monday, ERCOT, the state’s troubled grid operator, asked Texans to reduce their electricity use. That request came exactly four months after Texas residents were asked to conserve electricity due to a massive winter storm.

Before going further, I’ll give you the punchline: As I explained in these pages in April, about $66 billion was spent on wind and solar in Texas in the years before the deadly February storm that left millions of Texans without electricity. In return for that $66 billion, the wind and solar sectors collected about $21.7 billion in local, state, and federal subsidies and incentives. That first figure comes from the wind energy and solar energy lobbies. The latter number comes from a report published last week by veteran Texas energy analyst Bill Peacock of The Energy Alliance.

Thus for every dollar spent by the wind and solar sectors in Texas, they got roughly 33 cents from taxpayers. By any measure, this is an outrageous level of subsidization. And Texans are learning that the tens of billions of dollars spent on wind and solar are not translating into reliable electricity. As you can see in the graphic above, when power demand in Texas spikes, as it has this week, large segments of the state’s vast fleet of wind turbines – some 32,000 megawatts – like to head to Cancun with Sen. Ted Cruz for some vacation time.

On the graphic below, which I retrieved from ERCOT’s website on Wednesday, the black line shows electricity demand. The green line is wind output. On Monday, when demand was hitting 70,000 megawatts, wind output dropped to about 3,000 megawatts. On Tuesday, as power demand was again approaching 70,000 megawatts, wind energy production dropped to nearly zero.

Therein lies the biggest challenge facing Texas regulators and policymakers. The tax abatements, subsidies, and tax credits that are being doled out at the local, state, and federal levels favor the deployment of intermittent wind and solar. But during times of high demand, wind and solar often disappear and all of the load is expected to be met with traditional generation plants. But those traditional plants (nuclear, coal, and natural gas) don’t get the lavish subsidies being given to renewables. Further, those plants aren’t as profitable as they used to be because during times of fair weather (good wind and lots of sun) renewables are crowding out the juice that would ordinarily be produced from those traditional plants.

In his analysis, “Subsidies to Nowhere: A Year-By-Year Estimate of Renewable Energy Subsidy Costs for Texas and for the U.S.” Peacock says that Texas is “being overrun by renewable energy generation.” In 2020 alone, he found that Big Wind and Big Solar collected local, state, and federal subsidies worth about $2.3 billion. Further, he found that since 2018, 79% of all the electricity generation capacity built in the state has been from renewables while only 19% has come from “generation that can be dispatched, and all of that comes from one source, natural gas. The lack of diversity that has resulted from this overreliance on renewables has come at a great cost to Texas.” He continued, “Wall Street bankers and investment firms have partnered up with renewable energy companies from all over the world to chase the billions of dollars available if the companies will pick this form of energy favored by politicians and bureaucrats across the globe—including the state of Texas.”

Read the Rest at RealClear Energy