Texas renewables glut was set in motion in 1999 by then Governor George W. Bush who overhauled Texas power market and established "renewables" requirements-Wall St. Journal, 8/29/2016

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8/29/2016, “Which State Is a Big Renewable Energy Pioneer? Texas," Wall St. Journal, Bill Spindle, Rebecca Smith, San Antonio

“The roots of Texas’ renewables boom go back to 1999, when then-Gov. George W. Bush and a Republican-dominated legislature overhauled the Texas power market. The free market-oriented deregulation broke the grip of most monopoly utilities that controlled generation, transmission and retail sales of electricity and introduced competitive auctions for wholesale power.

The deregulation plan, which Mr. Bush signed just days after announcing he would run for the presidency, also included a government-imposed requirement to have at least 2,000 megawatts of renewable generating capacity by 2009.

Texas blew past that goal in 2005. Then Gov. Rick Perry, also a Republican and no fan of government intervention, raised the goal to 10,000 megawatts by 2025. Texas hit that target in 2011 and kept going. In April, there was more than 19,000 megawatts of renewable capacity, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, cranking out enough power for nearly 4 million Texas homes….

On a blustery February night [2016 or earlier], the Texas electricity market hit a milestone. Nearly half the power flowing onto the grid came from wind turbines, a level unimaginable a decade ago in a place better known for its long romance with fossil fuels.”…

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8/29/2016, “George W. Bush Helped Make Texas a Clean-Energy Powerhouse,” technologyreview.com, Michael Reilly

“[In 1999] As governor, Bush signed a bill that set the state on a path to becoming a leader in generating carbon [dioxide]-free electricity.”

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“Texas is crushing its clean power goals. Ever since 1999, when then-governor George W. Bush signed a law deregulating the state’s power market, Texas has been building wind turbines like crazy. And the boom isn’t likely to end anytime soon, thanks to a combination of federal subsidies and the falling cost of both wind and solar.As the Wall Street Journal reports, as part of the 1999 law, Bush included a provision that called for 2,000 megawatts of renewable power capacity by 2009. That milestone came four years early. Bush’s successor, Rick Perry, raised the bar to 10,000 megawatts by 2025.  

The state blasted past that milestone as well. As of April this year [2016], it had an astonishing 19,000 megawatts of renewables, enough capacity to power 4 million homes and good for about 16 percent of the state’s total energy diet. The vast majority of that is wind: nearly 18,000 megawatts, far and away the nation’s leader.

Such a massive boom in renewables comes with some problems, though. First, the Texas grid is straining to move all of that wind power from the rural places where it’s generated to the cities where it’s needed. New transmission lines are helping, but wind power figures continue to grow. There are big plans for new solar capacity as well, about 6,000 megawatts’ worth, so the transmission bottleneck is likely to remain an issue going forward.

Second, wind and solar are intermittent and only provide power when the wind blows or sun shines. This is a tough problem, but utilities are exploring ways around it, like using grid-scale batteries combined with some smart software to make virtual grids that smooth out the peaks and troughs in power generation. And if conventional lithium-ion batteries prove too expensive to scale up storage capacity, there’s always the chance that abandoned oil and gas wells could do the trick.”

(Read more: Wall Street Journal, “In Texas Oil Country, Wind Is Straining the Grid,” “Texas and California Have Too Much Renewable Energy,” “Virtual Power Plants Get Around Solar Power’s Intermittency Problem”)

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Added: “In Germany, negative energy prices have become commonplace, dramatically slashing utility revenues despite renewable energy subsidies that bolster electricity prices much more than in the United States. The first solution to below-zero prices is…to ship the power to places where demand is high. Germany now makes close to 2 billion euros a year off energy exports to neighboring countries.”…

4/7/2016, “Texas and California Have Too Much Renewable Energy," technologyreview.com, Richard Martin

“The rapid growth of wind and solar power in the states is wreaking havoc with energy prices.”

“Solar and wind power are coming online at rates unforeseen only a few years ago. That’s a good thing if your goal is to decarbonize the energy sector. But if you’re a utility or independent power producer and you make your money selling electricity, it can be not such a good thing.

In places with abundant wind and solar resources, like Texas and California, the price of electricity is dipping more and more frequently into negative territory. In other words, utilities that operate big fossil-fuel or nuclear plants, which are very costly to switch off and ramp up again, are running into problems when wind and solar farms are generating at their peaks. With too much energy supply to the grid, spot prices for power turn negative and utilities are forced to pay grid operators to take power off their hands.

That’s happened on about a dozen days over the past year in sunny Southern California, according to data from Bloomberg, and it’s liable to happen more often in the future. “In Texas, power at one major hub traded below zero for almost 50 hours in November and again in March,” according to the state’s grid operator. In Germany, negative energy prices have become commonplace, dramatically slashing utility revenues despite renewable energy subsidies that bolster electricity prices much more than in the United States.

The first solution to below-zero prices is to build more transmission to ship the power to places where demand is high. Germany now makes close to 2 billion euros a year off energy exports to neighboring countries, according to Berlin’s Fraunhofer Institute. But building out new long-distance, high-voltage transmission lines is expensive: Texas has spent $7 billion on transmission lines to ship power from the windy flatlands of west Texas to Dallas and Houston.

The ideal setup is for places with abundant renewable energy (many of them in remote areas) to store and ship power to energy-hungry cities on the coasts, forcing fossil-fuel plants to curtail production and, eventually, shut down. But such large-scale storage doesn’t exist yet. So in the meantime, “with more renewable power on the way in Texas, generators have been asking policy makers for incentives to keep conventional plants running,” according to the Dallas Morning News.”

“(Read more: Forbes, Bloomberg, Dallas Morning News)”

 

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