Van Zandt County resident David Dunagan is fighting a proposed solar farm, alleging it would plant an industrial facility directly around residences and create a revenue path of tax dollars, credits, carbon offsets and subsidies directly to their bottom line.
“They are not 'green' in any fashion,” Dunagan told the Lone Star Standard. “Having met with several different companies, testified against them during the last Texas legislative session and compared their paperwork and statements to others, they have a set playbook and pretty much every situation is handled the same way.”
Renewable energy suppliers have received $19.4 million in subsidies in Texas since 2006, resulting in favorable and sometimes negative prices charged by renewable suppliers to gain market share, according to an Energy Alliance study.
A Save Van Zandt county meeting
| Save Van Zandt county founder
“Subsidies to the renewable energy industry have emboldened out-of-state and international companies to inundate East Texas to take over control of our land, remove active agricultural resources, and take our tax dollars while generating very few jobs,” said Dunagan, who founded Save Van Zandt County in 2018. “Our group and others like it are not anti-solar or anti-wind. We are against their placement in populated areas; their extraordinary size; which leads to environmental issues and grid dependency issues; and their financial structure that harms local, state, and federal tax revenue and thus, the people.”
The Energy Alliance study further found that increased use of renewables endangers the reserve margin, putting consumers at risk for outages.
“Artificial price increases are certainly passed along to the consumers and the reserve margin and reliability issues are man-making assumptions with math that are not accurate,” Jason Isaac, senior manager of Life: Powered at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, told the Lone Star Standard. “It really should be looking at the available electricity on the market, which is why I will advocate in the 2021 legislative session that we have dispatchability requirements. Whether you’re building a natural gas, coal, nuclear, wind or solar plant, you must meet certain minimum generation requirements where you actually have electricity for the grid.”
Currently, the Energy Alliance reports that the Public Utility Commission of Texas is responding to the issue of reliability by instituting a $3.6 billion electricity tax on Texans, which was added through an administrative price called the Operating Reserve Demand Curve (ORDC).
“Subsidies for renewables makes it worse because it creates more renewables without any expectation of reliability,” said Chuck DeVore, vice president of National Initiatives for the Texas Public Policy Foundation. “What I would like to see as a way of solving the problem is that we value reliability. Prior to the advent of modern renewables, reliability was never an issue.”
DeVore blames the relatively recent alleged lack of reliability on no longer having enough spare capacity to ramp up and keep the grid stable and energized.
“The old rule of thumb was when you got more than 20% of your renewable supply from periodic sources, things get difficult,” DeVore told the Lone Star Standard. “The problem has been that cheap subsidized solar, and wind to a lesser extent, has been putting a lot of financial pressure on the reliable power plants in other parts of the West and they've been shutting down. Some of that's also due to fracking and the fact that natural gas prices have gone way down, which also puts pressure on coal fire plants.”
Although businesses have been flocking to Texas because of its predictable regulatory climate and low tax climate, Isaac foresees an exodus from the state due to unreliable electricity.
“If we continue on the path that we're on right now, we're going to continue to have less and less reliable electricity,” said Isaac. “When you have these leftist-run cities that are implementing plans to get rid of their reliable generation and replace it with unreliables, businesses won't be able to afford to stay here and they'll have no choice but to leave and take thousands and thousands of jobs with them.”
The future of Texas, according to Isaac, is in the hands of the Legislature, which restarts Jan. 12, 2021, and will last 140 days.
“I've already spoken with several legislators, both in the House and the Senate, as well as some of the executive branches and they are interested in these policies as well as just protecting our grid,” Isaac said. “We're getting too close to having unreliable electricity in the state of Texas, and the last thing we want to see are the blackouts in Texas that are occurring in California.”
Isaac contends that blackouts are next for Texas if the Legislature does not update the reserve margin metrics, the math used in the reserve margin calculations, and if renewables are not required to provide a minimum amount of electricity.
“The biggest thing the Legislature did years ago was deregulation and now it's time to update it,” he said.
