The Texas Senate Committee on Business & Commerce heard criticism of renewable power subsidies during a recent hearing on the Public Utility Commission's (PUC) efforts re-engineer the state's energy grid following Winter Storm Uri in 2021.
During the hearing, several Senators, as well as PUC Chairman Peter Lake, pointed at subsidies offered to renewable energy generators as a source of distortion of the energy market, saying the subsidies unfairly stilted the market from other traditional forms of energy, such as natural gas.
"One of the things we’re correcting here is almost 20 years of disincentivizing what actually works, which is reliable, thermal, dispatchable power generation," Sen. Mayes Middleton (R-Galveston) said at the Feb. 7 hearing.
Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the PUC to "take immediate action" to improve grid reliability after the Uri catastrophe in July 2021. Abbott's directive, as well as other measures in the Legislature, called on the PUC to offer incentives to reliable sources of power, while making "unreliable" generators pay for their shortcomings.
The PUC in January formally adopted a plan to overhaul the grid in order to ensure reliability, Lone Star Standard reported. The plan centered on the introduction of a "Performance Credit Mechanism," or PCM. At the time of Uri in 2021, the Texas Public Policy Foundation blamed renewable generators, arguing that wind and solar generators "contribute the least when they are needed the most, yet are propped up by billions in taxpayer-funded subsidies," the Foundation wrote in a news release published by Austin News.
In another release, the Energy Alliance also faulted wind and solar producers for their "intermittent" nature. The Energy Alliance said renewable sources are dominating the energy market and will continue to in the next four years, as they are projected to account for "99% of all new generation" in the works.
At the hearing, Sen. Phil King (R-Weatherford) asked what traditional producers could do to level the playing field against renewable subsidies.
"If the problem has been that renewables have been growing exponentially faster than thermal," he asked, "can you explain to me what in the PCM model that thermal will be growing at a rate to overtake that?"
Lake later said at the hearing, "There’s nothing we can do to stop the federal avalanche of renewables."
Energy Alliance Policy Director Bill Peacock recently told Collin Times that government's investment in renewable subsidies has been a "big bet" that has not paid off, saying their intermittent nature was at fault for an increase in electricity costs and a reduction in reliability.
"Energy producers have moved away from reliable fossil fuels and toward unreliable renewables because it’s nearly impossible to compete with taxpayer-funded subsidies tipping the scales so heavily," Rep. Jared Patterson (R-Frisco) wrote in a piece published by The Cannon.