this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
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The top US export is oil.
If you want to do something, wean yourself off oil. Big push for solar, wind, and anything else that doesn't rely on digging up bits of dinosaurs.
Electric vehicles, public transport, bikes, walking.
And as an added bonus, the world gets a little cleaner. Might be important, you know.
In 2022, renewable energy sources contributed 31% of the electricity used in Texas. Fucking Texas.
Get those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers.
One of the ironies of the Texas electricity grid - ERCOT - is how it accidentally created huge incentives for new solar and wind energy by trying to prop up the natural gas markets.
ERCOT operates via an auction system, wherein the electricity carriers put in bids for GWhs and producers meet those bids. When demand is low, electricity is very cheap - $10-25 MWh. But it rise rapidly during a heat wave, peaking at $3000 MWh in some instances. Gas plants don't have any incentive to sell onto the grid at this point, so they turn themselves off until the price rises. But when a bunch of gas plants operate as a cartel, they can coordinate when they release electricity and drive up the price.
The problem is that the auction price is set on the last GWh sold but it applies to the entire sale of energy for the auction cycle. So if you're selling continuously across the day, you can accidentally trip into a ahem windfall when gas producers surge the price.
Because green producers can't really control how much they put out onto the grid, they're at the mercy of the market. But if they know, in advance, that the gas companies are going to fuck with things, they can anticipate enormous profits during these strategic moments. And because wind/solar don't need a supply chain like gas does, you can just keep building and building and building wherever you find opportune spots for harvesting (which Texas has in spades).
So the gas companies inadvertently kicked off a green energy boom by their periodic price spike scheme.
Don't worry Texas is going to fix that. They're getting ready to pass a bunch of laws that limit renewable energy usage in Texas.
They've been making a lot of threats. But there's a ton of money in renewables, too. It's a hard lift
It's way more than just threats. They're already passing legislation.
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2025/04/16/texas-senate-passes-anti-solar-wind-bill/
The Senate passes a lot of bugnuts bills. Watch the House calendar if you want to see what has a chance of actually passing. It took Abbott nearly a decade to get his watered down voucher bill through, in large part because the calendars committee guy hated the idea and would book the legislation at the tail of every session.
This is what I always have to bring up when people go "bUt cHInA!". So what? Energy independence is valuable and should be pushed for.