In Texas, 'energy dominance' is the solar industry's new motto

AUSTIN, Texas — Solar energy might be clean, cheap and slow the heating of the planet. But that’s not what the solar industry wants lawmakers to focus on.

Instead, solar leaders are at the Texas Capitol this week presenting their industry as a lucrative pathway toward American “energy dominance.”

On Wednesday, they pitched solar and battery storage to Texas legislators as a key source of jobs and rural renewal and — above all — the fastest possible way to get new electricity onto the state grid.

“We’re spreading the good news,” said Daniel Giese, Texas director for the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), as he walked between legislators’ offices.

The news: that 75 percent of Texas counties now receive revenue from renewables production and battery storage, per industry data — which meant spillover effects for schools, hospitals and roads in counties where there has, increasingly, been little other source of economic growth.

Across Texas, solar, wind and battery projects will pay $20 billion in taxes — and $30 billion in landowner payments — across their lifetimes, according to a renewable industry-funded report by University of Texas professor Mark Rhodes.

Solar industry leaders' new pitch combined these local impacts with national and global implications as part of a story that increasingly centers on Texas, which leads the nation in solar and wind energy and is No. 2 in the growing field of battery storage. Solar and battery storage added more power to the Texas grid in 2024 than any other single power source, per research from the Dallas Federal reserve.

And with the state and national grids both facing surging demand from electrification, climate change and data centers, the industry argues that combined solar and battery plants are the fastest way to get new power online.

A recent report from SEIA found that solar and battery plants take just two years to get on the grid — about twice as fast as combined-cycle gas plants, and seven times as fast as nuclear power plants.

But despite that leading position when it comes to speed — and the state's surging demand for power — solar faces strong political headwinds in Texas, said Abigail Hopper, national head of SEIA.

The state’s solar boom, she said, isn't happening in “a place like California where everyone's like, ‘Oh, yay. We're so glad you're here.' It is happening in a state where there has been some significant pushback in the legislative cycle.”

As solar energy has established a bigger and bigger presence in Texas, she added, the industry has become “a bigger and bigger political threat” to a Republican state political consensus still largely built around fossil fuels.

November's elections appear to have raised risks for solar in the state Legislature. Industry leaders' pitch this week follows a purge of 14 veteran state House members led by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R). While the anti-incumbent primary campaign aimed to clear the House of rural members who had fought against school vouchers, it had a side effect: Many of the Republicans most friendly to Texas’ nation-leading wind and solar industry lost their seats too.

Among the new members who came to office in that purge is staunchly conservative state Rep. Don McLaughlin (R), who described himself to The Hill as something of a solar skeptic. "Texas’ energy future will always require innovation, and I’m willing to work with every sector to keep the Texas miracle alive,” he said. But renewable energy doesn’t get “a free pass just because it’s popular.”

His district, he said, had seen too many solar companies promising long-term jobs that never materialized, or peddling projects without any plan for how they would be decommissioned. He told The Hill he wanted his constituents “to know the true environmental impact, to see full decommissioning plans, and to receive their fair share of tax revenue.”

He added that “some solar companies are doing the right thing, but many are not — and I won’t stand by while rural Texans get left behind."

That's a concern many in the solar industry share. In Texas, the industry is largely unregulated. It is also marked by a broad division between the companies that make sales and the ones that install the actual panels.

Because the companies making the sales often aren't responsible for delivering on them — and there aren't regulations to impose accountability or quality on installers — the state system creates incentives for unscrupulous sellers to sell packages that installers can't deliver, and it makes it very difficult for homeowners to know if the installers are actually qualified.

“If you have a truck and a cell phone, you can call yourself a solar installer in Texas,” said solar installer and educator Craig Overmiller, who trains apprentice technicians in part by having them fix other installers' botched jobs, to the San Antonio Express-News as part of a multipart December series on abuse in the industry. The sky-high potential for solar energy in the state, the paper's editorial board found, is "one reason state leaders need to protect consumers."

Giese, the SEIA Texas director, was pitching state members like McLaughlin on S.B. 1036, a consumer protection bill authored by state Sen. Judith Zaffirini (D), which would require solar installers to register with the state and take out insurance, standardize contracts and provide for fines for bad actors.

But they were making a more targeted economic argument as well. On Wednesday, Giese dropped off personalized data in members' offices, showing how much money was coming into their districts from renewables. McLaughlin's District 80, for example, would take in more than $800 million in lifetime payments from wind and solar projects — $315 million in local taxes, and $530 million in direct payments to landowners.

The political challenges solar faces from the GOP are present on the federal level as well as in Texas. While solar has largely escaped the direct attacks that President Trump has launched against the wind industry — like in an executive order closing the U.S. continental shelf to offshore wind — the president has been dismissive of the industry.

“They’re ridiculous, the whole thing,” Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity in January about large-scale solar. “By the way, you know where the panels come from?” he added. “100 percent of the solar panels come from China.”

The solution for solar, SEIA president Hopper argued, is to recognize how well the solar industry aligns with the Trump administration’s stated goals of expanding energy production — and how little of a threat solar is to incumbents like oil and gas in a grid where demand is rising for the first time in decades.

Texas and national Republicans alike, she said, “care deeply about energy policy. They care deeply about energy dominance. And what we have been trying to do is illustrate that energy dominance is not limited to a certain technology, right?”

The catchphrase, she said, could apply to “the United States creating ample supply so that we can lead the AI revolution, and that we can be secure in all the different ways that energy security matters.”

The idea that the solar industry is Chinese-dominated is increasingly out-of-date, Hopper said: In 2024, the U.S. was able to produce more solar panels than there was demand for.

But many of the more valuable parts of the supply chain — like the machines used to make the panels themselves — do come from China, as do many of the raw materials from which they’re made.

That means the industry faces headwinds from tariffs against China, as well as the Trump administration's moves to roll back Biden-era support for clean energy. The president ordered a freeze on such funding passed in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and Bipartisan Infrastructure law — including $7 billion in grants issued under the IRA’s Solar for All program. The administration has also blocked renewable permitting on public land, including solar. And earlier this month, the Army Corps of Engineers briefly halted processing of permits for large-scale wind and solar.

In Texas, local opposition to the renewables has largely focused on the idea that solar and wind are more expensive than fossil fuels, because their intermittency require a buildout in gas power as a backup — as the right-wing Texas Public Policy Foundation argued in a January report.

This perspective, too, is out of date, solar lobbyists argue. While critics of solar tend to point out that the sun doesn’t always shine, solar advocates retort that it does always rise. That predictability, they argue, makes it a key energy source for a sun-blasted state, where the lengthening, ferocious summers often force gas and coal plants to be run to the point of breakdown.

Solar energy supplies do tend to peak in midafternoon, when demand is relatively low — and drop off in the evening, when millions of Texans come home and turn on air conditioning and appliances, or plug in cars.

But a boom in lithium-ion battery facilities have also helped extend solar’s productive hours long into the night. And it’s not just lithium — companies run by oil and gas veterans are experimenting with using fracking to store clean energy as well.

One mark of that growth: Despite months of record temperatures in the summer of 2024 that pushed coal and gas plants offline, solar development had helped create enough of an energy buffer that the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the state grid regulator, didn’t have to ask Texans to conserve electricity — despite record demand. In contrast, the regulator made 11 such requests in 2023.

Last year, Pablo Vegas, head of ERCOT, gave the primary credit to wind and solar in explaining how the state had kept the lights on, treating gas as almost an afterthought.

“We’ve seen significant additions of energy storage resources, solar resources and wind resources, with a few additions also on the gas side,” he told reporters in August. “All of that has helped to contribute to less scarcity conditions.”

Data centers for training artificial intelligence models, which require around-the-clock power — and which are run by companies which have strict climate commitments — are increasingly turning to solar, as well. Solar and battery backup will be part of the power supply for Stargate, a planned data center collaboration between OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank and investment firm MGX which will require 5 GW of power. Last December, Google announced it was investing $20 billion in co-locating clean energy — wind, solar and batteries — next to its data centers, Canary Media reported.

Sometimes, the reliable demand from these facilities means less power for local communities: a 300 MW battery and solar system in Arizona has been taken off the grid to feed a Meta data center, for instance.

The use of solar in data centers — which are notorious for their power and water consumption — points to a new side of the technology's potential appeal: one centered on its relative cheapness rather than its friendliness to the environment. That selling point has contributed to solar being taken up by a new generation of adopters that often belong to sectors that might have previously dismissed it.

The “shininess” of the green messaging has “worn off,” Hopper said: Many of her association’s members are wholly owned now by oil and gas companies, and many others sell power that keeps remote oil and gas operations running. Walmart is investing in rooftop solar for some of its stores and surrounding communities; logistics company Prologis is doing the same thing with its warehouses.

But all that could come to an abrupt halt, Hopper warned, if the administration in Texas or Washington were to turn hard against solar. For the industry, she said the nightmare version of such a turn would see the investment tax credits that have benefited it since 2005, and that help level the playing field with fossil fuels, canceled.

“There's not a solar project in the United States that's not built with the investment tax credit in place. So that would be beyond devastating,” Hopper said.

Overall, she said, the industry is “on a ship, very, very, very choppy waters. But we know where we're headed, and so we, you know, we keep our eyes on our goal. We don't let all of the chaos around us knock us off of our course.”

What is that goal? Keeping the U.S. the kind of country solar firms feel safe investing in. “We have a bunch of companies that won awards under the last administration, they have begun work, they have hired people, they have done projects, and now the contract they entered into the federal government isn’t being honored,” she said.

“Think about that: you're an investor, or you're a CEO of a multinational, and you're looking around the world [asking] where is there regulatory certainty? Where is there sanctity of contract? Where is there a reliable marketplace? And we're trying to ensure that the choice remains the United States.”

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