Texas legislation to crimp renewable energy projects clears state Senate
Breanne Deppisch
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The Texas Senate voted Monday to approve a new energy bill that would impose new permitting restrictions on renewable energy projects, a measure billed as increasing reliability but that threatens to deter investment and drive up consumers’ energy costs.
Senate Bill 624, which cleared the Texas Senate by a 21-9 vote, is an effort by Republicans to shift the state’s power generation away from renewable sources, such as wind and solar power, and back toward natural gas-fired generation, in the name of reliability.
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The bill would force renewable energy project developers in Texas to pay a new yearly fee for their operations, compared to fossil fuel projects, which would pay nothing.
Developers would also be forced to undergo a lengthy new permitting and environmental review process every time their projects change — another step that appears to be limited solely to wind and solar interests.
The bill also retroactively applies to renewable projects that are online, effectively forcing developers to shut their doors while they undergo a lengthy bureaucratic review process for the second time.
The bill also gives outsize responsibility to the Public Utility Commission of Texas to oversee new and existing renewable energy projects in Texas.
S.B. 624 would grant the utility commission the ability to enter project sites without warning and to remove clean energy capacity in Texas that has already been installed, should it deem it has “not met” the new regulatory standards.
Critics have blasted the bill as not only harmful to consumers, who are likely to pay higher energy costs as a result of these actions, but also to Texas’s economy. They say it would threaten Texas’s status as a renewable energy powerhouse and deter investment.
The bill now goes to the House. There are just three weeks before the Texas legislature concludes its session, and members also have to grapple with other major energy-focused bills the Senate punted to them just weeks earlier.
Last month, the Texas Senate advanced two bills, S.B. 6 and S.B. 7, aimed at funneling more money to natural gas and other “dispatchable” sources of energy generation — sources such as natural gas and other fossil fuels that can be brought online quickly in moments of need.
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Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and other proponents have said that adding more gas-fired generation to the grid is necessary to firm up supplies and ameliorate reliability concerns in the event of a shortfall. In Texas, this has been especially top of mind in the years since a major winter storm in 2021 caused 4.5 million Texans to lose power and resulted in 246 deaths.
S.B. 6 would use $10 billion in public funds to finance operations and repairs of existing fossil fuel plants in the state. Meanwhile, S.B. 7 would restructure the power markets by creating a financial incentive for dispatchable sources of energy.