Regulations rule everything around me
The secret to greening the grid is to allow people to build green infrastructure
Over the last few years, councils all over the country have declared that there is a “climate emergency”1. As Cheshire West, Winchester, Blackpool and Hackney (naturally) wheel out the rhetorical big guns, ready to tackle the ‘existential threat’ of climate change, it seems that they will do everything necessary to reach net zero. It’s not just in the UK either: this is part of a global trend for governments to declare their commitment to taking stronger actions on reducing CO2 emissions.
However, if you really did expect that to lead to meaningful action, you might be disappointed. Recent findings from the campaign group Britain Remade show that despite their rhetoric, many of the very same councils block green energy projects. You might not be surprised that councils aren’t living up to their stated values, but surely they’re doing better than local governments that are actively hostile to action on climate change?
One local government that I think we can be confident won’t declare a climate emergency any time soon is Texas. The deep red state has a political leadership deeply opposed to taking action on climate change, with Governor Greg Abbott repeatedly suing the federal government over environmental regulation and explicitly denying that humans are causing climate change. Despite that, Texas’s record on building out the green energy needed to limit climate change would put most UK councils shame: it is behind only California for new solar generation, and is by far the top state for installed wind capacity, and is second (to California again) for battery capacity2. And the interconnection queue3 is pretty promising! As Joshua Rhodes says below, it won’t all get built, but nevertheless, Texas seems to be on a path to almost entirely green their grid despite the Governor of Texas not believing that burning fossil fuels causes climate change.
This might seem unexpected but it boils down to the fact that while Texas might not care that much about CO2 emissions, it does care about money.
One thing that has become apparent over the last few years is how incredibly cheap green energy has become over the preceding decades. In the 1990s and 2000s, solar and wind were incredibly expensive, and battery grid storage was barely even a thing. But as we’ve built more and more, firms have got better and better at doing it and can now churn out solar panels, wind turbines and batteries at prices that beat already existing fossil fuel plants, let alone new ones4. Nowadays the secret to beating climate change is the mass building of infrastructure, and that’s why Texas is doing so well: it lets people do just that. Ultimately that is going to have a much more beneficial effect on the climate than green parties and campaign groups that declare a climate emergency but then oppose solar farms.
The real lesson here is that - perhaps thanks in part to the actions of green groups - we have got to a point where getting the regulatory regime right is more important than any political or cultural interest in climate change. Clean energy tech wins on cost if you let people build it; if you don’t build it, we’re stuck with our existing fossil fuel infrastructure. If the UK wants a zero-carbon grid, there needs to be less pressure on local governments to declare a climate emergency5 and more pressure on them to permit the green infrastructure we need to decarbonise.
This article expands on a comment I made on this post by Hannah Ritchie, whose substack I highly recommend.
Full list here. Nobody seems to have declared one in 2023 or 2024, so either the website isn’t up to date or it’s not actually fashionable any more.
Texas is obviously a large state (both geographically and demographically), and not all states are equally blessed with renewable resources. Nevertheless, in a few years time it may well overtake California, which clearly has political leaders more concerned by climate change, and it is well ahead of states like New York.
The interconnection queue is the list of projects being evaluated for connection to the grid
The godfather of pointing this out is Ramez Naam, who I think is the person to blame for why every clean energy blog, podcast and youtube video talks about learning curves. He made these predictions well over a decade ago and the learning curves have been even better than he thought.
I discovered while writing this that lots of UK councils have declared a housing crisis or housing emergency too. I’ve read enough about housing supply in the UK to know that it’s not really necessary to check whether any of them have decided to address this by, you know, building lots of houses, but Texas is showing them all how to fix that too.