Why Is Texas Beating California on Wind and Solar?

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• 00:06

  If Democrats care more about the climate than Republicans,

• 00:08

  then why is Texas, not California, the leader in renewable energy?

• 00:13

  This is good on paper.

• 00:15

  A policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.

• 00:19

  I'm your host, Jerusalem Dempsis, and this is an episode about a topic I've reported on for years,

• 00:24

  why it's so hard to build clean energy infrastructure in Democratic run states.

• 00:29

  From talking with policymakers, issue groups, advocates and experts,

• 00:34

  I've become convinced that our clean energy transition is seriously at risk

• 00:38

  if we don't make it much easier to build renewable energy technology on both wind and solar.

• 00:44

  Texas is now beating California.

• 00:46

  Why is that?

• 00:48

  For a while, Texas had led on wind, but sunny California had lead on solar.

• 00:52

  That's no longer.

• 00:53

  Ercot, which is the grid operator for basically all of Texas,

• 00:57

  announced at the end of last year that it had installed enough solar to power nearly 3.7 million homes

• 01:04

  during times of peak electricity.

• 01:06

  That's about 18,000 megawatts of solar, roughly a thousand more than California.

• 01:12

  After the passage of the Inflation Reduction act two years ago,

• 01:14

  renewable energy production became much cheaper.

• 01:17

  Now, not only had we solved many of the technological barriers to a clean energy economy,

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