Turning coal mines into solar farms sounds so smart, it’s
almost hard to believe that it’s happening in the United States under President
Trump. But late last month, construction began in Texas on a 1.2 gigawatt
solar farm that will be one of the largest clean energy projects
in the country and the biggest
solar project built on a brownfield site in North America. It
will start producing power a year from now, and will also include 1.6. gigawatt-hours
of battery storage.
This $1.7 billion project is groundbreaking, as is
another one forthcoming in the same state: The world’s largest carbon
removal plant will
open at the end of the year.
There are caveats in both cases. The surface coal mine and
adjacent coal-fired power plant in Bremond, which sits between Dallas and
Houston, will continue operating alongside the new solar farm. And many
environmental experts are skeptical of carbon removal as a realistic solution
to the climate crisis.
But there’s no doubting this much: Texas is a national leader
in renewable energy, and has been so for decades. It’s first in wind power—by a long shot—and second in solar power generation, behind only
California. It generates enough power from solar to power the equivalent
of half the homes in the state.
In its enthusiasm for wind power, Texas, which Trump won
even more convincingly in 2024 than he did in 2016 and 2020, couldn’t be more
at odds with the president. He has had a weird vendetta against wind power ever since the early
2010s, when a wind farm was built near one of his golf courses in Scotland—ruining
the view, in his opinion. He claims that all renewable energy is part of the
Democrats’ “Green New Scam,” and he’s wildly
exaggerated
the impact of wind turbines on whales and birds.
Now, in his second term, Trump has ramped up his war on
wind power. His Defense Department invented
completely bogus national security concerns to justify delaying more
than 150 onshore wind farms (a federal judge last week ordered
the administration to lift the freeze). The administration, with appalling
disregard for our futures and our tax dollars, is also paying companies billions
of dollars to abandon wind farm projects, which
if built would have, according to a Senate investigation, powered millions of homes and
created tens of thousands of jobs (not to mention averted huge
quantities of carbon emissions).
Texas is not following suit. It may be Trump country,
but it’s also Green Energy country—a paradox that has a fascinating history.
Texas, being an extremely sunny and windy place, has an
ideal natural landscape for renewables. Midland is famous for oil wealth, but
in the early twentieth century it was known as “Windmill City,” as
nearly every house had a windmill in its yard. But natural resources alone don’t
explain everything. People must make decisions and lead, and at the end of the twentieth
century one of those people was a Midland native, Republican governor, and
future president.
Like his father, George W. Bush was a market-based
environmentalist. He didn’t support renewable energy out of concerns over air
pollution or global warming, but because he saw how much money
there was to be made in the industry. “I didn’t use climate change to get the
state of Texas to go forward,” Michael Osborne, who co-founded the Texas
Renewable Energy Industries Association, told
the Houston Chronicle last year. “I used the green that Republicans
relate to.”
Bush signed a bipartisan bill that broke
up the local electricity monopolies and mandated that the state install
more renewable energy. Under his successor, the far more conservative Rick
Perry, the wind boom really took off. In
2005, Republican legislators set 20-year goals for renewable energy—and blew
past them by 2010. Since then, wind energy in Texas has more than quadrupled.
In the Trump era, some Republicans in the state
legislature have tried to mess with Texas’s green energy sector. Last year,
they attempted to limit the development of renewable projects, but failed. This year, they proposed
a quota to protect fossil fuels, as the renewables
share of the state’s future electricity generation reaches 70
percent. But in Texas, 60
percent of Republican voters support renewables,
and not even the oil and gas industry opposes them; after all, that industry
uses renewables to power its own operations—to
save money.
This is not to say that Texas is a climate policy
paradise. It simply is following the Bush template: monetizing all the state’s
abundant natural resources. Texas isn’t forcing the phase-out of coal or
other fossil fuels, instead pursuing an “all of the above” energy policy, and they’ve
been welcoming to data centers. But this approach has strengthened the argument
that all new forms of energy are welcome, with the result that renewables don’t
have serious opposition, even in a state that normally loves
a culture war.
No serious opposition, that is, except from the Trump
administration, which has delayed
54 wind projects in Texas as part of its national
freeze. The president’s war on wind has
been criticized by conservative Texans, who see his moves as interfering in the
free market—and with their values and economic interests. Former GOP state Representative
John Davis, a Trump voter who has seven wind turbines on his ranch, told
the Chronicle that wind energy was a “conservative idea” and that he
was frustrated with Republicans who have abandoned it: “Their own voters are
rural Texans, and it’s hurting their own voting base.”
Renewable energy makes practical sense in rural places all over the
country, where people are struggling with high energy bills yet have abundant
access to sun and wind. If Republicans nationally continue to back Trump’s
weird vendetta against wind it could hurt them in Texas but also in other conservative
rural states. After all, the state that produces the second-most wind energy is
Iowa, a famously important state in the presidential election calendar. And
solar farms and battery storage on coal mines are not even unique to Texas, as similar
projects are underway
in Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and Louisiana.
Trump will never come around on wind. His mind is made up. But even
red states whose Republican leaders have gone full MAGA can see the economic
upside to renewables, and the profit motive is steadily proving more powerful
than a dumb culture war. The voters, politicians, and businesspeople of Texas have
understood this for many years, and it’s only a matter of time before their
ideological brethren across the South and Midwest follow suit.
