I ran across this article by accident, it just came out yesterday. I had no idea about CREZ's and such. I did know that somebody out west was planting one heckuva bunch of wind turbines, because there have been a steady stream of wind turbine propeller blades moving down the I-10 past Seguin for the last several years. They aren't hard to miss, they are about 150' long and are hauled on special rigs. I don't live on the I-10, but I drive on it a lot, and every time I drove to San Antonio I would see several of these prop blades heading west. It seems to have tapered off now.
On of the things I only had a vague notion about was that (most of) Texas has its own electric grid, controlled by Texas. This appears to be a wise thing. The rest of the country is tied to one of two big "Interconnections" which I'm sure are wildy unwieldy to coordinate, especially with certain state governments involved.
This document: The Competitive Renewable Energy Zone Process
provides some maps that I found illuminating. I don't understand all the electrical details, but it shows the three big "Interconnections" and where things in Texas are located.
I am not fond of government subsidies for industrial projects -- the current administration has used "Green Energy" as a way to enrich it's friends while fleecing the country without providing anything of value -- but in the particular project Texas seems to have executed rather well. The article notes:
(==> note that California didn't really "de-regulate" their electricity market, they still had plenty of government rules in place to "protect people from the market" that perturbated the whole mess.)One reason all this is happening is that Texas deregulated its electricity market in 2002, forcing power generators, transmission providers, and electricity retailers to separate. Unlike deregulation in California, which led to a near-collapse of the grid and a series of major blackouts in 2000 and 2001, the policy in Texas has mostly worked as planned, thanks to efficient grid operations and the abundance of transmission lines in the CREZ network. “There’s no regulatory agency, no permitting, no wind laws,” says Rod Wetsel, an attorney in Sweetwater who specializes in wind leases and who cowrote Wind Law, the definitive text on the legalities of wind power. “It’s like prospecting: you can basically go stake your claim and build your project.”
It appears that the multiple projects for constructing transmission lines, while not without problems, were largely completed on time and on budget, which is pretty amazing for something that started as a Senate Bill in the (Texas) Legislature and was overseen by a government agency. A Texas government agency, in this case. I guess that's why I didn't hear about it.
