Texas: wind bigger than coal

From CNN:

Wind power has surpassed coal for the first time in Texas, according to a new report.

The numbers cap an enormous rise in wind power in the nation's top energy-producing state over the past decades.

Wind has generated 22% of the state's electrical needs this year. It just edged out coal, which provided 21% of the Lone Star State's power, according to the Electrical Reliability Council of Texas, which manages electrical flow on about 90% of the Texan grid.

Sixteen years ago, in 2003, wind made up just 0.8% of the state's power, and coal satisfied 40% of electrical needs, the council documents show.

By 2010, wind accounted for 8% of the state's energy, and it steadily inched forward to 19% last year and now 22% in the first half of 2019.

At the same time, coal's portion of the energy mix has declined over the past several years, from 37% in 2013 to 24% last year and just 21% this year.

Yet while wind has soared and coal-generated power has cooled, natural gas still accounts for the largest share of the state's energy mix, generating 46% of its power in 2003 and staying strong at 44% last year.

Texas produces and consumes more electricity overall than any other state. Its power production doubled that of Florida, the next closest state, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

It follows that Texas also leads the nation in wind energy production and generated fully a quarter of all wind energy in the United States in 2017.  Nationally, wind is just 6.6% of American energy production

The trends are clear.   And now that Texas is also expanding utility-scale solar generation, the share of coal is going to rapidly decline to zero.  Gas is a far from perfect substitute for coal, because gas leaks can easily undo the benefit from lower carbon emissions compared to coal when gas is burnt.  But gas power stations can be more easily ramped up and down than coal can, so they fit in better into a predominantly green grid than coal does.  In time, they too will be replaced by a mix of renewables plus storage.  We continue to get proof that large industrial economies can reach high percentages of renewables in their grid without harm.