TXSES on Turning 50: Recent Wins & Moving Forward
By Patrice “Pete” Parsons, TXSES Executive Director I hope you all have had a great summer. Although this summer has not been quite as hot as the last few, it’s still plenty darn hot and we have still been seeing a sharp pull on the Texas grid because of it. Despite the power drain caused […]
Solar Plus Batteries Save the Texas Grid. Again.
By Dr. Ariane Beck, TXSES Board Chair & Research Fellow in Energy Systems Transformation at University of Texas at Austin This summer, warnings of a potential grid outage have been noticeably absent. There has been no fretting or hand wringing. When a significant amount coal capacity unexpectedly went offline, solar, wind and storage stepped up […]
The ‘big, beautiful bill’ undercut rural energy projects. Texas must step up. (Op-Ed)
Rural communities didn’t get into renewables for politics. They did it because it worked. They need stability, not sudden rollbacks. By Raina Tillman Hornaday, TXSES Board MemberAustin American-Statesman Guest ColumnistAug 8, 2025Read it in the Austin American-Statesman. The recently passed “big, beautiful bill” was marketed as a cost-cutting win. While that may be true for some […]
Sine Die Approaches: A Mixed Bag for Solar
By Pete Parsons, TXSES Executive Director. Sine die is fast approaching, marking the close of the 89th Texas Legislative Session on June 2nd, and as far as I am concerned, it can’t come soon enough. I recently heard a statistic that I found gob smacking: Texas’s predicted peak power demand of nearly 218 gigawatts by […]
Solar: Keeping the Power On. What’s Next?
By Patrice “Pete” Parsons, TXSES Executive Director As we near the end of the hottest October in Texas’s recorded history (since the 1890s), with new daily highs set across the state, and at least for us in Austin, the latest calendar date to ever hit 100 degrees—44 days later than the average date of Aug. […]
New Value of Solar Study: Rooftop Solar Cuts Costs for the Texas Grid
TXSES commissioned a new study quantifying grid-stabilizing value and cost savings of rooftop solar For Immediate Release: July 16, 2024Contact: José Medina, jmedina@citizen.org AUSTIN, Texas—Energy supplied by rooftop solar is much more valuable than the average kilowatt-hour sent to the ERCOT grid by other means, finds a new study commissioned by the Texas Solar Energy […]
Texas’ Transmission Troubles and CREZ II
Transmission towers and lines at sunset in East Texas (Credit: Matthew T Rader, MatthewTRader.com, License CC-BY-SA) By Ethan Miller Back in October, I wrote an article arguing that many of last summer’s electric reliability scares and energy price increases were not the fault of renewables (as ERCOT had claimed), but the fault of insufficient transmission […]
A Matter of Supply vs. Demand
by Patrice ‘Pete’ Parsons, TXSES Executive Director You’ve probably seen the headlines this past week from ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas), including: It all comes down to a very simply concept — Supply and Demand. When considering the problems ERCOT is having in trying to meet the growing demand for energy, it is time […]
Understanding the Cost of Grid Interruptions in Texas
By Ethan Miller and Mohammed Alkhabtib In our ongoing commitment to strengthen Texas’s energy infrastructure, the Texas Solar Energy Society is proud to update our members on a crucial initiative. Spearheaded by our research team, we have embarked on a project to estimate the economic impact of grid service interruptions across the state due to […]
Solar Doing Its Job Despite Shakiness With Six Electric Generation Plants Going Offline
Did you know that Texas produces more power than any other state?