On Tuesday of this week, Texas Monthly staff writer Dan Solomon was boasting about the state's apparent slam-dunk investment in solar energy generation:
...If your air conditioner has been steadily running all summer long, you can thank the mighty power of the sun.
"We've got twice the solar we had last summer, and something like three times what we had eighteen months ago," energy consultant Doug Lewin told me on Monday. "We actually set another solar record today, and we set one yesterday. Renewables throughout most of May and June, as we've been experiencing extreme heat, really were the difference between [having] a whole lot of conservation calls and potential rolling outages and not having them."
By Wednesday, the state's Electricity Reliability Council was painting a slightly different picture:
The Texas power grid's operator has asked consumers to use less energy as clouds threaten access to essential solar power. ...
Unlike Monday's appeal, ERCOT included forced thermal outages and solar as major factors in reducing grid supply on Wednesday.
According to a spokesperson for ERCOT, developing cloud cover in West Texas has reduced the amount of solar generation.
Yikes.
Okay, okay, we jest—sort of, anyway. Solar is still a relatively new technology to be deploying at scale, and there are bound to be hiccups like this in its execution. No shame there.
Still, this sort of sobering setback should underscore just how important an all-of-the-above energy policy really is. Yes, solar and wind will presumably be critical energy sources in the decades and centuries ahead of us, particularly when fossil fuels run out, as they inevitably will do at some point.
But right now they are still vastly less efficient at meeting demand than fossil fuel. We need all of it—fossils, wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, bio-diesel, hamsters on spinning wheels, whatever—to ensure that when one part of the grid fails or falters, we won't lose critical lifesaving electricity.
Solar's good. So is everything else.
P.S. Now check out our latest video 👇
