Matt Welch, Texas state director of Conservative Texans for Energy Innovation, penned an editorial in Friday’s San Antonio Express-News on the Texas outages. Welch cuts through the partisan finger-pointing about what caused the blackouts and gets to the heart of the matter:
“What we need is a mix of not only fossil fuels, nuclear and hydropower to provide baseload energy, but renewables like wind and solar to capitalize on low fuel costs and provide more geographic distribution. The grid of the future, however, demands more. We will also need to focus on technology like carbon capture and sequestration, energy storage in all forms, next generation demand-side management systems and responsible energy-efficiency programs.
“Meeting future energy demands will call for emerging generation technologies such as hydrogen, next-generation small modular nuclear reactors, community solar and aggregated distributed responsive resources to be developed and brought online. Pair that with electricity market reforms that better align utility incentives with public well-being, and call on the power of free markets to provide competition and value reliability, and act on real-time data, increase customer choice and lower costs across the board.
“No one type of technology will fix this, but creating smart markets with clear incentives to keep the lights on is the best method to power Texas during the harshest of conditions.”
Check out the full piece in the San Antonio Express-News. And check out the good work of CTEI here.