Anti-renewables bill adds more risk for Texas grid, ERCOT boss says
GOP-led measure that passed the Senate this week could put needed solar and wind power at risk.
By Sara DiNatale, Staff writer
May 9, 2025
Republican-led legislation that barreled through the state Senate has the solar and wind industries tied in knots — and the Texas grid boss can see why.
During a discussion with reporters this week, Electric Reliability Council of Texas CEO Pablo Vegas said bills that call for costly back-up power requirements on renewables could push them out of the market and slow new development.
“It could cause certain resources not to be able to operate,” Vegas said. “That’s a risk.”
Senate Bill 715, which was approved Thursday by the Senate, could put a massive strain on wind and solar farms at a time the grid is facing an unprecedented demand spike, largely from data centers and AI computing firms flocking to Texas.
The legislation is the latest layer resulting from fundamental discrepancies between GOP lawmakers and energy experts over the role of renewables in Texas. Under the proposed law, solar and wind farms would have to pay gas-fired power plants or battery systems to “firm” up their power supply when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing.
Recent power outages in Spain and Portugal added fuel to the already-heated discussion, with the bills’ supporters calling Europe’s failings with a renewable-heavy grid a warning shot for Texas.
“They’re currently 70% reliant on wind and solar,” Midland Republican Sen. Kevin Sparks said on the Senate floor ahead of Thursday’s vote. “The whole world is really waking up to the fact that they’ve got to figure out how to get new dispatchable power.”
“Dispatchable” is a term for sources of electricity that can be turned on and off at any time. In Texas, that typically means natural gas plants.
Senators passed the bill 17-14.
Opposed by industry
Sparks, president of a family owned oil and gas company, is SB715’s author. He admitted to senators Thursday that both the Texas Oil & Gas Association and the Texas Association of Manufacturers oppose the legislation. Every major wind and solar industry group has made its opposition clear, too.
An amendment added in the Senate would exempt solar and wind farms from having to comply with the back-up power requirements if they have current power purchase contracts with utilities or businesses. But once those agreements end, the renewable companies would have to secure the back-up to keep operating.
For those rallying against the bill, the change wasn’t enough to make it workable.
“My concern is that your bill is going to wreak havoc on the state’s economy and every major business,” San Antonio Democrat Sen. José Menéndez told Sparks. “It would have what we call unintended consequences, and those unintended consequences would mean less ability to connect large demand, whether it be a data center or manufacturer, and it would mean higher costs for our constituents.”
The sponsor of companion bill HB3356, Rep. Jared Patterson, said last week that “renewables are not a source of generation to power a modern economy.”
Vegas, though, has consistently said the grid needs a mix of resources to to ensure stability. That means nuclear and natural gas plants along with solar, wind and batteries.
Unhelpful, ERCOT says
“Characterizing renewables as a problem, I don’t think is helpful to the conversation. I don’t think it’s accurate,” Vegas told reporters Tuesday at an ERCOT conference in Round Rock. “What we really need is a portfolio that can actually deliver on the resource requirements ahead of us.”
The grid boss has been sounding an alarm over what he’s called an “unbalanced grid” for at least the past two years. New natural gas development has lagged while Texas’ current fleet ages toward shutdown. As of June, ERCOT reported that 41% of the state’s natural gas-powered plants and remaining coal plants were more than 30 years old.
RELATED: More close calls ahead unless Texas changes approach to electricity supply, ERCOT boss says
But supply chain backups are keeping the industry from building new natural gas projects as fast as Texas — and the rest of the country — could use them amid the data center explosion. Key plant parts are up to five years away from being available for new construction. Most nuclear developments will take even longer to deploy.
As traditional dispatchables lag, solar and wind generation supported by battery storage systems increasingly supported the grid. On a typical afternoon, Texas’ sunny skies now are meeting more than 40% of the state’s power use. When the sun goes down, natural gas-powered plants become the workhorse with help from battery storage.
But that doesn’t mean solar, or any resource, falls into a bucket of “good” or “bad,” Vegas said. It does mean the grid has to plan for its known characteristics — like the fact solar is not available at night.
While lawmakers behind the bills are aiming to assist with stalled natural gas development — which ERCOT supports — it needs to be done in a way that doesn’t put the grid’s ability to meet demand at risk.
Texas energy policy must be additive, Vegas said, and not restrictive to other resources.
ERCOT ‘is not Spain’
More than a week after it happened, Spain’s blackout is still top of mind for energy planners and lawmakers. Republicans are using it as a cautionary tale to support the proposed back-up power regulations.
In that case, sweeping outages left 55 million people without power for nearly a full day. Energy officials in Spain still don’t know what happened — but they do know that a sudden frequency drop in the Iberian Peninsula caused a total blackout.
“It’s got nothing to do with renewables,” said Aaron Zubaty, CEO of battery storage company Eolian. “It’s actually a total fail in their market design.”
“Texas,” he added, “is not Spain.”
Danny Lynch gives a tour of the Blue Jay solar and storage plant in Iola in 2023. Such sites would face new restrictions under a measure that passed the state Senate this week. The state grid operator says it would add new risk for reliability.
Jon Shapley/Houston Chronicle file photo
In 2024, Texas had about 25,000 megawatts of solar power. This summer, it’ll be up to 32,000 megawatts and the state now has more than 10,000 megawatts of battery storage.
Spain has just 60 megawatts of battery storage and the grid there doesn’t have the kind of emergency back-up power programs ERCOT uses in the event of a sudden drop in frequency. The frequency at which current travels is key in power grids, because it reflects the balance between the supply and demand of electricity.
READ MORE: September grid emergency 'uncovers some deficits' in how ERCOT manages power, renewable energy
Zubaty’s company, though based in California, is one of Texas’ leading battery operators. He points out that ERCOT’s last grid emergency in September 2023 had similarities to Spain’s blackouts. That sweltering evening, an overcrowded San Antonio circuit led to a big frequency drop that put the Texas grid in its first emergency conditions since blackouts during Winter Storm Uri in February 2021.
But Texans never lost power. Most had no idea the grid was in trouble.
“ERCOT, at that moment in time, cut the transmission line,” Zubaty said. “They basically reduced flow south to north, and it induced this frequency collapse, which almost led to a bigger mess.”
But battery storage systems quickly kicked onto the grid and kept that frequency level steady enough to avoid cascading outages through a program designed to act fast in case of such drops.
Spain doesn’t have the market mechanism or the amount of storage to manage the same kind of response, Zubaty said. Vegas echoed those key differences between ERCOT and Spain.
“Batteries are a resource that do provide instant response flexibility, both up and down, being able to absorb voltage and energy when they need to,” he said.
France, which has an interconnected grid, didn’t want the frequency drop from Iberia to spread and trip up its nuclear plants, Zubaty said. That’s why grid operators isolated Spain. So, while all of Spain’s plants tripped off line as a result, that action kept outages from spreading further across Europe.
If Spain had more battery storage and the market structure to quickly turn to batteries in case of emergency, they’d be protected from frequency drops, Zubaty said.
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