Within a few years, there will be days when 100 percent of Texas’ electricity is coming...
The strategy is to use your cheapest energy, wind and solar, when available because the cost of producing an additional unit of energy is zero. When not enough free energy is available, then use your more expensive dispatchable energy sources.Peer-reviewed research has shown this approach is capable of producing reliable, low-cost energy that avoids the impacts of climate change, air pollution and economically price swings.
Sadly, some policymakers are trying to push us backward. Using the high prices of gasoline as an excuse, they are calling on us to double down on fossil fuels. This is a terrible idea, akin to your heroin dealer telling you the solution to your heroin problem is more heroin. While efforts to increase short-term production in some situations may make sense, building new infrastructure like pipelines can lock us into a noncompetitive energy source for decades. Even if we succeed at raising production and lowering the price of gasoline, fossil fuels will never again be our cheapest energy source and we will remain vulnerable to all the other problems they bring, like climate change and air pollution.
Instead of looking backward, the time is now to embark on the pathway to eliminating fossil fuels. Once we get there, we’ll realize that it’s a better world. Andrew Dessler is a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University and the Reta A. Haynes Chair in Geosciences. Follow him on Twitter at @AndrewDessler.
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