The Houston Chronicle discusses the challenges and defenses surrounding the Texas Energy Fund, a $5 billion initiative aimed at bolstering the state's power grid through the construction of new natural gas power plants. Texas Advanced Energy Business Alliance's Executive Director Matthew Boms urged lawmakers to embrace battery storage, solar, and wind resources as the fastest and most affordable way to meet new load growth.
Texas utility regulators are defending the state’s $5 billion fund for new natural gas power plants after numerous projects have dropped out of the taxpayer-backed loan program.
Companies that have withdrawn projects from the Texas Energy Fund have cited a variety of market challenges, such as supply chain delays and permitting uncertainty, that even access to state subsidies can’t help them overcome. Others have more directly blamed the program's requirements, saying the rules make their projects not worth pursuing.
But staff with the Public Utility Commission of Texas framed the dropouts differently, pointing to the withdrawn and denied projects as a sign that the state agency in charge of the fund is fulfilling its duty to safeguard taxpayer dollars.
Tracie Tolle, the PUC’s Texas Energy Fund director, said at the agency’s Thursday meeting that several applicants have withdrawn from the program “because some of our requirements to protect these taxpayer dollars are really stringent.”
Other companies have been denied funding because PUC staff found issues with those applications and didn’t believe loan agreements could be reached in time to satisfy the program’s deadlines, Tolle said.
Commissioner Kathleen Jackson was more blunt.
“These are taxpayer dollars, this is our program, and we set the rules,” Jackson said at the meeting. “At the end of the day, you have to have the ability to repay, and you have to have the ability to execute.”
Commissioners also advanced four more projects, two from Invenergy and two from Nightpeak Energy LLC, to the agency’s due diligence review process to backfill the applications that have left the program.
Including the four additions, the 18 projects under review total 9,218 megawatts of new electricity generation. That’s just short of the Texas Energy Fund’s goal to incentivize 10,000 megawatts of capacity, enough to power up to 2.5 million homes during peak demand times.
Matthew Boms, executive director of the Texas Advanced Energy Business Alliance, a clean energy trade group, said lawmakers should stop discriminating against battery storage and renewable energy. Instead, he called on legislators to embrace battery storage, solar and wind resources as the quickest, cheapest way to add new electricity supply in the near-term.
“They seem to be aiming for that three-pointer that's way harder to achieve, instead of going for the lay-ups and getting the cheapest megawatts available,” he said in an interview.
Read the full article here.