Link: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/05/solar-electricity-overtakes-coal-texas-ercot-energy-power-grid-resilience/

For the first time ever, solar is set to generate more electricity than coal in the power market managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. Nobody is building new coal power plants in the state, but developers are adding more solar there than anywhere else in the country. As a result of those diverging trajectories, the federal government expects ERCOT will receive 78 billion kilowatt-hours from solar in 2026, and just 60 from coal.

This trend does have seasonal variations. Last year, solar output beat coal on a monthly basis from March through August, and this year it is expected to do so from March through December, per the US Energy Information Administration at the Department of Energy.

Makes sense, lots of open land and lots of sun. Just don't tell MAGAs.

Oil has not been kind to Texas. Greed took control.

Business friendly energy hungry state with enormous plots of undeveloped real estate does the logical thing.

News At Eleven

Incidentally, NGL plants are being built out rapidly in Texas for a tangential reason. Unlike with coal, an NGL plant can turn itself off and on quickly and easily. Consequently, when the sun is shining, NGLs can turn off rather than selling electricity into a cheap market. And when it is night/overcast, they turn on to make up the difference

Given the major blackouts the state had recently, I'm not surprised.

Natural gas can also use efficient modern turbines. Coal plants are a nonstarter in the modern era because they run so dirty with impurities that you have to use shitty turbines that are down for maintenance cleaning all the time.

Natural gas turbines can bypass the need to boil water and drive steam turbines, because the actual combustion of the gas creates the rotational energy directly.

Steam turbines are pretty great, though. Not sure how the rest of a coal plant operates, but the turbines themselves shouldn't be touching any combustion byproduct.

Solar energy just needs to rebrand to space coal or solar oil to cut through the red tape

SkyFuel™

No one has ideology, morality or conscience, the millisecond renewables are cheaper, they will take over.

uhh...solar panels give me a headache!

Texas lines up with the Sahara desert. Cheap land. The economics are insane.

I believe they also recover the heat to boil water to run steam turbines. Double the turbines.

well said

that being said, china subsidized solar panel production heavily for 20 years until they became economically self-sustaining. so there was a large amount of ideology involved i'd say.

so this mostly applies to the buyers of solar panels.

space-based fusion technology

or maybe just something blunt like "fresh, renewable coal". it's family friendly and 100% jesus-conforming.

coincidence? i think not

The Radiance of God.

NGL is yet another TLA (three letter acronym)

tell us what it means at least once!

It's fusion energy, without the water boiling

economists were calling for the US to do that the whole time, too, for exactly the reason that eventually something becomes the cheaper way to do something and then everyone does it. every era of innovation has been kicked off by public investment into technology that hasn't a profit right now but someday will.

the government is supposed to take a 10-30 outlook on things and act accordingly because corporations never will. they only ever look 4 months into the future.

but then, if you've been alive long enough, you probably recognize that if the government can't, or doesn't, take that long term view then the government is useless at protecting you from business and that business is just fucking you over for blood money

Texas Gov actually tried to blame the winter blackouts on solar & wind rather than ngl power plants in the region not being properly winterized thus freezing up in their biggest time of need.

Natural Gas Liquids. I remember seeing Liquid Natural Gas quite a bit, but I guess we can just shuffle the letters around however we want.

Edit: If you want to know the difference (more details here)

What Is Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG)?

Liquefied Natural Gas is natural gas that has been cooled to approximately -162 degrees Celsius. At this temperature, methane—the primary component of natural gas—transforms into a liquid. The process reduces the volume of the gas by about 600 times, making it easier to store and transport over long distances.

What Are Natural Gas Liquids (NGLs)?

Natural Gas Liquids are a group of hydrocarbons found in natural gas and crude oil. They are extracted as part of natural gas processing or crude oil refining. NGLs include ethane, propane, butane, isobutane, and natural gasoline. Unlike LNG, which is predominantly methane, NGLs are heavier hydrocarbons with distinct chemical and physical properties.

Did you know that during the 18th and 19th century industrial revolution in Britain, coal never became cheaper than water power? All those new steam engines were used to make deeper mines more viable and to increase production. But water power remained cheaper throughout. But water power came with a downside. Available water power tended to be located in rural areas. The smaller population in these small towns consequently had a lot of labor bargaining power. Industrialists instead wanted access to the labor markets of the major cities, cities brimming over with new urban poor desperate for any scrap of work they could get. Cheaper labor overcame cheaper power. A coal plant could be put anywhere, while a water mill could only be positioned on high-flowing streams.

Renewables are cheaper, but we've been here before. There's more to this than just energy cost.

"Woke libtards are STEALING all the sunlight from Texas to power their satanic abortion machines!"

Jesus would have loved solar, I'm pretty sure.

The infra noise!

Happened recently in conservative Romania

Do you have any source for that? I find it difficult to believe that the only reason for using steam over water mills was the dastardly exploitation by capitalists.

Electricity doesn't fertilize crops or generate plastics or chemical feedstocks or fly you across the Atlantic in six hours.

Having free renewable electricity in a world of 8+ billion people and dwindling fossil fuels is like running your fridge for free, but it's empty.

Uh...electricity makes fertilizers, runs water pumps for sprinklers and refines all the fuel.

Water mills only produced a set amount of power that could be increased orders of magnitude by coal and steam.

Or the trillion dollars sitting in France that might work in 30 years.

Sorry. Natural Gas Liquids. Some combination of methane, ethane, isobutane, and propane, which are compressed/chilled to a liquid state for transportation and used to power electric generators.

That one probably isn’t really ideology so much as strategic necessity. To my understanding, China is a major energy importer, with a dependence on fossil fuels coming in via the South China Sea. They’re in an exceptionally vulnerable position because a blockade wouldn’t be particularly difficult to implement there (at least, if their opponent is the US), so any degree of energy independence they can give themselves is imperative.

"I am the way, the truth, and the LIGHT"

Every photovoltaic cell is actually doing the job of a priest blessing communion. By the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, all that copper wire is actually transubstantiated into the Body and Blood of Christ.

This is the WAY. And that's God's Honest Truth, yep 👍

Meanwhile, coal plants go Wirrrrrr!

They can't stop it, it's hilarious. Good news.

They've also maintained a hundred-year plan since at least the 90s.

At any given moment, their strategic policy is looking so far ahead that everyone in the government will be dead and their grandkids will be old by the time it comes to term.

US politics can't seem to past the four-year election cycle. Biden tried with the Green New Deal, Build Back Better, and CHIPS, but you see where those landed. Severely diminished bills that narrowly passed and were among the first things on the chopping block when his successor entered office.

And yet people call it a grift because it would have taken at least 8-10 years to see the results even if it hadn't been dismantled.

The amount of systemic change that needs to happen in the political and economic landscape realistically cannot happen in under four years from start to finish. It will require long-term investments in infrastructure projects that take years to build, which means at some point voters are gonna have to be patient and stop flipping sides whenever conditions don't materially improve overnight.

In other words, we're fucked...

As someone who has never been to Texas, I associate Texas with unrelenting sun and vast tracts of uninhabitable land with little or no environmental value (ok that bit is hyperbole, I know deserts are in fact a delicate ecosystem but you get the idea).

Or in other words, perfect solar panel real estate.

So what's stopping them taking advantage of all the almost free energy!

So what’s stopping them taking advantage of all the almost free energy!

It's woke.

Renewables are already cheaper*, wind and solar.

*depending on where you are in the world.

ehh, the actual technology where liquid oil / fuels are required are like 3% of all total energy consumption. the rest 97% can be electrified, and actually, using electricity is in many cases even simpler than using coal. for example in steel production. it's easier to do with electricity than coal because coal contains sulfur and that introduces impurities into your chemical process. meanwhile electrolysis is simple and clean.

yeah, IIRC, in 2000, renewable oil from rape seed was still cheaper than fossil oil. however renewable oil was banned politically sothat there's no food vs fuel debate tearing society apart. the question really is more complicated than simply the cost.

that being said, solar panels can be put anywhere, including near big cities, and transporting electricity over distances has also gotten easier in the last 200 years, so that's not an argument for coal anymore.

The amount of systemic change that needs to happen in the political and economic landscape realistically cannot happen in under four years from start to finish. It will require long-term investments in infrastructure projects that take years to build, which means at some point voters are gonna have to be patient and stop flipping sides whenever conditions don’t materially improve overnight.

In other words, we’re fucked…

yeah the US really needs to learn (possibly the hard way) that there needs to be a political plan for the industry. in the 20th century apparently it could do fine without that, but that just doesn't work anymore. you can't have efficient industry without a long-term plan.

the millisecond renewables are cheaper

Not true. Trump is actively sabotaging wind as we speak. Trump is doing vice signaling, not economics.

From https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/why-the-trump-administration-is-paying-nearly-a-billion-dollars-to-abandon-wind-farms :

Lawmakers from both parties are raising concerns about the Trump administration's spending decisions. In the latest example, the administration said it will pay nearly $1 billion to energy companies to abandon plans to build two wind farms off the U.S. coast. Liz Landers joins Amna Nawaz to discuss.

uninhabitable land with little or no environmental value

As I understand it, the partial shade created by solar panels will often be a plus for the ecology of the land below solar panels. Especially in a sun scorched place like Texas.

They can’t stop it, it’s hilarious.

It is utterly sad that they want to stop it, to burn more coal.

Yup, I agree wholeheartedly. Major industries, especially ones that provide basic necessities and utilities (and I'm including web access in that, because let's be honest), should all be considered public services anyway and should be provided for with tax dollars and centralized planning accountable to the constituencies.

i'll include:

• water, food and healthcare
• housing
• transport
• energy
• and IT and education

all at the communal level, responsible to the citizens

Hail.

Now MAGAs will blame the cold winters on renewables because solar panels stole all the sunlight and warmth.

Please don't give the idiots something new to complain about.