Austin News

Texas Railroad Commissioner Wayne Christian said the facts must overrule both emotions and politics when discussing energy issues in Texas.

Christian said it became apparent in February, as Winter Storm Uri left 4 million Texans shivering in the dark, that an overreliance on wind and solar left the state vulnerable to disaster. As Uri hammered the state, electricity generated from wind and solar decreased 52% while the electricity from natural gas increased 72%.

That is not the reliable energy that people need to depend on, he said. 

“While many celebrate the seemingly impressive 30 gigawatt 'capacity' of Texas’ wind turbines and solar panels, that capacity has always been an illusion,” Christian told Austin News. “In the leadup to the storm, before any wind turbines froze, solar and wind generation fell from meeting over 50% to under 5% of demand — solely due to their inherent unreliability.”

The commissioner has held this opinion before the storm hit.

“My first public statement in the context of Winter Storm Uri happened on the Tuesday or Wednesday during the storm, but I have been vocal against renewable subsidies for years because of the cost to the taxpayer and impact on the market,” he said.

Robert Michaels, a retired Cal State University, Fullerton economics professor, said wind and solar must have such subsidies to survive. “Because it’s impossible to have reliability unless you’ve got things backed up and made reliable,” he previously told Lone Star Standard. 

Michaels said regular infusions of “capital expenditures and operating expenditures” are required to keep wind and solar power operating, a reality that renewable fuel supporters tend to overlook.

“They are omitted from most of the comparisons that involve wind power,” he said. “Wind power’s inability to increase production at times of high power demand means that the most inefficient [and often most polluting] fossil fuel generators must operate to maintain reliability and cannot be replaced by wind units,” he said. “Even if wind turbines are widely dispersed around a region, the operator cannot expect with near-certainty that high wind power output in one sub-region will make up for low wind power output elsewhere.”

Longtime energy analyst Bill Peacock of Austin said it’s unrealistic to rely on wind when the air is still or turbines are frozen, or on solar when the sun isn’t shining.

“We could have a reliable natural gas backup in place, but we don't. All three of those are related to the renewable energy policies in Texas and in the United States,” Peacock previously told Lone Star Standard. “We need to stop renewable energy subsidies, eliminate excessive regulation by the Texas Public Utility Commission and let the market work. Then we will have a system that we can rely upon.”

He said tax abatements and tax subsidies have propped up wind and solar power for years while passing hidden costs on to property taxpayers. If the government support dried up, solar and wind would struggle to get moving like a windmill on a calm day.

Christian wrote an op-ed on the subject that was published by The Wall Street Journal on March 19.

“Regardless of your thoughts on climate change, last month’s storm made painfully clear that climate catastrophists have an oversize influence on public policy,” he wrote. “An obsessive focus on reaching the unattainable goal of zero carbon emissions led to decades of poor decisions that prioritized and subsidized unreliable energy sources [wind and solar] at the expense of reliable ones [natural gas, coal and nuclear]. Texans now know that reliable energy is essential to our everyday lives.

“The catastrophists’ oversize influence has produced a dangerous hypocrisy,” Christian wrote. “Greens say that wind and solar can replace natural gas and coal to meet our energy needs while reducing carbon emissions. But when ‘renewables’ fail, greens claim they aren’t to blame.”

The issue isn't the existence of renewable energy, but that it has displaced reliable generation because they have been prioritized and subsidized by our tax dollars, he told Austin News.

“At the federal level, we have spent billions through the production tax credit, and at the state level we have spent billions building out the transmission lines and providing 313 tax incentives,” Christian said. “According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Texas’ planned additions as of December 2020 include 11.6 gigawatts of solar, 8.4 of wind, 5 of gas, and no new nuclear or coal. These plans should change to prioritize reliability.”

He also wants to see more consistency on the arguments presented by renewable fuels advocates.

“It is hypocritical for green advocates to state out of one side of their mouth that we must stop using coal and natural gas to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2035, and out of the other blame fossil fuels for the Uri blackouts because ‘wind power was expected to make up only a fraction of what the state had planned for during the winter,’” he said, quoting a Texas Tribune story.

Which position are they going to take, he asks.

“If increased emissions is the fear, why is there such opposition to reliable nuclear power with a zero carbon footprint?” Christian said.

The commissioner, who lives in Center, has had a diverse career, starting as a musician with The Singing Christians and his country/gospel group Mercy River Boys before working in banking, real estate and other business ventures. Turning to politics, he served as president of the Texas Conservative Coalition and was elected to the Texas House of Representatives in 1996, representing the Ninth District in East Texas, where he helped forge a Republican majority in the House. 

Christian, 70, was elected to the Texas Railroad Commission in 2016.