Clifford Krauss, writing in yesterday’s Times, points out in

With Coal Plans Cut Back, Texas Faces Energy Gap[Link to article here ] that the recent TXU deal – in which the energy firm made a commitment to withdraw applications for several coal-fired plants, doesn’t necessarily address Texas’ projected consumption.

Environmentalists and some state officials see an opening for renewable energy in a state that is already the national pacesetter in wind energy production. About 4 percent of the state’s power is now produced by wind and other renewable sources, and state officials say they expect a quadrupling of wind power generation in the next 20 years.

Wind has the potential to help fill the shortfall, said Jerry Patterson, the Texas land commissioner, whose responsibilities include leasing state lands for wind energy development. Every day that passes, renewables make more economic sense.

Texas now produces 2,800 megawatts of energy a year from wind, enough to serve 500,000 homes. Mr. Patterson said an additional 2,000 megawatts would come online by 2009. Most of the production now occurs in the blustery Panhandle, but two offshore farms are in the planning stages and should be online by the beginning of the next decade.

Still, few experts think enough renewable power can be developed quickly enough, given the lack of transmission capacity and high costs. Natural gas, which provides nearly half the state’s electricity, is set for another surge because gas plants can generally be built faster than nuclear or coal facilities.

That Texas currently gets 4% of its electricity from renewables is striking; Popular Logistics

is trying to find out if that’s solely the result of energy “market” forces – it’s hard to think of our current energy situation as a real market, complete with vigorous competition and invisible hands- or if Texas has been subsidizing renewables all along.

However, perhaps Texas should take heed of the Naval Postgraduate Center’s recommendation for making the power grid in Iraq more robust: widespread decentralized use of solar power. The current administration, ever keen to take advice from military professionals, hasn’t publicly commented on the Navy’s proposal to put a PV panel on every Iraqi roof. A copy of the report is available from The Project on Government Secrecy

at the Federation of American Scientists.

Krauss’s skeptical experts are probably correct, if one assumes little or no subsidy for renewables, and a focus on large-scale “farms.” But the Navy “Solar Eagle” proposal is for a decentralized system (a chicken in every pot, a PV panel on every roof), principally because decentralization and redundant connections are what make networks robust and resistant to attack – and reduce the need for transmission capacity, as more power is generated at or near the site of production. (One of the reasons, we’re told, that the Internet was designed the way it was. Just ask Mr. Gore).