 Thank you all very much for coming. As you know, the occasion for us gathering is Kate Galbraith, one of the authors of The Great Texas Windrush. This book is going to talk a bit about wind energy and Texas and wind energy in Texas. This event has been organized by Future Tense, which is a collaboration between the New America Foundation, where we all are now Slate Magazine and Arizona State University. The book is a fantastic and enjoyable read. I really liked it. Kate wrote it together with Asher Price. They're both reporters in Texas for competing publications, but teamed up to write this book. And Kate's going to speak briefly, and then she and I will have a brief conversation and then open it up to questions from you, the audience. And then afterwards, we have copies of the book for sale next door, and Kate can stick around and autograph your copy, write a haiku of dedication, if you're a very nice tour, et cetera, et cetera. Anyway, without further ado, I'll let Kate come up and talk to us a bit about what's in the book. I should add that I am Constantine Cacaius. I'm a fellow here at the New America Foundation. And it's very fun to do this with Constantine, because he and I worked together, what, ten years ago at the Economist magazine in London. There are actually a few American infiltrates into the Economist, a little known but fun fact. Yeah, so it's great to be here. Texas is a very fun state to report in. I worked for the Texas Tribune in Austin for three years. It's a non-profit, non-partisan sort of policy and politics publication in Texas covers the whole state. I covered energy and environment. And what you really should know about Texas is it's just such a great state to report in. I sometimes think of it as God's gift to journalists. I mean, we are the state of Ted Cruz, and you're welcome for that. And you know, state of Rick Perry and Oops and the filibuster and the pink running shoes and so on. So it's a very fun state to be a journalist in Texas. I wrote this book with Asher Price, who reports for the Austin American statesman on energy environment. And, you know, I kind of stumbled into this idea because in 2005 I landed in Austin from London. I had been with the economist in London. I was covering insurance. I said, please, can I go home, i.e. at least in my country, and cover something? So they sent me to Austin. I'd never been to Texas before. And I was a regional correspondent for the economist. And I really just stumbled into the wind power story. In 2006, a couple months after I got there, Texas was passing, just at that time, passing California to become the nation's number one wind power state. And I was kind of like, oh my gosh, like, where am I? Am I in Texas? I thought this was oil and gas country. And it was a very, very fun story. And it's really just grown from there, essentially. Texas remains number one in wind power by far. I mean, it's 12,000 megawatts, I don't expect that to mean a lot to folks, to everyone. But it's about 9% of the power on the Texas electric grid last year came from wind. And the next closest state, which is indeed California, has less than half of the amount of wind power that Texas has. The third closest state is Iowa, for some reason. But on some windy, particularly windy days or particularly windy moments, the amount of wind power on the Texas grid climbs above 20%. So it's really a pretty dramatic transformation of the electric grid and the electric grid capabilities in Texas in the oil and gas state. And that's what drew me to report on it. It's just, you know, and the more I dug, the more sort of contradictions emerged about the existence of wind. And I'm sure we'll talk about that with Constantine a little bit later. Just I wanted to just kind of get you in the mood of Texas wind and show you just a three minute video that was made by a fellow called Brian Merzer in Texas for Texas Monthly Asher, my co-author. And I did a piece for On Texas Wind for Texas Monthly several years ago. And Brian put together this wonderful film. So we'll just watch three minutes. The setting is some guys up in North Texas who were kind of tinkering around during the energy crisis of the 1970s. They're a father-son team, and could we play the video? The Carter family represents three generations of Texas wind power engineers, and like the early oil pioneers a century ago, theirs is a story of successes and failures. It took Jay Carter Sr. and Jay Carter Jr. three years of tinkering on turbines in the late 1970s before they settled on a design that worked. My dad was in the oil business, and I was an oil field brat, you might say, and we kind of followed around the oil fields around the country. That kind of got me started in engineering, which I'd sort of been doing ever since I was a kid, you might say, building model airplanes and flying them. Jay Carter Sr., now 88 years old, was a mastermind at the manufacture of lightweight composite material that would prove crucial to the Carter turbine design. I recognized, of course, that wind was free, essentially. And if you could harness it at a low cost, why it would be one way of generating electricity and generating electricity had always been something that I'd been interested in since I was really a kid. We've had some units that have been through winds over 120 miles an hour and continue to generate electricity and winds over 100 miles an hour. Jay Jr. has seen all aspects of the wind industry, riding the full length of the learning curve. The Carter's were determined to slim down wind turbines, using some of the lessons in the helicopter industry. The lighter the turbine, the lower the capital costs. So prior to getting into the wind, I was working in the aircraft industry. But there was the oil embargo in 1974. And boy, we could just see the prices of electricity going up. And so we were really aware of the problems that it was bringing to the farmers and their agriculture and the high electric bills to pump water. And so initially, that was the market that we were going after, was the agricultural markets to provide them with low-cost electricity. Among their first sales were to Michael Osborne, a space cowboy in Pampa, who had recently quit as a promoter for the famed Armadillo World Headquarters music venue in Austin. Well, before the Carter's, we were looking for the equipment. We were looking for the turbine. And other folks were trying to either rebuild like old Jacobs turbines or old wind chargers. But there really wasn't a good turbine. So the Carter's had a unique design. They had a two-blade downwind design. It was also a tilt-up tower. So it was a guide tower. And it had a lot of features that could have been the wind farm standard. It happened to be that their two-blade downwind design did not win the technology race and the three-blade upwind design that came from Europe became the dominant turbine that you see everywhere today. We got out of the business there for a while because it just Great. I asked them to cut it off there because Jade, you and your goes on and does a little self-promotion. We don't really need to see that right now. I really like the video because, you know, among other things, it brings in a couple of themes of Texas wind that run through our book, the connections between wind power and oil, which we can talk a little more about later. J. Carter Sr. family grew up in the oil business, moved into wind, not uncommon. Texas now thinks of itself as the energy state. We've also got a hint of a much stranger connection between Texas wind and Texas music that does exist is strong. I can't fully explain it. So, the J. Carter Sr. and Jr. operated out of a little town called Burke Burnett, which is a couple hours northwest of Dallas, and they were tinkering around. It was called Boomtown USA, close to a century ago because it was one of many towns where oil was booming, and so they really got started tinkering around, moving from helicopters and aircraft into wind power during the 1970s energy crisis. Energy prices spiked. A lot of folks started moving into wind that way. I will say Texas, and this is just, I'm going to give you a real quick potted history of Texas wind, and then we'll have a conversation here, but Texas wind definitely predates the 1970s energy crisis. The roots of some of the modern movements lie in the energy crisis, but even, you know, 150 years ago, wind power was going strong on the great plains in the sense of the water windmills. Those old kind of whirligig windmills really helped settle the west. They helped pull water out from the aquifers so that this very dry land, these plains where there was no water in sight, wasn't enough water that you could pull up with a windmill to grow a large crop, but you could water cattle and you could get water for your family. And in fact, close to 100 years ago, Midland, Texas, of all places, now, of course, oil and gas country, fracking central, it was known as windmill town because really everybody had one. So you had these water windmills, then things evolve into using wind to produce electric power that really gets going after World War I. A lot of folks come back from the war. They've flown these new things called airplanes, and they see some of the potential similarities and design between the wind power or the airplane wings and wind power blades. And so they kind of work on that. And by then, you've got the potential for a lot of rural ranches to have what's called a wind charger to, you know, light a few flickering lights in the ranch house. These isolated ranches did not have centralized power. Then, of course, along came FDR and the Rural Electrification Administration killed off these wind chargers, essentially. And then in the 1970s, you have people like Jay Carter, senior and junior, all over the country, a resurgence of interest in wind. And it wasn't just the carters were making these turbines, experimental turbines. They had a lot of problems. You know, sometimes when they're testing them out, blades fly off. They explode. You know, I mean, they tested it out. And then this is an image of the first wind farm in the country. There was a fellow in the video, Michael Osburn. His tagline was Wind Ranch Operator. They didn't really know to call them wind farms back then. They didn't quite know what they had. But he built the first ever wind farm in Texas, second in the country, first was in New Hampshire. He built this in 1981 in Pampa, which just to go back real quick, Pampa is up in the Texas Panhandle, which is the remotest region in Texas. It's also the windiest area of Texas. And I've actually really enjoyed getting a lot of reporting trips to the Panhandle, believe it or not. There's just something about the flatness and the wind. And it's somehow very compelling. So he puts this up, 525 kilowatt turbines in Pampa, 1981. These are about 100th of the capacity of the enormous wind turbines today that you see just four of them out in West Texas. Another fellow follows soon after. His name is Father Joe James. He's a priest in Lubbock, Texas, which is a couple hours south of Pampa. And he basically thinks that saving energy, he sees the energy crisis, thinks that saving energy is essentially next to godliness. And he buys some Carter turbines and puts five of them up beside his church, not only beside his church, but specifically beside his church football field. Because in Texas, churches, of course, have football fields. Fun fact. So he and others sort of get going. The 1980s, they have some government, federal government incentives, the state government's considerable federal government incentives at that time. Those really die off in the 1980s when oil prices crash. People lose interest in alternatives. And in fact, there was one day in 1986 where gas was so cheap that a guy near Austin who had a gas station, he started giving away gas for free as sort of a gimmick just one afternoon. But you can't compete with basically free energy. And so the interest in alternatives and getting off of foreign oil and natural gas as well, there were huge concerns that natural gas was running out at that time. And we can talk a little bit about that later. Texas oil and gas production actually peaked in 1972, has never actually returned to those levels since then. So 1970s, great time for wind innovation. As the 1980s come on, interest in wind in Texas dies out. California, under the first coming of Jerry Brown, is still decides to dive into wind power. Jerry Brown at that point, not fond of nuclear power. So he supports the construction of a bunch of wind farms around the state. And by about 1990, I think California has about 90% of the world's capacity in wind power. I mean, it's just unbelievable. They didn't do it all right. They had some investment tax incentives that meant that the turbines were sort of shelters for rich people's money, tax shelters, and they didn't have to work. And they had some issues with birds as well in the Ultamont Pass area and so on that kind of freaked California out. Just to give you a sense of the contrast, when I was reporting my very first Texas wind power story in 2006, one of the folks I talked to was the Texas land commissioner, Jerry Patterson. He's now running for lieutenant government. But journalists in Texas just love Jerry Patterson because he's a very colorful guy. He flies his own plane, carries a gun in his boot, all that stuff. And so at that time, he was very excited about the ability of the general land office, which oversees state land in Texas to lease out offshore land that the state owned to wind farms just as we could lease it out to offshore oil rigs. And so I said, well, commissioner Patterson, environmentalists are very concerned that these offshore, these potential offshore farms are right in the path of migratory birds coming out from Mexico. He says, well, sure, we'll pop a few birds, but at the end of the day, we'll have smarter birds. Yeah, that's Jerry Patterson. That's why being a journalist in Texas is particularly dreamy. 1990s, George H.W. Bush is president. He signs off on the production tax credit, which is still an important force for wind. He also goes to the Rio de Janeiro Climate Conference. I don't think you'd see a Republican president going to that sort of thing today. It's also when Ann Richards is in power and her administration kind of breathes new life into Texas wind. There are also a bunch of California companies that see momentum tailing off in California, move to Texas, look around, and they think there's a public power utility in Austin that decides to kind of take a risk and buy a small amount of wind power. And they team up with the California company, Kenatec. And there is the first large wind farm in Texas. It's not super large by today's standards, still a fraction of the amount, but they put it, they basically looked, this was put up in 1995, and they essentially looked for the windiest site they could find in Texas. And that was in Guadalupe Mountains National Park. National Park Service said no. So they said, okay, what's the next windiest spot we can find? This remote ridge on the Delaware Mountains, it's like literally middle of nowhere. I could drive six or seven hours from Austin and I have to get here. It's 100 miles east of El Paso. They put up this wind farm in 1995, and a couple months later, big storm comes along, gusts of up to 160 miles per hour, it part of it blows down. And it's amazing, instead of being discouraged, they're like, okay, I guess it's windy here, wind power, good. So on it goes. In 1999, governor at the time, George W. Bush, signs a just massive law that is a combination of electric power deregulation, horrible, nerdy stuff that we can get into if you want, but you probably don't. And also it's a renewable portfolio standard, a renewable energy mandate, essentially, mandating 2,000 megawatts of renewable energy, essentially means wind power, wind is cheapest, be built in Texas by 2009. Texas is so far past that. It's amazing. We now have 12,000 megawatts of wind power and growing very strongly. Governor Rick Perry extended that mandate with the approval of state legislature in 2005. Texas has also supported wind by building out just an incredible sum, sort of almost $7 billion of transmission lines to connect the wind farms, which that's kind of what a modern turbine looks like here. The $7 billion of money that Texas has signed off on connects wind farms, which really came up in West Texas and now are starting to be built up in the Panhandle, so remote, I can't even quite reach it, to the cities which are largely in central and east Texas that need the power. So that's an incredible investment. I actually think that's some of the untold story of Texas wind. I mean, that's $300 for every single Texan. It's about to appear on Texas power bills, three bucks a month for years. I'm looking forward to everyone starting to discover that fee on their bill and ask a few questions. So that'll be interesting. I'll stop there, but we'll have a conversation now and then open it up for questions. Great, well thanks very much, Kate. Hopefully you won't, yeah, John's taking the screen up. Everything works like clockwork here. One of the very intriguing things to me in the book, and we saw in the video the Carter family there, is how far back the history of wind goes in Texas. And one of the sort of transition points in the book is when you go from talking about these tinkers who were initially building small, sort of almost homemade windmills to the emergence of sort of modern, large turbines. I was wondering if you could sort of walk us through that transition a little bit, which you did a little bit now, but at what point did people from Scandinavia start coming into Texas and building larger turbines? Yeah, it is a funny transition. I mean, then the early 80s, you have these just teeny tiny wind farms they wouldn't even register by modern standards. And then by the late 90s, by the early 2000s, you have modern scale wind farms. And now of course, Texas always likes to be building the biggest wind farm in the country or thinking it will be building it. And I've seen announcements, biggest wind farm in the country. And these are all different wind farms, sort of in successive years. And so I think one of the things that really got wind to scale up was in the mid 90s, there were this public power utility, Lower Colorado River Authority in Austin was committed to an experiment to sort of buy wind power. It was a bit of a reach, it wasn't economic for them at the time, but they're a public power agency and they thought we're interested in getting off of fossil fuels. There was a study out at the time that said that Texas, the energy state, the oil and gas state had become a net importer of energy because Texas also obviously, in addition to all the oil and gas, has just a tremendous amount of industry. And so these factors combined and there was this first wind farm and this remote Delaware mountains, they rebuilt it quickly after it blew down and decided not to be intimidated by it. And then in 1996, for reasons that I still do not know, George Bush, Governor Bush calls his top public utility regulator into his office and they're talking about stuff, utility regulator Pat Wood is about to leave the office and he's going out the door, he hears, hey Pat, and what? We like wind, and Pat Wood is like, we what? And Bush says, according to Pat Wood, go get smart on wind, that's all he said. According to Pat Wood, he's got his cowboy boots up on the desk and just go get smart on wind and Wood is thinking wind power, like that's a sort of hippie-dippy California thing and so Bush wouldn't talk to us for the book, he doesn't seem to talk to anyone these days. So why he said that, I honestly don't know. He had a couple of friends, including Kenneth Lay of Enron, Sam Wiley who were Green Mountain Power, who were at that time getting interested in alternative energy in wind, interested in climate change and pollution issues. Maybe it's that, maybe it's that Bush grew up in Midland which again has a lot of oil but used to be called windmill town, it's got a lot of wind. So why Bush said that, I don't know but what that led to is this really interesting process in Texas that they did something called deliberative polling on renewable energy which is rather than call people up and say, hey, are you for wind or against wind? They would go to different cities, bring together a group of people probably about this size and say, come to us for a weekend, we'll babysit your kids, we're gonna educate you on power sources and they had people from all sides and this was carefully, is very carefully done, it's called deliberative polling and so people would come in for the weekend, listen to presentations about the pros and cons of wind and coal and natural gas and by the end, they did this in city after city, big city after big city in Texas and everyone was for wind power and so I think that probably kind of laid the foundations for the state to go ahead, it gave Bush some confidence to be able to go ahead and sign this renewable energy mandate in 1999. I don't think you'd see, Rick Perry extended the mandate in 2000, I don't think you'd see another Texas governor mandating renewable energy and we can talk about that, there's been a very interesting. Yeah, I did wanna ask you about that, as you mentioned in the book, there's not been a steady march of progress of increasing wind power, increasing renewables and you touch on in the end of the book the political changes in Texas and in the country in the last sort of half decade that we were talking earlier that the things that Rick Perry said eight years ago, Rick Perry today might not say. So I guess the way to make this a question is to say, what exactly is the effect of the rise of the Tea Party been on renewable energy in Texas? It's been so interesting to watch, I mean, I've dug through Governor Perry's press releases on his website in the news archive and you see him 10 years ago, he's going out to a wind farm in West Texas, he's cutting the ribbon and the press release right there will say how many carbon dioxide emissions the wind farm will save. I mean, it's incredible contrast that to the rhetoric today where Governor Perry has said he's not gonna run for reelection, the Attorney General Greg Abbott is eager to step up and his sort of mantra is, I wake up, I go to the office, I sue the federal government, EPA, and then I go home. I mean, Texas is suing the EPA over greenhouse gas emissions and I don't think you'd see any mention of carbon dioxide savings now. So it is an incredible change. I think the rise of the Tea Party had a lot to do with it. I don't think you'd see, you know, mandates are very out of fashion these days. The solar industry in Texas, Texas is a big sunny state of course and the solar industry would love to get a, quote, non-wind carve out, you know, please let wind do its thing and let us have some non-wind solar but they've been trying for years, haven't gotten it, they've been trying for a little fee on power bills, haven't gotten that. It's a very tough political climate so I think the Tea Party has a lot to do with it and also Texas kind of, you know, wind is continuing to be built but Texas honestly feels like has sort of forgotten about wind because everyone is just wrapped up with fracking. You know, I think politicians would probably much more love to be seen and photographed at a drilling rig rather than a wind turbine these days. One of the things you mentioned in the book is the sort of intrinsic sort of network nature of providing energy to the grid that it's not, the economics of it aren't just how much it costs to build a wind turbine but also how much does it cost to interconnect that turbine to the grid. You saw that in Texas, unlike elsewhere, you already had a very distributed infrastructure because of the history of oil exploration in Texas. And I was interested, as you're mentioning now, there can be a relationship where wind and petrochemicals are competing but there's also been a sense in which the historical development of wind in Texas, the way was paved by the oil and gas industry. I was wondering if you could elaborate on that sort of relationship. Yeah, well one of the favorite comments that I stumbled across in the book was there was some people gathered in West Texas admiring a solitary wind turbine and someone apparently remarked, this is the late 90s, ah, now we can drill above the ground as well as below. And that just kind of gives you a sense of where Texas is at in thinking about these things. There are tremendous synergies between oil and gas and wind power in Texas that I think really did help Texas emerge from among other states that are also windy to be more aggressive on wind power. And you know, it's people like Jay Carter Sr. who we saw in the film, people who were experienced in oil, used to working with their hands. Landowners were very used to folks knocking at their door and saying, I'd like to drill, here's the royalty check, I can give you. In the late 90s, early 2000s, when oil and gas production was declining in West Texas towns, that's now reversed, they were open to the idea of wind power because as the guy said, you just sort of rent the wind, it's free, you can't use too much of it. So why not just use this free resource and go with that? And so I think there was, in a lot of ways, oil paved the way for wind. It also resulted, as you said, in some infrastructure in West Texas, power line infrastructure for natural gas plants and the mere existence of these towns, a lot of these West Texas towns that are at the center of the wind boom now were originally founded by the oil wildcatters and then the windcatters discover them in the 1990s. So a lot of synergies, there's a really interesting battle right now or just interesting dynamic, I should say, between wind power and natural gas. We could go very nerdy on this and I think we could have a whole panel on the interplay between natural gas and wind power in Texas. But fundamentally, I mean, T. Boone Pickens is a great example. He, in 2008, he was out promoting what he called his Pickens plan. T. Boone Pickens, I imagine most people in the room probably know who he is, but if you could quickly, in case anybody doesn't. Yes, Texas's favorite oil and gas billionaire who has gone around in 2008, he was trying to kind of create a platform for himself and promoting this thing called the Pickens plan, which again would bring Texas, would bring the country off of foreign oil, off of imported oil, with the help of wind and natural gas. There were always problems with this, but he also grandly declared that he was going to himself build the largest wind farm in the country in the Pampa area where he's got a ranch, not on his own ranch to be sure. But he, and then he gets caught out like just about everyone else with the fracking boom. It's kind of amazing that people didn't foresee this, but the combination of hydraulic fracturing, busting up rock with water, sand, chemicals to bring up oil or gas plus horizontal drilling, being able to access new reserves, those things came in and Pickens was caught out. He retracted his plans to build the biggest wind farm in the country and just a quick, funny story. I was working at the New York Times at that time and they said, could you please write, this new Pickens plan is out, could you please write a piece on it? So I call up Boone Pickens and this guy and I said, I'd like to talk to Mr. Pickens. I'm doing a story from the New York Times. Said, ah, you know, it's very busy, but we're flying from Dallas to Washington in two days. Are you coming? And like, okay, private plane, let me just check that with the New York Times ethics people. So I checked it with them, it was all cool. And so it was me and eight oilmen on Boone Pickens' Gulfstream. Yeah, and what was funniest of all was he had, he sits up front and he's got a TV right in front of him and it played, it was playing Fox News of course and periodically the commercials for the Pickens plan would come on and the entire plane would essentially fall silent and watch this commercial that they've probably seen like 20 times before. It was fun. So I wanted to ask you one last question and then open it up to the audience for some questions. You mentioned that about 9% of the energy in Texas, I guess in recent years or over the last year, came from wind power. What I'm curious about is how obviously no one thinks that wind will be the unique source of power for electricity. How saturated is that in terms of if public policy were to go in a way that is as conducive as possible for wind, what's the ceiling? How much room for growth is there for wind power in Texas and nationally for that matter? That's a great question. So right, Texas last year, 9% of the energy on the Texas grid from wind, that's the contrast is to the nation where about 3.5% last year was from wind power. So Texas is ahead, it's building more wind power and honestly in conversation in Texas, I don't hear a tremendous amount of sort of grid integration pushback from the grid folks on the wind issue. Clearly there's an interest in being able to store energy. The problem with wind of course is that it doesn't blow all the time and in West Texas where they built a lot of the wind power, it blows most strongly at night and in the spring and the fall, which is not as useful as it could be at night. Everyone's asleep and in the spring and the fall people don't have their air conditioners on. So solar in some ways makes a lot more sense for the grid because the sun's beating down right when you need electricity the most, need your air conditioning on. And so it's a great question. The Texas grid is kind of a great laboratory because fun fact there are three power grids in the lower 48, Eastern grid, Western grid and Texas grid. Texans love, this feeds Texas national pride. I've heard bus loads of Texans just cheering when they hear they have their own grid. But it does mean that Texas is this kind of unique laboratory and I mean the built out of wind in the next couple of years could reach sort of, this is a complete guess but maybe sort of 9% now, 12%, 13% and at what point does energy store and all of that come into play, it's a great question. So we'll ask some more great questions from the audience. Please do wait for Ariel to bring you the microphone as this is being broadcast on the web which I should have mentioned at the beginning and state your name. Yes, my name is Edward Hoyt with Nexon. Just following on this question of integration, in Europe you have some countries that on a particular day can achieve 50%. Denmark and Spain I think have reached that level. Obviously over the course of a year it's a lot less so there's still considerably a lot of room to go in terms of consumption. I wanna come back to the question of natural gas. There's a study that has come out just recently in the last few days, gotten a lot of press that Stanford did making the case that cheap natural gas is going to displace coal which is one of the reasons why there's this quote unquote war on coal going on and then, but then they also say it's gonna be detrimental to renewables and I'm not sure that I fully agree with that. Number one, gas is not gonna stay as cheap as it is for in the first year of the future but there is the integration benefit of having natural gas to facilitate more generation using wind. And so I'm wondering if you could just sort of elaborate. It may be a little more nerdy as you say in looking at grid management but I think it's an important point to show how natural gas can help facilitate further integration of wind. Yeah, it's a great question. I mean the interplay isn't just between wind and natural gas, it's also wind, natural gas and coal and again, Texas is, having its own grid is a terrific laboratory. We've got wind, 9% and gas and coal I think are about sort of roughly close to 40% each. Texas has a little more gas than elsewhere in the country and so you do see this complementarity between wind and gas such that you can turn natural gas plants on and on, on and off quickly so that when the wind dies down I say hey, natural gas plant, can you turn up please? Natural gas is, you know, would obviously like to just be filling all of that space. But yeah, there's a study from three or four months ago done by the Brattle Group for a kind of clean power coalition in Texas that does contend that the combination of wind power and cheap natural gas could help to, could add to coal's problems, be, you know, coal's problems currently including federal regulations coming down the pipeline. Although those federal regulations haven't always been as tight as some wanted or expected. So it's, this is a very, this is a very complex subject and you know, maybe New America Foundation could have a whole panel of experts on this very subject. It's, you know, I, my best answer is not a very satisfactory one. It's just kind of we'll, we'll see. I mean coal, coal seems to be falling out. Natural gas, wind in Texas cut into natural gas by it looks like several or more percentage points. You know, natural gas may be sort of swinging back up and coal swinging back down. But you know, in Texas you have some of these old power plants, old coal-filed power plants from the, from the 70s that they've said they're gonna shut down for most of the year except in the summer when Texas desperately needs most of the power. So it's, it's a very complicated interplay. I urge you to read the, this Brattle report. And yes, good discussion would be great. Yeah. Hi, Michael Nix. Renewable portfolio standard and energy storage. You mentioned the number about wind generation peaking, like one to two in the morning. And I'm with you, I'm much more of a solar advocate than a, than a wind advocate. Has there been any talk about storage concepts being promoted in Texas so they can store the power and then use it when they need it? Yeah, definitely. You know, energy storage is sometimes referred to as the quote holy grail of renewable energy because, you know, if you had the ability to store electricity rather than how it currently is, which is it's generated, you've got to use it immediately. You can't, you can't really hold onto it. If we could hold onto that energy, then we could, you know, then wind power would be working even when the wind died down. So that would be fantastic. There are a couple projects in Texas. Duke Energy put up a battery in, I think it started operating in January or so, 25 or 35 megawatts, I can't quite remember, out in West Texas, paired with a wind farm. That's a very interesting experiment to watch. Texas also has the largest or one of the largest batteries in the country out in this very remote town that I have visited called Presidio. That's less related to wind. It's because they've got some, you know, one old, old, old power line that's supported with wooden poles going to this super remote town. So if lightning hits, you know, they'll still have a little electricity for a while. But Texas is, you know, very much thinking about storage, partly because they've got all this wind on the grid and are interested in solar. And so there's, you know, there's been talk of a compressed air storage facility up in the panhandle. You know, we'll see. You know, it's also a policy-based thing. Will they create, will the Texas grid create more rules to encourage storage and so on? Yeah. If you can just wait for the mic. GE has these new, what they call the brilliant turbines where they paired them to a little bit of battery. Do you want to comment a little bit about that or what do you think of those? That's a technology I don't know about, but I'll go Google it. Hi, Emily Williams, American Wind Energy Association. So coming at this from a pro-wind perspective, three of those turbines are under construction right now in Texas. I think those are the first ones. So just a quick, quickly to dispel the myth that Texas wind only blows at night. There's a lot of growth on Gulf projects that kind of match peak load in the early afternoon. So there is, you know, wind is not just blowing at night. But I found very interesting from what you talked about was that Texas has forgotten about wind. So last, and they've kind of moved on to fracking. So last year, I think Texas installed almost 2,000 megawatts of wind, more than anywhere else in the country, it's like a $4 billion investment. And particularly as the Cres lines are being completed and we're seeing wind kind of expand to new areas of the state that it hasn't been before. My question for you is whether or not you think the industry should be more proactive in voicing the impact they're making or are they better off kind of sitting back and letting fracking take the focus? That's an interesting question. And thank you for bringing up the coastal wind farms, right? Texas has built, you know, 10 years ago, pretty much all Texas wind was being built in the West Texas area that I showed you, but now the last three or four or five years, there's been growing interest in wind farms along the Gulf Coast, onshore, not offshore, a lot of them near Corpus Christi. And those winds are much better matched the grid because they actually blow hardest during the day and sometimes in the afternoon, related to the way that the wind comes off the Gulf. And so that's, as I said, that is much better matched the grid, but there's less land along the coast. That's a constraint. People like to live on the coast, so where do you put the turbines and so on? West Texas is a little bit emptier, but yeah, I mean, it's, one interesting thing I've seen in Texas, back to your political question, is there's a growing effort to emphasize the lack of water use of wind turbines, you know, coal plants, gas plants, all of these thermal plants use, you know, a considerable amount of water, some of which goes, gets heated up and goes back into the river, but nonetheless, Texas is in a very big drought right now and water is, water is the subject of a $2 billion vote in a couple weeks on election day. So water is a big topic in Texas and I do see the wind folks starting to emphasize that, but yeah, I mean, it's interesting that wind continues to grow, sort of despite this political dynamic that's really just changed in Texas. They've got to fight to prevent the, last session they fought to prevent the repeal of the renewable energy mandate of Governor Bush, Governor Perry, arguably it's moot, Texas is way past mandates, but there's complicated things with renewable energy credits that this would apparently affect and it's also symbolic, you know, symbolic of how the kind of tea party views wind and Texas politicians as you all know, have many of them have jumped on that fine tea party bandwagon. I think we have time for one final question. We'll try and cram it in. If you want to very briefly, if all three of you will give you time, but just very quickly and then Kate can answer all of them. My question is about water because fracking uses so much and aside from pollution, isn't the main water supply in that central part from Canada all the way down through Texas, the Ogallala aquifer, which is being depleted and running low and needed so much for agriculture? Is there enough water to frack? Question one, two, and three. Yeah, I'm from Houston, so in regards to the Keystone XL pipeline, do you, that's the talk of the town right now, so do you think that's gonna have an effect on talk of increasing the wind farms and what kind of effect is this having in West Texas because I'm not familiar with what's happening there? And third. Rorick McCorsen from the Heiners-Bolt Foundation. Back to the political point, so the question briefly would be who are the political advocates these days in Texas for renewables, I'd say in general, especially among conservatives? You know, not necessarily naming names, but as it's members of the state legislature, is it more local officials, some mix of the two? So I think that's informative to the debates we see in Washington where you can't really get anything through. Yeah, great. So let's start with water. I'll keep you to. Yeah, water, let's talk afterwards. I could give a whole nother talk on water fracking and water. Texas Tribune did a series of articles last year, this year on fracking and water use, so we can talk afterward. Keystone and- But for the people who won't be around afterwards, it's a large problem, it's not a large problem. Fracking water use, about 1% of these states overall water use, according to studies that have been funded by oil and gas, there is, to my knowledge, no real independent study in Texas, I'd love to see one. In rural areas, it's where there's a lot of fracking and not a lot of people, or that there's considerably more, it reaches the double digits. Agriculture, always the biggest water in Texas, about 60%, so it is a big issue, big discussion in Texas. Keystone, yeah. Keystone and wind, I have not really heard a lot of discussion linking the two. Keystone is oil related, whereas wind power is electricity, oil doesn't directly generate a lot of electricity now, so I really haven't seen a lot of discussions on the two. We can talk afterwards if you'd like, and your question was on the- Who is pushing, yeah. Who is pushing? Well, it's really interesting to see Texas politicians somewhat caught in the political change that has happened in the last 10 years in Texas. Again, five or 10 years ago, Governor Perry, all the state politicians on board with wind power, signing off on an extension of a wind power mandate, signing off on $7 billion of wind power transmission lines. Now you see that conversation happening much less, and when it comes to extending the federal tax credit that helps wind power, that's when people kind of have to take a stand. You see Governor Perry not signing a letter to President Obama requesting an extension of the tax credit, whereas the governor of Oklahoma, Mary Fallon, did sign that letter. So you see kind of a divergence there, and you see a lot of congressmen from rural areas. I called up a bunch of them like a year ago, I think, when the discussion on the extension of this credit, which was expiring at the end of the last year, was happening, and some of them just didn't want to give me a position, honestly. They're kind of caught between a rural constituency, which likes wind and a tea party constituency. So it's very interesting to watch this political shift. Which Kate will continue to watch. Thank you all very much for coming. I should mention that the book is for sale outside. Kate will sign it. Asher, her co-author, will not. That was his voice that we heard narrating the video. So they were both here. We talked about a lot of policy issues. The book talks about those. It also tells a lot of individual stories in a way that I found it to be really just fun to read. And I mean this as a compliment, it doesn't read like it was written by two people. They really managed to sort of have a voice and a narrative thread that goes through. So I very much encourage you to read it and get it half signed, and then you can go around the country, go to Texas, go visit Asher, and get the other half signed there. Thank you all for coming. Thank you to Kate.