Chuck DarwinSections of a new Texas bill that impose new burdens upon clean energy providers were directly crafted and edited by the ♦️Texas Public Policy Foundation ♦️( #TPPF ), a conservative group that has led the backlash to renewables and to make what it calls “the moral case for fossil fuels,” according to a copy of the draft language seen by the Guardian.
Several dozen edits were made to the bill’s amendments by 🔸Brent Bennett🔸, a TPPF policy staffer, the document shows, and Texas lawmakers subsequently passed parts of this language along with the key TPPF desires👉to impose new transmission costs on renewables and require them to source fossil fuel “backup” power when the sun isn’t shining or wind isn’t blowing.
“They’ve won over the top politicians in the state, which is very dangerous. Texas is going to be critical.”
The passage of the bill, which funds the ongoing operation of the Public Utility Commission of Texas, was the flagship victory for TPPF even as a raft of other Republican bills that would have “shut down the renewable energy industry in Texas,” as energy analyst Doug Lewin put it, faltered.
The burgeoning influence of TPPF, an organization 🔥substantially funded by fossil fuel interests🔥 and publicly lauded by Greg Abbott, Texas’s Republican governor, is the catalyst to a rightwing attempt to crimp the stunning progress of renewable energy in the state, which now produces more than a quarter of all wind-powered electricity in the US.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/06/texas-public-policy-foundation-charles-koch-climate-clean-energy-fossil-fuels/
Mark Stoll