Tell your state leaders to remove all red tape holding back cheap clean energy!

Texas, which built the most grid-scale solar of any U.S. state last year thanks to its low permitting barriers, has set new records for solar, wind, and battery storage in summer 2025!

From June 1 through August 31, solar power alone met 15.2% of all electricity demand (more than coal!) on ERCOT, the Texas state grid. Wind and solar together generated 37.7% of ERCOT’s electricity in the first eight months of 2025. Renewables have met 95.7% of all power demand growth on the ERCOT Texas grid since 2016!

And batteries continue to stabilize the grid, with ERCOT reporting that the risk of grid emergencies during the “summer risk peak hour” had fallen from around 16% in summer 2024 to less than 1% in summer 2025. That’s thanks to a boom in solar and grid-scale battery storage, with 5,395 MW of solar and 3,821 MW of battery storage added since summer 2024. In the aftermath of mass power outages in 2021 caused by unreliable fossil fuels (gas plants’ water sources froze in an extreme weather event), clean energy is providing reliable power to Texas.

Despite politicians’ attempts to prop up slow and expensive fossil gas with handouts, renewables continue to dominate the Texas power market’s future. Two years ago, the Texas state government passed a $7.2 billion “slush fund” to support new gas plants, but since then only two new gas facilities have applied for less than $0.5 billion in loans, with seven other proposed gas projects canceled.

As of summer 2025, solar and batteries account for about 80% of projects in ERCOT’s “interconnection queue” of proposed new builds waiting to connect to the grid, and wind accounts for another 10%. Gas, even with all the subsidies, accounts for slightly less than 10% of new projects that someone in the market wants to build in Texas.

And that’s all at the grid scale. Texas, which has a Republican-dominated state legislature, also passed a new law in May 2025 drastically simplifying permitting for residential rooftop solar and home batteries.

The example of Texas makes it clear that “ease of building” is the key factor determining state-level clean energy buildouts right now. Even if a state government tries to shovel money at fossil fuels, solar and battery storage will provide a surge of abundant, reliable, and clean electrons as long as you let it get built. Every U.S. state leader should be working on removing all permitting and procedural barriers to clean energy build-outs in order to deliver cheaper and cleaner power to the people!

Tell your state leaders to remove all red tape holding back clean energy!