Texas lawmakers and regulators have unleashed blistering new attacks against solar this month, setting up a showdown that could curb renewable energy growth.
State senators grilled solar advocates over whether Chinese-made solar panels could give the Communist Party of China the ability to meddle with Texas’s isolated electric grid.
The Public Utility Commission of Texas sent a solar and battery project back to a state administrative court, telling El Paso Electric it should consider natural gas or other traditional generation.
And state Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) said his office filed civil investigative demands with four companies as part of a new initiative to investigate “widespread” fraud among rooftop solar companies.
Moves against renewables aren’t new in Texas, which has a history of going after wind and solar every two years when lawmakers meet despite installations across the state. But the timing ahead of the 2027 legislative session — which kicks off in January — is notable because the state is bracing for a surge in power demand from data centers and other large users.
“What’s interesting to me this time is that it’s more executive branch efforts — whether it’s [the] PUC or the attorney general’s office digging in,” said Michael Webber, a professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the mechanical engineering department at the University of Texas, Austin. “That does not have the same kind of legislative engagement where people can say, ‘Hey, I don’t like that you’re undermining my ability to make money from my land or increase our local tax base to build schools and that kind of stuff.’”
Texas also is not the only state that has seen Republican-led pushback against solar this year.
Missouri Republican state Sen. Sandy Crawford filed a bill to impose a moratorium on both new solar projects and solar projects already under construction until Dec. 31, 2027.
Arizona legislators are considering a Republican-led bill that would criminalize new solar and wind farms within 4 miles of any home unless they get a special certificate from two regulatory bodies. In Wisconsin, Republican state senators proposed a bill that would require solar projects to get local approval before the state’s Public Service Commission could approve them.
The Texas pushback against solar comes as sun-powered generation pours onto Texas’s main grid, which is managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT. Texas leads the country in utility-scale solar generation capacity, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, edging out California for the top spot in 2025
Solar provided more electricity to ERCOT than coal for the first time in 2025, churning out about 14 percent of all power on the grid, or more than 67.8 gigawatt-hours. That’s up from roughly about 2 percent of the grid power that solar provided in 2020, or about 8.7 GWh, according to ERCOT data.
And in the next few years, much more solar generation is slated to come online.
ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas said at a Texas Senate committee hearing this month that the grid operator has about 450 GW of generation looking to interconnect to the grid — 160 GW of which are tied to solar projects and 177 GW of which relate to batteries.
“Over 75 percent of the total interest is still with solar and battery storage resources,” Vegas said at the hearing. “The economics in our market are still highly favorable to those two resources.”
Texas lawmakers and regulators have been trying to bring more natural-gas-fired generation online for years, especially after Winter Storm Uri in 2021 knocked out power to millions of people for days and led to more than 240 deaths in Texas.
Although ERCOT’s post-mortem of the storm and power outages found that the biggest chunk of generation outages came from natural gas power resources, Republican leaders including Gov. Greg Abbott and Sen. Ted Cruz have targeted renewables coming offline as the main culprit.
“It just shows that fossil fuels are necessary for the state of Texas and as well as other states to make sure we can heat our homes in the wintertime and cool our homes in the summertime,” Abbott said in an interview with Fox News during the 2021 storm.
Andrew Mahaleris, press secretary for Abbott, said in a statement last week that Abbott’s “all-of-the-above energy approach” has helped cement the state as the “energy capital of the world.”
“Expanding access to all forms of energy, especially rapidly deployable dispatchable power, is crucial for long-term reliability,” Mahaleris wrote.
Seeking gas
After Uri, the PUC approved market changes within ERCOT’s region to incentivize more natural gas generation on the grid after the winter storm. But those changes were eventually tossed out.
The Texas Legislature ultimately passed a bill to create a $5 billion fund to give natural gas generators low-interest, taxpayer-backed loans to build more of their generation in the state. The fund has lent more than $1 billion to six projects as of April 2.
Vegas said recently that natural gas generation in the interconnection queue is now just 60 GW of the 450 GW total generation requests — compared with less than 10 GW three-and-a-half years ago. He credited that rise to the Texas Energy Fund.
“My concern is that without something materially different in the market to incentivize gas beyond those limits — which it’s limited to 10,000 megawatts today — that we wouldn’t necessarily see continued growth in gas,” Vegas said.
One GW is equal to 1,000 MW.
Vegas said since ERCOT’s deregulated wholesale power market has incentivized the cheapest power possible to come onto the grid since its creation in 1999. That market was created when most power generation resources looked the same, Vegas said — largely fossil fuel, dispatchable generators that can come online and stay online as long as they have fuel.
But the introduction of solar, wind and battery power has distorted the market, Vegas said.
“That’s what has happened in the past 15 years, where we’ve seen this explosion of wind and solar, and now batteries, to the complete exclusion of growth in the natural gas system, because economically, we’re not valuing the characteristics of gas generation that is so important to long-term reliability and economic viability of this state,” Vegas said, adding that “we need to change that” to recognize the reliability characteristics of other generation types.
PUC Chair Thomas Gleeson, meanwhile, has also talked about potentially changing ERCOT’s market to incentivize more natural gas generation.
“We have to do everything we can to incent dispatchable generation in the state because we have a proliferation of renewables, which has been great — they keep costs down,” Gleeson told state senators recently. “But you have to have a balanced portfolio, and right now, we need more gas-fired generation in the state.”
PUC commissioners also voted to send a proposal by El Paso Electric to build a solar/battery project to a state administrative hearing judge after Commissioner Courtney Hjaltman filed a memo questioning whether building the project would be enough to meet the longer-term needs of the region.
“Granted, traditional thermal dispatchable resources can take longer to build than other resources, but they also have longer service lives and, when the sun is not shining and wind is not blowing, continue to produce the critical energy needed to meet an ever-growing customer base,” Hjaltman wrote.
Thermal power can include sources such as natural gas, coal and nuclear.
Neither Hjaltman’s office nor El Paso Electric responded to a request for comment about the memo or PUC vote.
PUC spokesperson Rich Parsons said in a statement that solar does not always generate power during peaks in summer — which usually happen after the sun sets — or in the coldest parts of winter just before the sun rises. Batteries, Parsons wrote, are only reliable until their charge runs out.
“That doesn’t make solar or batteries less valuable when they are working, but we need a solution that addresses demand around the clock with reliable output to support our growing economy and population,” Parsons wrote.
‘Anti-Texan thing’
But lawmakers and Paxton, Texas’s attorney general, have brought up additional concerns in recent weeks.
The Texas Legislature in 2021 passed the Lone Star Infrastructure Protection Act, which prohibited Texas government agencies from contracting with companies owned or controlled by citizens of China, Iran, North Korea or Russia. As part of that prohibition, the Legislature directed ERCOT to go through its existing generation resources to see if any had ties to those countries.
Thirty-three ERCOT market participates were ultimately removed from the grid’s power market for not responding to information requests about their ties to those countries, Chad Seely, ERCOT’s senior vice president of regulatory policy and general counsel, testified before a state Senate committee recently.
And of the 2,194 attestations ERCOT received from market participants, Seely said, 113 reported they had an affiliation with a company that had ties to those countries. All but one of those 113 market participates said the affiliate companies would not have direct or remote access to the ERCOT grid.
That admission would have constituents in Republican state Sen. Lois Kolkhorst’s district in east central Texas “show up with pitchforks,” she said at the hearing.
“Nobody wants the renewables anyway in their districts, and now we find out it’s littered with foreign enemy countries,” Kolkhorst said.
Mark Stover, executive director of the Texas Solar + Storage Association, said in a statement that the association supports the 2021 infrastructure protection law and is working to comply with its requirements. The group is also supporting legislation that would create more domestic supply chains for solar, he said.
“While we must not lose sight of potential hardware issues,” Stover said, keeping “a strong security framework in the information technology and operational technology domain is what matters most, and industry stands ready to work with state policymakers should they want to take additional steps to further ensure grid security.”
But Paxton’s new initiative to weed out fraud within the rooftop solar industry drew even more headlines about the industry.
In a news release this month, Paxton said the civil investigative demands he filed against four rooftop solar companies were “just the beginning” of a broader effort to look into fraud within the industry.
Freedom Forever, which was one of the four companies named in the release, said it has not received any “communications or formal requests” from Paxton’s office.
“When, and if we do, then we will fully cooperate and address any questions or concerns,” Freedom Forever spokesperson Angelic Venegas said in a statement.
Paxton’s office did not respond to a request for comment about whether he supports rooftop solar in general or to discuss his stance on utility-scale solar projects. Paxton is in the midst of a competitive GOP primary runoff for a Senate seat against Sen. John Cornyn, the incumbent.
The growing debate over solar sets up a familiar debate at the Texas Capitol in Austin, according to Webber with the University of Texas.
In recent legislative sessions, he said, some Republicans suggest policies to make it harder for wind and solar to make money in the ERCOT market, but rural Republicans and Democrats who support solar pushed back and have ultimately killed most of those measures.
Since the 2021 winter storm, Webber said the growth of solar within ERCOT has kept electricity prices lower than in other parts of the country.
Reshaping the power market to shut out solar and incentivize thermal generation, he said, would make electricity more expensive in the Lone Star State and would make it harder to power major Texas industries like oil and gas and, more recently, data centers.
“We’d have to run more expensive power plants, and then we might not be able to accommodate all the growth of data centers and all the demand for electricity by oil,” Webber said. “This is the most anti-Texan thing ever.”
