Texas is hosting a summit on the future of energy production

Nearly 3,000 people from 27 countries are attending a summit in North Texas this week to focus on planning for future energy production. The Advanced Research Projects and Energy Innovation Agency summit is being held at the Gaylord Texan in Grapevine.

“Texas really has all the ingredients to really produce all kinds of energy and use next-generation technologies to do it,” says U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm.

Other countries, such as China, have developed policies to attract industry to build the components needed to generate renewable energy, Granholm said.

“They saw our passivity as an opportunity,” she said. “That’s why Invest in America is so important.”

Granholm said the Biden administration’s Investing in America program is fueling private sector growth. She said that in Texas, 53 companies have announced plans to build clean energy projects.

According to her, 24 of these 53 companies are involved in electric vehicles and charging. In 2022, Wallbox opened a factory in Arlington producing electric vehicle chargers. The company says it produced 250,000 electric vehicle chargers in its first year and expects to create 700 jobs by 2030.

In Kleberg County, south of Corpus Christi, Occidental Petroleum is using a Department of Energy grant to build a carbon capture facility. DOE is also providing a grant to build a clean hydrogen hub in Houston. Hubs create networks of producers and users involved in the production, delivery and storage of clean hydrogen.

“It’s amazing. It’s really something,” Granholm said. “These are just manufacturing plants. This doesn’t even include all the solar power generation projects where you all are so ahead of the curve. This is making things in America.”

Texas currently leads the nation in solar and wind energy production. Granholm said these projects could also make the state a leader in producing components needed to generate renewable energy. He says producing components here would reduce dependence on China.

“This deliberate strategy makes investing in America compelling,” she said.

Granholm said the Inflation Control Act and the bipartisan infrastructure bill provide incentives to invest in clean energy. He says these incentives focus on communities “that may have been left behind” as older industries left.

“That’s why all of our global competitors are kind of mad at us, because they know we’ve designed a way that we’ve designed a way for companies from all over the world to be able to locate here and make a profit for them,” she said.

As of Friday afternoon, CenterPoint Energy said 5,800 customers were still without power as a result of last week’s severe weather in the Houston area. The company said it had restored power to 890,000 customers.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas said the state’s power grid could set records for demand over the holiday weekend as hot weather is forecast across much of the state. ERCOT predicts demand could exceed 75,000 megawatts on Friday and 76,000 megawatts on Monday, but the grid operator does not expect demand to exceed supply.

Granholm said ERCOT also tries to plan for the future, securing additional energy sources that can power the system during periods of spikes in demand. ERCOT has launched a pilot program to explore how “virtual power plants,” such as backup generators or battery storage systems, can contribute to the energy market.

“How can batteries be used, for example, in electric vehicles? If you connect them together to store energy, you can make the grid more resilient,” she said. “All this kind of technology is here in Texas.”

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