An interesting fact seemed to go unnoticed in all the press
around the Electric Reliability Council of Texas’s (ERCOT) Long
Term System Assessment, a biennial report submitted to the Texas
Legislature on "the need for increased transmission and
generation capacity throughout the state of Texas." ERCOT found
that if you use updated wind and solar power characteristics
like cost and actual output to reflect real world conditions,
rather than the previously used 2006 assumed characteristics,
wind and solar are more competitive than natural gas over the
next 20 years. This might seem a bit strange since we've been
told for years by renewable energy skeptics that wind and solar
power can't compete with low natural gas prices. Let me back up
a second and explain what's going on here, and what it means for
both the energy crunch and Texas' ongoing drought. Every two
years since 2005, ERCOT has used a series of complex energy
system models to model and estimate future conditions on the
Texas electric grid. This serve