The Texas Legislature is in session, and you know what that means: time to kneecap renewable energy as a sop to the oil and gas interests that fund so many of our representatives’ careers.

It’s a frustrating exercise in dragging Texas back in time that we have to endure each session. And this year, it looks especially dangerous.

We are keeping our eyes on two bills in particular, Senate Bill 388 and Senate Bill 819, that have us worried the state will make it so expensive and onerous to build new renewable energy sources that we will fall behind in providing the energy this state needs for the future.

Before we get into the details, this is worth a reminder. Have you noticed that even on the hottest days of the summer, at the peak of the day’s heat, Texas’ power grid hums along and we all stay cool? What happened to the brown-out worries or the calls to watch the thermostat? Those have all but disappeared.

You can thank renewable energy, especially solar power, for that.

SB 388 from Republican Sens. Phil King, Paul Bettencourt and Lois Kolkhorst would require that, beginning next year, at least 50% of all new power installed on the grid “be sourced from dispatchable generation other than battery energy storage.”

It’s important to understand that Texas does need to increase the supply of dispatchable energy. But it makes little sense why dispatchable energy shouldn’t come from rapidly improving battery sources or why 50% is the right amount of new generation from other sources (read natural gas). The result here is to ensure that new natural gas plants are built because that’s what the regulation will require. We all understand who benefits.

Kolkhorst’s SB 819, meanwhile, adds a host of regulations to renewable energy construction that rival California’s treatment of the oil and gas industry. It’s an embarrassing anti-business grab bag designed to create so much red tape that renewable energy entrepreneurs might just say forget it.

That’s what happens when big government gets in the way of business; people with capital and ideas go somewhere they are welcome. That place used to be Texas. Sadly, we can’t count on that from our current Legislature, which is bent on warping pro-business conservatism into do-as-we-say populism.

Take a whiff of the language in SB 819. It describes using the “police power of the state” to protect “wildlife, water and land” with greater regulation over “the installation and removal of renewable energy generation facilities.”

These bills are just two among several that are aimed at undermining renewable energy construction and operation in the state.

If we keep going this way, you’ll know whom to thank on that hot day when you have to just sweat it out.

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