Harger: Texas just became the No. 1 solar state in America. Without a carbon tax. WA should be paying attention
May 12, 2026, 7:43 AM | Updated: 3:02 pm
I’ll be the first to admit it. I complain about the Climate Commitment Act a lot. The gas prices. The utility bills. The emissions numbers that don’t match the rhetoric. If you’ve listened to me for any length of time, you’ve heard it.
So today I want to try something different. Instead of just pointing out what’s wrong, I want to point to something that’s working elsewhere and ask whether we can learn from it.
The somewhere else is Texas. Yes, Texas. I’d ask you not to dismiss this just because of the name on the marquee. There’s something happening down there that anyone who cares about clean energy, lower utility bills, or working-class families should be paying attention to.
I want clean energy. I want it for my kids. I want it for this state. I want this to work. The question I want to ask today is whether we’re going about it the right way.
Texas solar, wind, and battery storage capacity in 2026: The numbers that surprised everyone
Texas just passed California in utility-scale solar capacity and generation. It also leads the nation in wind and is on pace to pass California in grid-scale battery storage by year’s end.
The data comes from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, posted earlier this month by energy researcher John Bistline. The post went viral, and for good reason.
Texas utility-scale solar capacity: roughly 37 gigawatts. California: about 30. Washington: 0.27. Texas has roughly 137 times the utility-scale solar capacity of Washington.
Texas wind: about 43 gigawatts. California: six to eight. Washington: 3.4. Texas battery storage: roughly 15 gigawatts with another 12.9 gigawatts planned for this year alone, which is 53% of all new battery storage in the entire country. California: about 22, though Texas is closing fast.
Texas accounts for about 40% of all new utility-scale solar in the U.S. this year. One state is building more clean energy infrastructure than virtually every other state combined.
$157 billion invested. More than 125,000 clean energy jobs. Roughly $50 billion in projected lifetime landowner and tax revenue. Rural Texans are getting lease checks every month. County tax bases are growing.
Now, yes. Texas has more sun than we do. Western Washington has a lot of clouds, and anyone who lives here knows it. But Eastern Washington gets plenty of sun, and we have the land and the infrastructure to support far more solar development than 0.27 gigawatts. We’re barely trying.
How Texas built clean energy faster than any mandate: market forces, federal credits, and cheap land
ERCOT, the Texas grid operator, runs a competitive wholesale market. The cheapest power wins. When solar got cheaper than gas, the market did the work.
I want to be fair about what drove this. Texas benefited from federal Production Tax Credits, Investment Tax Credits, and the Inflation Reduction Act. Those incentives helped make the economics attractive for developers. Texas also had its own Renewable Portfolio Standard, which it exceeded years ahead of schedule.
But here’s what matters for Washington: we get those same federal credits. We have access to the same Inflation Reduction Act incentives. And we’ve built 0.27 gigawatts of utility-scale solar.
The difference is everything else. Cheap, abundant land in West Texas. Fast interconnection through a “connect and manage” process that lets developers move quickly. Surging demand from data centers, manufacturing, and population growth. And a permitting environment that gets out of the way.
The free market, combined with federal incentives that every state has access to, moved faster in Texas than any state mandate has moved anywhere else. Developers chased profit. Profit happened to require clean power. The planet got a win.
Texas didn’t set out to save the planet. They set out to make money. The planet is doing pretty well either way.
WA’s Climate Commitment Act: Higher bills, 0.27 gigawatts of solar, trailing 37 states
Washington’s approach was the opposite. The Climate Commitment Act (CCA), signed in 2021, created a cap-and-invest carbon pricing program. The Clean Energy Transformation Act mandates 100% clean electricity by 2045.
The results? Natural gas bills are up 15 to 30% in some analyses, with Puget Sound Energy asking the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission to approve electric rate increases of nearly 30% and gas increases of nearly 20% by 2029. The CCA’s carbon pricing is stacked on top of the third-highest fuel taxes in the nation. Compliance costs must now be itemized on utility bills following a transparency ruling.
And Washington trails 37 other states in per-capita carbon dioxide reductions despite running one of the most aggressive carbon pricing regimes in America.
The hydro ceiling: WA politicians take credit for a grid the dams already built
Some of that gap has a fair explanation.
Washington’s electricity grid is already 60 to 70% hydroelectric. It was one of the cleanest grids in the nation before the Climate Commitment Act existed. The dams did that work. Decades ago.
You can’t decarbonize what’s already largely carbon-free. The easy electricity wins were captured before most of us were born. The remaining emissions are in transportation, industrial use, and natural gas heating, sectors where carbon pricing hits consumers directly but moves slowly.
Texas started dirty. Every solar panel replaced coal or gas. Massive room to improve. Washington started clean and is now charging ratepayers a carbon tax to squeeze marginal gains from a grid the dams already built.
Washington’s politicians take credit for climate leadership on a grid they inherited.
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WA’s own grid study calls its 2045 clean energy mandate ‘infeasible’
The state’s own commissioned grid study, conducted by E3, projects a 9-gigawatt electricity shortfall in Washington by 2030. That shortfall is larger than the entire average electricity demand of Oregon. We have a hole in our grid the size of a neighboring state.
The same E3 study found that meeting Washington’s 2045 clean electricity mandate without emerging technologies would nearly triple today’s retail rates. E3’s own word for that pathway: “infeasible.”
And the least-cost pathway E3 identified to keep the lights on? New natural gas peaking plants. The very resources the Clean Energy Transformation Act was designed to phase out.
The state-commissioned analysis admits that the policy can’t work without the very thing it was built to eliminate.
WA wants to tear down the dams, and the carbon math goes the wrong direction
Those hydroelectric dams, the ones that gave Washington one of the cleanest grids in America before any climate legislation existed, are now being targeted for removal. The push to breach or remove the lower Snake River dams in the name of salmon recovery would cost between $10 and $27 billion and remove a massive source of carbon-free electricity from the grid.
Follow the logic. Remove dams that produce clean power. That generation has to be replaced. In the near term, it gets replaced with natural gas. A state that charges you a carbon tax on your utility bill wants to remove the infrastructure that keeps the grid clean. In the name of the environment.
And if you want to know how seriously they’ve thought this through on the salmon side, consider the sea lions.
WA salmon recovery, sea lions, and $300,000 the state budget couldn’t find
Washington and the federal government have spent billions trying to save Columbia River salmon. Not one species has recovered. Meanwhile, the California sea lion population in the Columbia River basin has gone from fewer than 500 to roughly 4,000 in the past decade.
It costs roughly $38,000 to remove a sea lion. That works out to about $203 per salmon saved. State Sen. Jeff Wilson tried for three years to secure $300,000 in the state’s $79 billion budget to fund sea lion removal in tributaries such as the Cowlitz River. The answer every year: the budget is tight.
We are spending billions trying to save salmon while refusing to spend hundreds of thousands to remove the animals that are eating them.
WA can learn a lot from Texas and the free market
Let’s look at what Texas actually accomplished and ask whether we’re getting the best results for what we’re paying.
Texas proves you don’t need a government mandate to build renewables at scale. You need a competitive market. Cheap land. Fast permitting. Falling technology costs. Federal incentives that every state already has access to. And a willingness to let developers move when the economics make sense.
Eastern Washington has the sun, the land, and the infrastructure to support far more solar than 0.27 gigawatts. Rural counties east of the Cascades could be collecting lease revenue and growing their tax base. Working families could be benefiting from new jobs instead of paying carbon surcharges on their gas bills.
The barriers are largely permitting, interconnection, and political will. None of those requires the CCA. None of those require new taxes. They require getting out of the way and letting builders build.
Texas stumbled into clean energy abundance by accident. Washington could build it on purpose.
Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here.
