How to Be a Better Human - How Texas became America’s biggest producer of wind energy (from Speed & Scale)

Episode Date: October 16, 2025

This is the surprising story of how Texas – rich in oil and gas – became America's biggest producer of wind energy. For our first episode, Ryan and Anjali talk with Pat Wood, once George W. Bush��s right hand man and head of Texas's Public Utility Commission, to uncover the innovative approach that turned Texas into a renewable energy powerhouse. It’s a story about what could get done before partisan politics got in the way of good climate policy, and it shows that economic incentives for consumers, government, and companies can play a huge role in supercharging clean energy.For the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscriptsHow to Be a Better Human is nominated for the Signal Award for Best Advice & How To. Vote here!Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyou Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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It's possible here in Calgary, the Blue Sky City. Learn more at Calgary Economic Development.com. Hi, listeners. We want to share something special today. It's an episode from Ted's newest podcast, Speed and Scale. Something we always think about on our show is how to be a better human when the planet is facing an existential climate crisis. This show, Speed and Scale, is not your average climate podcast. Anjali Grover and Ryan Panchatram are sharing the stories of climate solutions that are actually working right now to address the climate

crisis. They go beyond the, hey you, individual consumer, have you heard of recycling, beat we always hear, and instead talk about the big ideas that scale up to change how our entire world works. We think this podcast can leave you feeling kind of hopeful, so we hope you enjoy this episode. And if you do enjoy it, subscribe to speed and scale wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Anjali. Hi, Ryan. Do you remember when Texas had that really bad storm a few years ago? I think so. Remind me what happened? You know, it was 2021, and I remember, I remember it so vividly because I was calling friends who lived in Houston, and they'd lost power. And what was crazy and just, they weren't alone, millions of other people had lost power.

I guess Texas is having blackouts because of how cold it is, which right now, I think it's seven degrees. I just woke up to a cold house because we have no power. It's Monday morning. And I think it's like in the 20s. and then tomorrow is supposed to be worse. When the power went out, people were really angry, and they wanted to find out why it happened, and especially who was at fault.

And it's important to know that Texas is powered mostly by natural gas, and of course it's got solar and wind and nuclear, but natural gas is the bulk of it. But Texas Republicans, including Governor Abbott, saw this as an opportunity to single out renewables as the cause for these blackouts. Some wind turbines went offline, and suddenly wind energy became,

the bad guy, when in fact, the natural gas plants, which provided most of Texas's electricity, weren't built to withstand the cold, and their equipment froze. So when they got hit, the grid got hit, big time. So natural gas let us down? That's right. But Republicans jumped on this opportunity to introduce a bunch of anti-renewable bills. But guess what? Almost none of them passed. Okay. How come? Well, because wind is big business in Texas. About a quarter is powered by wind. Anjali, Texas has the largest amount of wind energy in the United States. Wow. 25% of their grid is powered by wind?

How did that happen? Well, Ange, just wait. You're going to love this story. Hi, everyone. I'm Ryan Pinchot's room. And I'm Anjali Grover. Welcome to Speed and Scale, a podcast from TED. This is the show where we focus on the best strategies to tackle climate change. We know the headlines are scary. We know climate change can feel overwhelming.

This is the show that cuts through the fear to face things head on. We'll dig into the obstacles we're up against. We'll celebrate the winds and we'll talk to people in unexpected places. All while focusing on the things that we can speed up and scale up. Speaking of which, in 2021, we helped write the book, Speed and Scale. It lays out an action plan for solving our climate crisis. We spoke to a bunch of people, including climate experts and industry leaders. We wanted people to hear what we were hearing, that there's still opportunities out there to draw down emissions.

And for a quick explainer, when we say emissions, we're talking about greenhouse gases that trap heat in our atmosphere. Gases like carbon, methane, and nitrous oxide. They come from a variety of sources like driving your car or growing the food you eat. And they're often grouped together under one umbrella term, carbon emissions. Yeah, and these carbon emissions are so massive, they are measured in gigatons. One gigatone is about 2.2 trillion pounds. A gigatone is a lot. So if we're serious about making a dent in this problem, the gigatons are what we're after.

In this show, we've mapped out where the gigatons of pollution are coming from, and we're bringing you the most impactful solutions to tackle climate change at scale. We're starting with electricity, because it's the single largest source of emissions worldwide. Then we're going to tackle deforestation, transportation, carbon removal, and so much more. Today we're bringing you a story about the U.S. power grid, because the power grid alone generates a quarter of the United States carbon emissions. And we're going to go to a place that I never expected. Texas. The state that epitomizes oil and gas is now the biggest producer of wind in the U.S. Let me repeat that. The biggest producer of wind in the United

States is Texas. So how did a deep red Texas turn, well, you could say a shade of green? Okay, Ryan, what's the deal with Texas? Did it really turn green? Well, Angie, I needed to find that out myself. So I called around and I got introduced to Pat Wood. This is the guy in charge of Texas's Public Utility Commission, or PUC for short. This is the agency that regulates utilities. And, Ange, this guy was really cool. Like cool for a regulator or cool, cool, cool? Like, like, cool, and I wanted to talk to him because back in the 90s, he was the guy who helped write the policy that actually required Texas to build renewable energy.

But I also wanted to talk to him because he started out not wanting to do anything with renewable energy. The guy grew up close to the town where oil was discovered. And then his boss was former Republican president, George W. Bush. So I kind of walked into this interview not knowing what to expect. How does this guy become responsible for bringing wind to Texas? And Anjali, it turns out Pat has had a long relationship with energy, something that started out when he was just a kid. My grandfather was the head of the Gulf Oil Refinery.

in Port Arthur for my whole life. I was Tom Hogan's grandson, and my grandmother Hogan would, we'd drive through the plants. This was before the Clean Air Act went into place, and she go, that's good old bread and butter. And I just, I never understood that

until I was old enough to understand bread and butter meant money. But it was like, I don't smell like red, and it sure doesn't smell like butter. Smells like kind of noxious sulfur. But, you know, just growing up there, I assumed every town had their own refinery. I mean, it's one of those things I would just never understand when my friend Jeff would come over from San Mateo. And I always would ask, well, where's y'all? What's your refinery? What, you know, what brand are y'all?

It's like, are y'all golf or Texaco or mobile? It's just like, we don't have a refinery. We're in California. I'm like, oh, well, that's weird. That is so Texan. It's so endearing his relationship with energy. Yeah. I think it makes sense, like why Texans are so connected to it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. But what's the true? turning point. When does Pat go from daydreaming about refineries to scaling of wind? Yeah, so when Pat was in his 30s, he was nominated by the governor, George Bush, to be the head of

the Texas Public Utility Commission. In other words, he's the guy in charge of Texas electricity. And that's where he first heard about wind. Well, in those days, I would be down in Governor Bush's office every, say, three weeks or so to ask him advice about something. And one day I was in his office talking about something else and I walked out the door and back in those days you wore ties and I had course suspenders because it was the 90s and I was a Republican yuppie and so it was just kind of the thing but I remember walking out that door like it was yesterday and Bush goes hey wood and yes sir we like wind and I looked at him I was like what he goes you heard me now go get smart on it. So I was just like, honestly depressed because I was like, wind. I mean, that's like

Birkenstock and Volvo driving people in California. What do I have to do with that? So what did Pat have to do with that? Well, so Pat is now on this quest to make wind energy an important player on the Texas grid. And it turns out Texas had a law that guided Pat in the right direction. This 95 law said that the utilities have to consult their customers about energy issues. And to do this consultation, utilities have this tool called deliberative polling. And what it does is let's educate people about the issues and ask them their opinion after they're informed of all the pros and cons.

So what it was was a three-day weekend, like Friday, Saturday, Sunday, 260 some odd customers were there, learning about the issues, beautiful cross-section of Texas, and age and diversity and ideology. I participated in it as a panelist for big groups, small groups. In some of these rooms, there was a one-way glass that I could look through. It was fascinating. I mean, just to see Texas at its best and rawest talking through all these issues that was like the real world. Anjali, this is so cool.

Deliverative polling is this technique where you get to bring a group of people together and have them debate and learn and then ultimately ask them how they feel about an issue. Yeah, it feels strangely democratic. It feels right like it's the way it's supposed to all work. Honestly, I don't think it happens as often as it should. The funny thing that came out of this, Ryan, was that of all the things that were polled,

two things really stood out and rose to the top. One was energy efficiency. customers really got and understand the need for conservation. And then the second thing, which was the course, the total shock to me, was renewable energy. Customers in Texas, uniformly in every section of the state, said they loved renewable energy. That's amazing. Do you have any stories or examples of maybe one of the customers? I distinctly remember walking outside.

of the deliberative poll one day. And an older man, I remember his name was Jim. I don't remember his last name, was out there having a cigarette. And I said, what are you thinking about things, Jim? And he got that finger and he put it on my chest with that smoke blowing in my eyes right under his hand. He said, Pat, we got to clean up the goddamn air.

It needs to be cleaned up and we need to get more of this renewable energy. And I thought, man, it could be any better. said than from smoking Jim in Beaumont, Texas, it was just one of those moments you'll never forget. We need some more goddamn renewable energy. Ryan, love that. I really needed to know how did Jim get so convinced that renewable energy was important? What made him embrace it?

It's something that hit Jim and me being from Southeast Texas pretty clearly that, you know, energy is absolutely essential to our way of life. And I would look at what resonated with people is the renewable energy is here. It's Texan. It's blowing from God's breath and his shining off his face. That's coming to us for free. Aren't we smart enough to take something free and do something good with it? And I really do think that that kind of resonates with people on all parts of the political spectrum is it's about the technology and the joy of embracing something that is new and is positive and it's free. And gosh, why can't we figure that out? And so we did. And what did you do with the results? At the end of this, I reported the data to the

governor. What do you say? He said, well, what do you think? he said he put those glasses on and looked over it closely and got to the bottom and looked over those glasses because there was those little half glasses so he kind of looked up you've probably seen him do this as president and he said Woody told you and he just laughed that laugh he does and I said well gosh he goes well this needs to be in our bill I said well what he goes because they want conservation they want renewable energy, that needs to be in our bill. So that's when I went out to figure out what did we do about both.

So what did Pat do about both? What happened? Well, it was a lot simpler than I thought. Pat took all this information and he put it into an energy bill, and it made utilities use a certain amount of renewables. Senate Bill 7, signed by Governor George W. Bush in 1999, set up the Renewable Portfolio Standard Program, which said the state wants to add 2,000 megawatts of renewable energy over the next 10 years. So just like that, they pass a bill. No political drama?

I guess there's always political drama, but Texas got this done before New York, before even California. That's insane. I'm still confused, though, as to why Bush signed this into law. I know. So I asked him this exact question. For George Bush, the governor, what were his motivations? Because in a lot of ways, this took, I imagine, some political capital to do. And so from his point of view, share what his motivations were. Governor Bush grew up in Midland, Texas. And Midland is really a very windy spot.

I go there now and again, and it is a hair-blowing-back kind of place. You get off the airplane, and there's just a lot of wind. And so he knew that that was a really vibrant resource, that that could actually be captured into electricity. So he knew that just kind of intrinsically as a West Texan. Bush's instincts obviously were driven by the politics of Texas, which are he's a Republican governor, but he's got kind of a split Senate and a Democratic House. So a lot of stuff got done toward the middle, on education, on prisons, on tax reform, and on energy issues. What was the moment when that bill passed, to see that mandate passed in Texas?

What did that mean to you? You know, it's funny. It wasn't a passion of mine. Renewable energy was not virtuous or all these other things that were, I think, have been attributed to it. I cared about it because I've got this penchant to care about people getting discriminated against. And this was a new industry and a new technology that was being kind of elbowed to the side by the big gas, big coal, and nuke in the traditional utilities. And it's just like, don't.

I mean, that's just not who we are. We don't pick on new people. We invite them to the party. So let's level that plan field so these guys can compete. Honestly, Ryan, it wasn't this victory of clean versus traditional. It just was that a new technology got a chance to win or lose based on its merits. And, boy, did they ever win. So the renewable energy standard got things started, but how did the renewables win, as you say?

When did the wind and solar revolution really take off? The real boom started in about 2001 and 2, and wind was just trucking full speed ahead in its lane. because it saw this wide-open opportunity in Texas. A lot of land, easy to interconnect, no need to get a regulatory permit, great wind resource, and boom, it just took off. Solar was probably a decade later, and then batteries, which I'm doing now for my day job,

is probably a decade behind that. And so each of those have started off expensive and then gotten cheaper, dramatically cheaper, over kind of short period of time and gotten to the point where wind and solar now are the two cheapest ways to produce electricity. And, I mean, that happened in, what, 25 years, Ryan? That's pretty phenomenal.

This is amazing. One thing I'm missing about all of this is when you generate power, you still have to find a way to transmit it. So how do they do that? I definitely asked them about that, and Texas had a solution. a brilliant one. So wind is ramping up, solar is ramping up, but how does the state deal

with transmission? Does it pass more policies? I mean, you have to get all of this energy from the rural, windy, sunny areas to where people live. The transmission expansion is a very important piece. I'm glad you identified that because if we don't expand the transmission, we don't get there. So in 2005, the state-wide, who I was friends with, David Swinford, called me up and said, hey, Pat, I've got this idea. We're building a lot of kind of great wind facilities in kind of B-minus places on the grid. When we've got all this A-plus wind that's just sitting there trapped,

and so we're going to figure out where those A-plus areas are and build the infrastructure to get there. So basically, the short story on that is, if you build it, they will, We called it Field of Dreams. From 2007 to 2013, the transmission project was built, $7 billion to connect about 18,000 megawatts of new resources. So the entire West Texas grid effectively got beefed up. This is so critical. Basically, what Pat was saying is that they went and found the windiest places and said,

And we're going to first build power lines there. And by doing that, it incentivize companies to build right next to them. And just like he said, if you build it, they will come. I'm sure I sound like a broken record, Ryan, but I can't believe how logical this is. They were thinking ahead. It's shockingly rare. It was incredible planning. It was so logical.

But it was also expensive. You know, this cost Texans about $300 each. So I was shocked that there was enough political capital for this plan to pass. So I asked him, politically, how on earth did this get passed? Rick Perry was governor and understood the importance of developing our own resources here. The return by having lower cost renewable electricity on our grid would pay for the $7 billion investment. five times over in 10 years. So that's like putting down a nickel to get a quarter.

It was very non-ideological. It certainly wasn't wrapped in what is kind of now today become this renewables or left and, you know, polluting fossil fuels are right. It was better for Texas customers who were paying their bills. And oh, by the way, it happened to be better for the air. And oh, by the way, it happened to be better for technology too. but at the beginning, it was better for the wallet.

So that's a twist. I was thinking it was just going to be some huge money suck, but it actually is an investment that makes a ton of sense. It has real returns. Totally. So much of this financially was the way to go. Okay, but to be fair, this must have also taken some handholding. Like wind and solar couldn't have just started up on their own.

There must have been some upfront costs. And that's why I thought Pat might have had another motive. Do you think of yourself as a climate activity? being responsible for the largest deployment of clean energy? I absolutely do not think of myself as a climate activist. I mean, that's just not, I would not, you could name 20 things, titles. I wouldn't get that in my top 20. Pat, what are you?

Oh, gosh. I mean, I don't, if you're asking me stuff, I've never been asked in my entire life. Wow, let me just think about that question, Ryan, because I'm going to get it right. What am I? I'm a kid who grew up where a lot of injustice happened. Yeah, I grew up in a town where we, in 1970, we desegregated the public schools. And my parents were very involved in the desegregation movement from the supportive side. And, you know, some of people in our town moved to all white cities nearby or places where their kids wouldn't have to go to school.

school with minority kids. And, you know, I was taught my church and by my parents that that's not what Jesus would do. So we stayed in Port Arthur and, you know, I grew up in a very diverse environment and I love that. And I think that's formed who I am. And it's formed my opinions about, you know, we benefit so much more by having a lot of different voices at the table and a lot of different technologies and players around the table, that's what makes us strong. So that's kind of who I am. You know, I guess I'm a social justice warrior of my own type.

I laugh at that term thinking of like AOC and those kind of people. But, you know, at the end of the day, I think all the things that I tried to do as a regulator that are having, I think, beneficial impact today derived from the fact that I was hell-bent to implement the statute that required non-discrimination. And that's what got us where we are today. So I think if you had to say, what am I, today I'm just a lawyer who tried to do what the law told me to do

on being non-discriminatory. And so, again, the virtue of this whole story is that the renewable energy happens to be the cheapest energy. And so thank you, God, for that win-win you gave us because we're going to take it to the mat and go all the way. And, you know, I think we have here. And I think the rest of the country can do the same. Ryan, to be honest, I really didn't.

think that you were going to tell me anything I didn't know. But I just, I'm reeling. I can't believe this happened in the 90s. I can't believe it happened in Texas. I can't believe it happened under a Republican governor that would go on to become a Republican president. I know. This like totally shatters every stereotype or preconception of where clean energy gets deployed the best. Seriously. I totally would have expected this to happen in California someplace else. This really turns my world upside down. The other thing that I really can't believe, and Ryan, we work in climate day and day out, how on earth have we not heard this story? That's a great question. Why didn't we hear about this? And I think it's because this has become such a partisan issue. That's the loudest

voice in the room. And to be quite honest, you just have to go look at the data. And the data itself is what cuts through. So I'm still wondering, because Ryan, you started looking out for a story that brought down emissions from the grid. So did Texas succeed in doing this? It absolutely did. Their deployment cut emissions from the grid by over a quarter. Wow. I'm speechless.

And you've got to remember, Ange, Texas was growing that entire time. This, to me, feels like the most unexpected part of the whole story. So Texas scales up wind and it reduces fossil fuels needed for the grid. That's just so incredible. But Ryan, something's not checking out.

Texas is an oil and gas state. So what about all that oil and gas? That's not going away, is it? That's right. Texas has got a ton of oil and gas, and unfortunately, they're drilling more and building more petrochemical plants. So when you look at Texas's overall CO2 levels, not just from the grid, those have been going up. And so Texas has a lot of work to do on electrifying its transportation and cleaning up its industry. But I do think at the end of the day, this is a story about opportunity. You know, I was struck by just Pat's hunger and mentality, right? You build it, they will come.

And somewhere along the way, renewables became a polarizing political topic. But at that point, they were too profitable to go away. It proves I think that clean energy is both a smart business decision and a smart climate decision. I think Texas did so many things right. And their playbook was simple. Add renewables to the grid and then make sure you connect them. Find the windiest places, find the sunniest places. These are things other states can easily copy.

And I did a little research, and I found that 32 states have standards like what Texas put into place. So just 18 more to go? Speed and Scale is a podcast from 10. It's hosted by me, Angela L. Grover, and Ryan Pinchotzerum. The episode was produced by Sarah Craig from Pushkin Industries. Production support from Tully Emlin. This show is edited by Van Ben Chang, and our fact checkers are Julia Dickerson, Kate Williams, and Jen Nam. The show is sound designed and mixed by Hansel She.

Our executive producers are Daniela Balerozo and Consanza Gallardo. Special thanks to Jonathan Mallow and Roxanne High Lash. Calgary, also known as the Blue Sky City. We get more sunny days than anywhere in the country, but more importantly, we're the Canadian capital of Blue Sky Thinking. This is where bold ideas meet big opportunity, where dreams become reality. Whether you're building your career or scaling your business, Calgary is where what if, turns into what's next. It's possible here in Calgary, the Blue Sky City.

Learn more at Calgary Economic Development.com. This Friday, I'm an angel. See the wings? Don't miss the new comedy Good Fortune, starring Seth Rogen, Aziz Ansari, and Keanu Reeves. Critics rave. It's heaven sent. You have a budget, guardian angel?

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