In a state where for, as long as anyone can remember, growth has been heavily driven by fossil fuels, the shift to renewable energy is a big deal. And the pace of that change is a point of contention.
The established oil and gas community still has a lot of power in Texas, but a transition is coming – and what does that transition mean for the people in communities either eager to or forced to embrace it?
Andy Uhler is a research fellow at the University of Texas Energy Institute, and next month marks the debut of his new podcast documenting a year of travels across Texas, visiting communities and talking with Texans experiencing the energy transition firsthand.
He joined the Standard with a preview of what we can expect from “Phases and Stages: The Texas Energy Story.”
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Andy, you’re a lifelong Texan living in Austin these days. I notice you’re joining us from Houston, where you’ve been wrapping up some reporting for this series. What got you thinking about hitting the road and telling these stories in the first place?
Andy Uhler: It’s funny, I mean, it’s a lot of miles, traveling around Texas. But I just felt like, you know, I was doing all these panels. I was reading all these research papers, going to conferences about basically what the energy transition was going to look like in Texas.
And it felt like so much of what I was sort of surrounded by was forgetting one really important part of the equation, and that’s the people. And I also think that a lot of us in this space need to do better at giving some context for exactly the kind of stuff we’re talking about.
“Nobody knows what the truth is. I don’t know,” said Peggy Brown, a lifelong Texan. “I read one thing and then I read something else, and I’m confused half the time.”
She’s 90 years old. She lives out in Lexington. It’s about 60 miles east of Austin. And I actually met her, I was walking around town just asking folks what they remembered about the old Alcoa aluminum plant out there, which at one time in the 1950s, no doubt was the biggest aluminum plant in the country. It was decommissioned about 10 years ago.
So she was telling me that this part of Texas – and this is kind of the story that I was asking – she said, look, we’ve already been through an energy transition of sorts. Or at least she said, we’re in the middle of one because they’re transitioning away from that lignite coal. There was a big power plant out there that was powering that whole part of Central Texas. They’re now transitioning to a gas plant that they’re actually building on that same Alcoa site.
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And what about the pace of this transition? Those folks in Lexington probably didn’t see the writing on the wall at the time. But, you know, they’re dealing with the repercussions now. And depending on who you speak with – let’s be honest, what industry they work in – you’re probably going to hear a different answer.
You’re exactly right. There’s a lot of academics who are looking into how the workforce is going to have to change in Texas as a result of changing industries, and also the changing skills that are necessary for working in those industries.
But it’s really interesting to speak to the folks who are investing in the renewable and green energy space right now, because they’re hoping the transition is quicker than the folks who are kind of holding on to their oil and gas beds.
Now, I spoke with a guy named Dave Pruner. He’s the executive director of the Texas Entrepreneurship Exchange for Energy; they call it TEX-E. Now, he set up a nice little game for me. When we first started chatting, he kind of set things up, and I started asking him about the need to think about the future of the energy industry in Texas.
“Picture yourself with the fourth largest city in the world, a city that has grown to the point where it has an industry that literally every major company in that industry dominates the globe,” Pruner said. “And it’s a global capital. It exports its product to millions of customers all over the world.”
So it’s easy, right? It’s got to be Houston.
“That was Detroit in 1950,” Pruner said.
Now, look, I don’t think Pruner is predicting that Houston’s going to suffer the same exodus of jobs and population that Detroit has suffered since its heyday. But look, it’s a bit of a cautionary tale, right?
Well, Houston went through a real big downturn back in the 80s. The big oil bust. People still talk about it.
That’s exactly right. And funny enough, I was looking for a person to give me some of that Houston history – and not kidding you, a friend of a friend told me about a woman, Julie Cohn, who was writing a book about ERCOT and the electricity grid in Texas. So I thought, sure, why don’t I talk to her? Maybe she knows something about just sort of that old Houston history. She may not be the exact source that I’m looking for, but why not? Right. So then she hits me with this”
“From 1982 to 1990, I worked for the mayor of Houston. So during two major energy downturns, huge budget crises for the city of Houston and kind of a revamping on the part of the business community to position Houston as more than just an oil and energy hub – as a space hub, as a medicine hub, as a place that could be entrepreneurial for a lot of different industries,” she said. “So really, it was a very interesting time to have kind of a front seat to this shift in the local economy.”
So according to Houstonia Magazine, Houston lost more than 200,000 jobs between February of 1982 and March of 1987. And 1 of 8 Houstonians was unemployed because of that oil downturn. So then government officials tried to transition and diversify, and Cohn says it actually worked.
“Somebody once said people move to Houston to work. That’s its big appeal,” she said. “But to make Houston attractive to a younger generation, a younger workforce, you have to get it out of the past. You have to keep it moving forward.”
It honestly sounds like what they’re trying to do right now with the energy industry. Houston is actively rebranding itself away from the energy capital of the world to the energy transition capital of the world. And they’re putting municipal money behind the branding, and they’re holding conferences and meetings trying to get everybody on board.
Now, there’s still a whole lot of oil and gas money in Houston, but we’ll see how long that’s the case, right?
