Texans have lived for years with a looming energy crisis. Experts always saw it on the horizon and warned, periodically, of its arrival. The state was growing, they observed, and the electricity supply was not keeping up. When the reckoning came, it would come in the form of rolling blackouts. Such predictions often yielded reporting […]
They’re in over 6 million Texas homes. But if you want to get rid of them, you’ll have to pony up. We’re talking about smart meters — advanced electricity meters that communicate wirelessly with the grid. They’ve spread rapidly across the state since 2005, when the state legislature passed a law to fund and encourage […]
Millions of them have been installed in homes across Texas, but not everyone is happy about them. Smart meters, which allow allow utilities to respond to outages faster and help utilities and consumers monitor their energy use, have been deployed across much of the state at the urging of the state’s Public Utility Commission (PUC). […]
The luxury electric car company Tesla announced plans today to rapidly expand its network of “super-charging stations” across the country, including a number of spots in Texas. But the company still can’t sell to consumers in Texas directly, despite a strong effort to lobby state lawmakers to change the rules. The charging stations are meant to allow […]
I’m as annoyed as the next guy by reductionist cliches about about our state. But sometimes they feel so good, like air conditioning on a hot Texas summer day. Air conditioning. It’s as Texas as cowboy hats and high school football. But, as we noted ast week, it’s also partially responsible for Texas’ impending electricity […]
Watch In Austin, Charged up About Smart Power on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour. If you’re a Texan interested in green building, smart grids and solar panels, there’s probably no better place to see them in action than the Pecan Street Research Institute in Austin’s Mueller neighborhood. That neighborhood, just northeast of downtown Austin, is […]
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