Turning coal mines into solar farms sounds so smart, it’s almost hard to believe that it’s happening in the United States under President Trump. But late last month, construction began in Texas on a 1.2 gigawatt solar farm that will be one of the largest clean energy projects in the country and the biggest solar project built on a brownfield site in North America. It will start producing power a year from now, and will also include 1.6. gigawatt-hours of battery storage.
This $1.7 billion project is groundbreaking, as is another one forthcoming in the same state: The world’s largest carbon removal plant will open at the end of the year.
There are caveats in both cases. The surface coal mine and adjacent coal-fired power plant in Bremond, which sits between Dallas and Houston, will continue operating alongside the new solar farm. And many environmental experts are skeptical of carbon removal as a realistic solution to the climate crisis.
But there’s no doubting this much: Texas is a national leader in renewable energy, and has been so for decades. It’s first in wind power—by a long shot—and second in solar power generation, behind only California. It generates enough power from solar to power the equivalent of half the homes in the state.
In its enthusiasm for wind power, Texas, which Trump won even more convincingly in 2024 than he did in 2016 and 2020, couldn’t be more at odds with the president. He has had a weird vendetta against wind power ever since the early 2010s, when a wind farm was built near one of his golf courses in Scotland—ruining the view, in his opinion. He claims that all renewable energy is part of the Democrats’ “Green New Scam,” and he’s wildly exaggerated the impact of wind turbines on whales and birds.
Now, in his second term, Trump has ramped up his war on wind power. His Defense Department invented completely bogus national security concerns to justify delaying more than 150 onshore wind farms (a federal judge last week ordered the administration to lift the freeze). The administration, with appalling disregard for our futures and our tax dollars, is also paying companies billions of dollars to abandon wind farm projects, which if built would have, according to a Senate investigation, powered millions of homes and created tens of thousands of jobs (not to mention averted huge quantities of carbon emissions).
Texas is not following suit. It may be Trump country, but it’s also Green Energy country—a paradox that has a fascinating history.
Texas, being an extremely sunny and windy place, has an ideal natural landscape for renewables. Midland is famous for oil wealth, but in the early twentieth century it was known as “Windmill City,” as nearly every house had a windmill in its yard. But natural resources alone don’t explain everything. People must make decisions and lead, and at the end of the twentieth century one of those people was a Midland native, Republican governor, and future president.
Like his father, George W. Bush was a market-based environmentalist. He didn’t support renewable energy out of concerns over air pollution or global warming, but because he saw how much money there was to be made in the industry. “I didn’t use climate change to get the state of Texas to go forward,” Michael Osborne, who co-founded the Texas Renewable Energy Industries Association, told the Houston Chronicle last year. “I used the green that Republicans relate to.”
Bush signed a bipartisan bill that broke up the local electricity monopolies and mandated that the state install more renewable energy. Under his successor, the far more conservative Rick Perry, the wind boom really took off. In 2005, Republican legislators set 20-year goals for renewable energy—and blew past them by 2010. Since then, wind energy in Texas has more than quadrupled.
In the Trump era, some Republicans in the state legislature have tried to mess with Texas’s green energy sector. Last year, they attempted to limit the development of renewable projects, but failed. This year, they proposed a quota to protect fossil fuels, as the renewables share of the state’s future electricity generation reaches 70 percent. But in Texas, 60 percent of Republican voters support renewables, and not even the oil and gas industry opposes them; after all, that industry uses renewables to power its own operations—to save money.
This is not to say that Texas is a climate policy paradise. It simply is following the Bush template: monetizing all the state’s abundant natural resources. Texas isn’t forcing the phase-out of coal or other fossil fuels, instead pursuing an “all of the above” energy policy, and they’ve been welcoming to data centers. But this approach has strengthened the argument that all new forms of energy are welcome, with the result that renewables don’t have serious opposition, even in a state that normally loves a culture war.
No serious opposition, that is, except from the Trump administration, which has delayed 54 wind projects in Texas as part of its national freeze. The president’s war on wind has been criticized by conservative Texans, who see his moves as interfering in the free market—and with their values and economic interests. Former GOP state Representative John Davis, a Trump voter who has seven wind turbines on his ranch, told the Chronicle that wind energy was a “conservative idea” and that he was frustrated with Republicans who have abandoned it: “Their own voters are rural Texans, and it’s hurting their own voting base.”
Renewable energy makes practical sense in rural places all over the country, where people are struggling with high energy bills yet have abundant access to sun and wind. If Republicans nationally continue to back Trump’s weird vendetta against wind it could hurt them in Texas but also in other conservative rural states. After all, the state that produces the second-most wind energy is Iowa, a famously important state in the presidential election calendar. And solar farms and battery storage on coal mines are not even unique to Texas, as similar projects are underway in Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and Louisiana.
Trump will never come around on wind. His mind is made up. But even red states whose Republican leaders have gone full MAGA can see the economic upside to renewables, and the profit motive is steadily proving more powerful than a dumb culture war. The voters, politicians, and businesspeople of Texas have understood this for many years, and it’s only a matter of time before their ideological brethren across the South and Midwest follow suit.
