Texas—yes, Texas—has the most clean energy jobs in the country

The IRA accelerated Texas’s clean energy expansion—but it didn’t start it. In the late 1990s, the state deregulated its energy market, allowing customers to freely choose their electricity providers, which included clean energy options like wind and solar. That, combined with the build-out of the state’s transmission lines in 2005 under then Governor Rick Perry to connect the sunny, windy expanses of West Texas to urban centers, meant that businesses and households could easily opt for cheap, renewable energy generated hundreds of miles away.

“Really, it’s been a process of over 20 years,” says Matt Boms, executive director of the Texas Advanced Energy Business Alliance, a clean energy trade group. “Renewables have definitely benefited from that kind of free market framework that Texas is famous for”.

This means that even under the previous Trump administration, Texas was already in the process of growing its carbon-free electricity generation infrastructure. Between 2012 and 2021, the state roughly doubled the amount of solar-generated electricity every year, going from 0.1 MWh to 14.9 MWh annually during that time span.

And the state’s energy demands are only poised to grow, due to the continued influx of both people and companies, including tech companies building energy intensive data centers. Everyone wants to keep the lights on and the servers running for the lowest cost possible.

Texas’s dual dominance in both clean energy and red-state politics is instructive in how a state can grow its carbon-free energy capacity regardless of where it falls on the political spectrum. “Energy is not inherently political,” says Boms. “These are just technologies. They’re not painted red or blue. This is long term, and driven by economics”.