For those not in the know, Texas is trapped under a brutal heat and humidity dome, as high-temperature records were broken across the state. Meteorologist Ben Noll said that it was only hotter in "the Sahara Desert and Persian Gulf."

All this meant that Texans cranked up the air conditioning to 11 creating a record for energy demand in the state — 80,878 megawatts on June 27.

The only issue here was that Texas’s power grid breaks in the face of extreme weather, despite the fact it only has to look after Texas. The reason is mostly that its infrastructure is old and never seems to attract much in the way of investment.

But so far, the grid has held up this summer due to the fact that solar and wind farms set a new high water mark for renewable energy generation — 31,468 megawatts — on June 28, helping offset the 8,000 megawatts knocked offline at ailing natural gas and coal-fired plants.

Solar electricity has been a workhorse during the afternoon hours, fulfilling more than 15 per cent of the state's power needs during some of the most critical periods.

Texas is the leading state for wind power and No. 2 for solar, behind California, but it is trouncing all comers in building new solar and wind farms — and the third leg of the renewable energy triad: battery storage. "Mack truck-size" battery arrays, which step in when "power plants sputter," are "ideal for harnessing wind and solar energy," the Post reported, and they "played a crucial role in avoiding outages" in Texas.

More than 8,000 megawatts of battery storage will be installed by May 2024, which is "enough power to meet Texas’s backup needs.

However all this green goodness is coming with marked reluctance from the ruling GOP lawmakers.  They argue that wind and solar power are unreliable compared to power plants that run on fossil fuel. Oil and gas production is also a significant source of tax revenue for the state, as well as er “political contributions.”  Meanwhile, green initiatives are the sort of thing that lefties tend to talk about, particularly in association with global warming which conservatives don’t believe in. A small minority worry about using solar power because they are worried that the sun will run out whereas the oil supply is unlimited.

This past legislative session Republicans advanced a bill to kneecap wind and solar power through onerous permitting requirements, and they gave a boost to natural gas plants with special financial incentives.

If it had not been for the fact that 20 years ago Gov. George W. Bush (R) deregulated the state's energy market in 1999 and called for 2,000 megawatts of renewable energy to come online in the following decade, while his successor, Gov. Rick Perry (R), backed the multibillion-dollar push to put in the transmission lines from windy, sunny West Texas, the entire state would be BBQ by now.