Why is Big Oil is more influential in California than Texas

[dsummersminet at comcast.net]

Doug's post on conservative positions started me thinking about something. 
Of the two energy sources agreed to as green by the full spectrum of folks:
solar and wind, we find that California has been lagging well behind Texas.

For example, I compiled the following list from

http://www.awea.org/projects/

	    cal	 texas nation
2005         68	  672	
2006        212   774	
2007        63   1398	
2008 q1     45 	  790	
total     2439	 4354   18303
beingbuilt 290   1998    5736


We see that Texas has almost twice the wind energy of California and that
the total of what's been built from Jan 1 2005 to March 31, 2008 and the
present contruction is 9 times larger for Texas than California.  Yet, I've
read may posters here say that it's the manipulation of the big powerful
energy companies, not market forces, that determine what gets built and
what doesn't.

So, my question is why is California so much more under the thumb of Big
Oil than Texas?  It follows from that arguement, right, since Texas has
built and is building about 6 GW of wind power since 2005 and California
has only managed less than 700 MW.  

Now one might argue that California's photovoltic initiative means that
large scale (GW) installations of solar photovoltic power is just being
done instead of wind, but as we see at


http://tinyurl.com/4pwbhf

California has installed a lot more wind energy than solar over the last 5
years or so.  In fact the record total of solar energy capacity over the
past year in the US has been less than 150 MW....which is about 10% of the
first quarter of '08 for wind. 

And, the big wind symposium will be held right down the road from me...in
Houston the first week in June.

So, my question is, given the fact that California is far more liberal than
Texas, how did this happen? 

Dan M.

(Yes, this post is tounge-in-cheek, but I think it is a valid use of the
reasoning that the use of alternative energy is determined by whether an
area is dominated by Big Oil).



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