Why is Big Oil is more influential in California than Texas

[Ronn! Blankenship]

At 11:11 PM Sunday 5/11/2008, dsummersminet at comcast.net wrote:
>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?



Especially given that there is so much wind coming from the left coast.



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. . . ronn!  :)