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Is Wind Power In Texas Under Attack? Plus: A Population Boom In The Lone Star State

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Is wind power in Texas under attack?

On This episode of "Texas Matters":

  • The Texas population boom.
  • The shrinking White population (9:00).
  • Wind power is clean, cheap and under attack (20:40).

Texas Population Boom

Over the past decade, Texas has seen incredible growth. In 2007, the state population was almost at 24 million. Today, it stands at over 28 million — and the forecast is more growth. The state's population is expected to double in size by 2050, at 54.4 million. 

A recent Pew Trust report out this week says Texas, and other fast growing states, need to prepare for their exploding populations.

Matt McKillop, who manages the Pew Trust’s research for Fiscal 50, a resource that helps policy makers gain insight into economic and demographic trends, joins us to discuss the report.

Demographic Shift 

Looking deeper into population shifts, the overall U.S. population is getting less white, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Deaths now outnumber births among white people in more than half of the states in the nation, and the already recognized trend of a coming White minority is coming sooner than first predicted.

Rogelio Saenz is a demographer at the Univeristy of texas at San Antonio and the co-author of a report out this week that looks at this pattern, “White Death Exceed Births in a Majority of U.S. States – a census data brief by the Applied Population Lab.”

Clean Wind Power Under Attack

Texas is going to need more electric power to deal with the arrival of it’s new population. And the good news is that Texas has plenty of power — and it’s green.

Wind power continues to expand across Texas and it’s gaining an increasing share of the state’s power grid, producing 17.4 percent of the state’s electric juice in 2017, with more than a $1 billion in investments on the way. But despite this success — or perhaps because of it — there is in an increase in misinformation about wind power on social media and in the public square.

Jeff Clark, the president of the Wind Coalition of Texas, joins our discussion.

David Martin Davies can be reached at dmdavies@tpr.org or on Twitter @DavidMartinDavi

David Martin Davies can be reached at dmdavies@tpr.org and on Twitter at @DavidMartinDavi