alt Hacker NewsWest Texas is like Costco for natural gas.
There are cases where the fields can produce more than the pipelines can carry away. If you put your gigantic gas turbines right next to the fields you can obtain access to some extremely cheap fuel. They might even pay you to burn it sometimes. Negative gas prices are a thing.
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sidewndr46 • today at 7:38 PM
Replace "extremely cheap" with "zero cost" and you've got it correct. Texas at night is an endless sea of flare stacks. We burn off an unbelievable amount of natural gas just to get rid of it.
gnerd00 • today at 4:17 PM
West Texas is also a basket of methane leakage -- see CarbonMapper et al
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And despite that, when there's any sort of price pressure, like there is for new electricity grid additions from investors, solar and batteries completely dominate the choice over natural gas in Texas.
Look at the map for 2026 of the grid buildout in Texas at the bottom of this page:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67205
All solar and batteries (yellow and black), with a few tiny blue dots for gas. It was the same story in 2025. And it will be the same story in 2027 because solar and batteries are getting even cheaper.
These are all decisions from private investors, trying to make money, and choosing solar and batteries over gas in the market where gas is the cheapest in the world, gas is like a waste product that's hard to get rid of.
Why would Microsoft choose dirty energy when all the profit-driven investors are choosing cheaper solar and storage?