Texas Senate passes bill aiming to counter federal subsidies for wind and solar

Because this wisdom is wrong. Investment is buying non-liquid capital, and to some extent, an irreversible decision; while saving is pretty much keeping liquid capital (like money) on hand.

So if you invest (make an irreversible decision), you are taking a risk that the decision is wrong. Therefore, other players on the market, who save and not invest, can learn from and react to your decision. In other words, keeping options open by saving (and not investing) gives you an upper hand over people who do invest.

Of course, if everybody saves and nobody invests, everybody loses as well. It's a prisoner's dilemma of sorts.

In practice this often manifests by large corporations keeping large amount of savings on hand, so they could "invest" in smaller companies that are deemed to be winners. It's generally a better strategy than to invest themselves everything back into some cutting edge research and risk these investments won't pan out.

The basic macroeconomic wisdom ignores this dynamic (and the fact that fundamental difference between investment and saving is that one is irreversible and the other is reversible), and so it concludes that all money that is not consumed (savings) must always be invested.

It's an interesting question if Texas should require all turbines to have deicing capabilities which are almost never used.

So, gas and coal affected represented about 43+% of the total demand for energy. Coal piles froze and reduced capacity (shoveling wet coal frozen solid is hard). Gas pipes froze because of humidity in the pipes (removing water from gas takes energy). Both are preventable problems of course and commonly dealt with elsewhere.

Wind turbines were also affected. That too would have been preventable: weather proofed turbines exist and operate in both polar regions, Alaska, Greenland, Iceland, etc. and other places where what happened in Texas can happen any day of the year and does not count as remarkable weather and arguably should have been planned for in Texas where it is rare but not that rare for it to be cold once in a while.

The reason for this push for reducing subsidies is simple: wind and solar reduce the demand for more expensive gas and when that peaks, gas plants are not profitable and may even have to shut down temporarily. Coal is already past the point of being even close to credible as a cost effective alternative. It only survives with subsidies, tax benefits, and other forms of government support. Hence recent closures of coal plants across the US even in states where they actually mine coal. It's just too expensive even in places where they have every incentive to pretend otherwise.

Wind grows by the MWs of capacity per month in Texas currently. There is a massive investment in it everywhere and that has been going on for years in Texas. Likewise grid solar is also rapidly growing there. It's basically becoming the dominant source of energy. People adding subsidized solar on their roof also put power back in the grid during the most lucrative moments in the day.

This presents the dual problem of the grid having to pay for that (to buy it back from consumers) and reducing utilization of their expensive gas and coal plants at the same time. In peaker plant form, operating gas plants becomes even less attractive. Which is why expensive batteries are preferred instead. That's another thing that is growing rapidly in Texas. Batteries are expensive but still preferable to a gas plant that you don't operate most of the time that is really expensive to start and stop.

Gas and oil producers dominate politics in Texas because they are such an important part of the local economy. They prefer to let consumers pay for expensive dirty power as much as they can so they can milk the sunk investments of gas and coal plants a bit longer and so they can sell their gas to the electricity providers. So that is two powerful lobbies with a vested interest in the status quo and a big reason for why things are the way they are. For the same reason weather proofing never happened because that would make gas plants even more costly and thus less attractive.

Local politicians act in the interest of these powerful lobbies rather than consumers (who got some outrageous bills after the storm to pay for the mistakes by their own representatives). The interest of consumers would of course be lower prices and a cleaner grid (less pollution, reduce CO2 impact). But that directly affects the profitability of gas plants and gas producers. Even without clean energy subsidies this trend will continue of course. Of course when talking subsidies, you have to consider that a lot of that already benefits fossil fuel production and consumption whether it comes in direct form, or in the form of tax benefits, environmental legislation, etc. Cutting that would accelerate the demise of coal and gas plants even further. So, instead, politicians do their best to slow the growth of renewables. In the same way interconnecting the grids to the rest in the US is controversial in Texas because that puts locally expensive producers on the spot.