All right. Thank you, sir. All right. Wow. I think I first started working with you guys in 2011, 2012, and it's been an extraordinary journey. So I really want to thank you. I had a bunch of stuff I wanted to say, but Ricky flummoxed me because his speech was so amazing. And look, I agree with him 100%. I mean, I have always interacted with people believing that they had good intentions, and you know, it screwed me over a lot. But I think my karma is more positive as a result, and so I continue to act that way, and I continue to do that, and I think it's an important thing to do.
I just wanted to give you guys a few facts as you go into your lobby day. I think there's going to be question cards and stuff, so I'm going to keep my remarks short and then go to questions to all of you. So let me know if you have questions. A couple of big things, right? I think that when we started together on this journey almost 15, 16, 17 years ago for me, what we found was that a lot of the things that we were pushing for needed financial support, right? They needed tax credits. They needed grant funding. They needed R&D. They needed lots of things. Right today, I just want to make sure that everyone really understands that 94% of everything we added to the grid last year was clean, right? And the state that led the way with all of that was Texas, right?
And I want to make sure that people really understand this because I feel like sometimes we get wrapped up in our own narrative and don't quite understand other people's narratives. The state of Texas had a catastrophic event with Winter Storm Uri in 2021, right? I mean, people died from a lack of electricity and, you know, freezing to death, really, right? In that time from 2021 till today, 90% of everything that got added to the Texas grid was basically solar and battery storage with a little bit of wind, right? And so today, the Texas grid is almost 20% battery storage, right? And so when you compare that to the PJM, which is in the news every day about being the most dysfunctional group in the country, they are at less than 0.5% battery storage, right?
And so when you think about what's going to allow Texas to have all this economic growth, which, you know, regardless of what people tell you about being anti-data centers or pro this or pro that, the governor of a state is always the champion for economic development of that state, right? That's it, right? So when you think about what Texas has done for itself, it is using clean energy to be able to ramp up economic development in their state, right? And you see the same thing in Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Minnesota, all sorts of states, right? And so I want to make sure people understand that it's not incentives that, you know, cause us to do this now. It's now the fact that we have 300,000 trained people, many of them union, that actually get this stuff deployed. They figure out how to get the permits. They figure out how to do this. I was just on the Landman podcast.
Lord Almighty, did you know that 50% of their entire revenue base is now negotiating leases for solar and wind, right? You wouldn't know that from that TV show. So, you know, I just want to make sure that everyone understands just how far we've gone on the technology side. The next piece of it is that when you think about how many people have backup power in this country, it's about 15% of all households that have paid for backup power, right? And today, for the first time, the number one choice that people are making are batteries, not backup diesel or natural gas generators. Why? Because it actually has a payback, right? If you put in diesel or natural gas, that's just a cost, right? If you put in a battery, the utility oftentimes will now pay you $75 to $150 a month to borrow that battery to help level the grid, right? So that's you protecting your family and being helpful to your neighbor, right? And that's because the technologies for batteries since we got together in 2011 has gone down from $1,000 a kilowatt-hour to just $75 a kilowatt-hour, right? That's all of you. So I just want to make sure that you guys continue to understand that we're winning because our technologies and our solutions are actually better.
So last year, globally, right, we added about 800 or so terawatt-hours of electricity growth globally, and all of that came from solar, wind, and a little bit of new nuclear in China, right? All of it, 100% of all growth in electricity consumption globally — India, China, Brazil, South Africa, Africa — came from solar, wind, and a little bit of nuclear. Fossil fuels actually went down by 30 terawatt-hours last year, right? And for all of those countries, this is not a subsidized thing, right? They don't have the money to subsidize it. This is because the technologies just outperform their competitors, right?
The last thing I want to say is that as you go on the Hill today, we have millions of Americans who are energy burdened, right? We have 7.5% rate increases in the state of New Jersey, most across the country for the last five years, right? So it's a lot, right? That means that electricity bills are more than 6% of their budget. And when you think about what the weatherization program does in this country, it provides roughly $300 million a year and it helps 10,000 homes a year. There's a million homes on a waiting list waiting for weatherization, and there's 30 million homes that qualify for weatherization but never bothered to get on a waiting list, right? And so part of the reason you're doing this is not because you know what people accuse you of, right? You're just trying to put a price on carbon and you're just trying to make everything more expensive and yada yada yada, right? You're doing this because this is the right way to help our neighbors, right?
And so I just want to make sure that everyone recognizes that yes, do not use that talking point. It's all permitting reform all the time. You know, stick to your talking points. But I just want to make sure that you understand the broader picture of what we're here for, right? I mean, I have worked my entire career on bringing the costs of all these technologies down, right? I have my own set of tools. Other people have their own strengths. We all work together to get that done. All of you in this room, all of us, right? But now those tools are available to be helpful to people, right? And that's why we did it. We didn't do it to enrich ourselves. We didn't do it because we thought the technology was cool — although actually some people thought it was just cool. But we did it because, you know, energy is the foundational part of the pyramid that allows people to flourish, right? Whether they want to teach in schools or they want to do art or they want to do whatever, access to affordable energy is what makes all of that possible. And so we are part of that effort, not just here in the United States, but those technologies have now gone across the world. So with that, I'll pause and see if there are questions. I don't know how the question card situation is happening, but...
Well, there's a couple of big things that have happened in Texas. One is they have a program called Connect and Manage. And what that means is when you try to install a large power project to the grid, they do two different checks. One is, is the power project safe to install, right? Is it safe to interconnect into the grid? Is it going to create weird harmonics? Is it going to take down the grid through just poor quality power? That check always gets done, and it's a pretty fast check. The second check that they do across the country is, you know, is there enough capacity on that transmission line for you to use it 8,760 hours a year. Texas foregoes that step and says, 'We're going to let you connect because you're safe. And if there's space, you'll be able to sell power, and if there isn't space, then you won't be able to sell power, and we'll just tell you not to, you know, not to do it.' And so they load up their lines more than everyone else does in the country. So in the country, our transmission lines are used 40-45% of the time. In Texas, they're more like 70% of the time because they load up the lines, right? And that you as an investor take that risk. If you are connecting to a line that everybody else and your neighbors have connected to as well, well then you might have to curtail when it's super sunny out or super windy out and, you know, other people are using the line, right? So that's how Texas has moved people much faster. And then they calculate every year how much clean energy and how much energy that they're wasting, and they build new transmission lines based on how much they're wasting, and so they can waste less. And so they've got a good system, but the regulations are also a lot lower. And so residential solar in Texas is about $1.90 a watt, whereas in Massachusetts it's really hard to get below $3 a watt.
