R.I.P., Texas Oil - Here Comes the Sun

Inside the plot to make the Lone Star State a solar powerhouse.

By Bruce Sterling


The modern petroleum industry was founded in 1901 in Spindletop, Texas, and the subsequent century of gushers made Texas a byword for oil worldwide. Today the Lone Star State imports more crude than it exports, and 21st-century oil has become a byword for jihad. Thus Austin, a city governed not by oil people but by picky tech geeks, is looking for a better way to live.

With Texas oil barons ensconced in Washington, the capital of their home state should be free to pollute everything in sight. But that's not happening. Austin's most backward fossil fuel-burning power plant, a noisy, smelly relic, has been a persistent source of controversy. And the Environmental Protection Agency has called the city out for excessive smog, threatening its reputation as a livable high tech mecca. So in December, Austin announced its intention to become the clean energy capital of the world. If the mayor, city council, local power utility, and chamber of commerce have their way, by 2020 Austin will achieve record growth without adding to the atmosphere's CO2 burden.

Austin's gambit is a multidecade plan to pioneer industrial solar energy on only a few million dollars a year. The scheme is speculative, but the idea is to attract a crowd of alternative-energy startups and patent-spewing R&D outfits so as to make some bucks off something-or-other when, and if, it becomes practical. A zero-energy housing subdivision will serve as a demo, creating as much solar as it uses from all other sources, and all over town schools and libraries will be retrofitted with solar panels. If the plan works, 20 percent of the city's energy will be renewable, and 15 percent will come from enhanced efficiency by 2020.

A minute's work on the back of an envelope suggests that Austin's plan is a daring long shot. So far, solar satisfies a whopping 0.1 percent of the nation's energy requirement. It costs five times as much as fossil fuels - though it cost 50 times as much in the 1970s, so the trend line looks good. The silicon needed for solar panels is expensive, though not necessarily for Austin, a town full of vacant chip fabs since the tech bubble burst. But even if the whole city were paved in solar panels, it would take a wondrously smart and nimble utility to shuffle the resulting energy to meet demand. And there's a pressing need for a new business model. When a power company's customers become its producers, too, who pays for maintenance? Who inspects what? Who do you sue?

The rest at...

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.03/view.html?pg=4?tw=wn_tophead_10