Texas is already the largest oil and natural gas producing state, but it has potential to boost its vast energy economy further, by better harnessing its solar energy resources.
That’s the message of Solar Power International, organizers of a solar industry conference later this year, which today launched a statewide advertising campaign touting the potential of solar energy to create jobs and clean energy in the state.
The group says Texas, endowed with the richest solar resources in the nation, ranks first among states in solar resource potential and should do more to capitalize on the bounty.
The $6 billion U.S. solar industry employs 100,000 Americans, and that number is expected to grow to 500,000 by 2016, according to Solar Power International.
Texas’s solar industry, with 6,400 workers today, is among the 10 best states for projected job growth in the sector in coming years, the group says.
“Solar is a booming industry across the globe, and Texas is perfectly positioned to experience the
economic growth this industry can bring to any community it touches,” Brian Tully, Executive Director of Solar Energy Tradeshows, said in the announcement of the advertising campaign.
The advertising campaign, Solar: Business is Looking Up in Texas, is the first public awareness effort of its kind in the state and will highlight the industry’s potential to create new jobs in Texas. It comes ahead of Solar Power International’s 2011 conference in Dallas on Oct. 17-20.
And I’ll start a unicorn ranch and a fairy-dust mine. Those are also excellent and realistic alternative energy sources. We can run our homes on unicorn milk and our jet packs on fairy dust! Get real. This “green” alternative nonsense is a fairly tale right now. Electric cars that go 40 miles and then require an 8 hour charge. Yeah, that’ll be viable in Houston.
Question, What happens when those expensive solar panels are destroyed by a hurricane? Our traditional system leaves us in the dark for 2-3 weeks after a major hurricane. How long will it take to replace thousands of solar panels? And the clean up costs?
It is simply not yet viable. Keep it in the lab until you can make it work.
Why does the Chronicle continually push boutique energy sources that will do NOTHING to meet our energy needs?
What do we need? CHEAP ENERGY. I know certain wack-a-doo liberals will call me a fascist republican because I like cheap oil, but to be honest I like ANY cheap energy source. Economies simply do not grow when energy costs too much. One reason why America became an economic powerhouse was due to cheap energy.
We need to keep developing natural gas, nuclear, and petroleum-based energy. Obama and the tree-huggers will turn us into a Third World country, and do it on purpose. Of all people, the Chicoms have taken our energy model and become a global powerhouse. But hey, we have Facebook and iPhones, right?
yes Bill in Houston, obama wants nothing more than to turn the US into a third world country. did you hear that? that was the sound of any semblance of creditibility you may have had flying out the window.
Still can’t make plastic out of solar.
KB, the article is about making ELECTRICITY from solar power. Not plastics. Oil is a great feedstock for plastics. But the electricity used to process and manufacture that feedstock can certainly come from solar energy. Your comment is off-base.
Bill in Houston: “chicoms”? You must be joking. You accuse our president of having a “third world” mentality with respect to energy policy. What about your “third world” mentality with respect to humanity? Your post is absurd, most of yours are.
The fact is that the future of solar energy in Texas has nothing to do with Washington, California, or China. Your elected politicians in Austin and your big energy companies in Houston are the ones that will decide which energy sources we use for ELECTRICITY in this state.
ERCOT (our electricity market) is effectively an island. The deregulated market structure and the ratepayer-subsidized transmission lines to connect wind and solar-rich West Texas to the big cities spell a big win for renewables in this state over time.
Solar costs are coming down, coal and nuclear costs are going up. Natural gas will continue to provide the bedrock of our energy market. But when the wind blows, it already powers 20% of the state’s electricity load in the spring and fall. The sun rises every day. It makes sense.
Progress is why we switched from coal to oil after the Industrial Revolution. It’s why we’ll move from oil to natural gas, by far an environmentally superior fossil fuel. And progress is why we’ll move from large scale nuclear to small scale fuel cell, and to renewable and stored energy systems. Ready to move forward?
Bill Gates spoke at a renewable energy conference last week, and he spent most of his talk touting nuclear.
Wind and solar is nice, but it will never provide enough electricity to be anything more than a supplement.
And for economic growth, an economy must have a source of energy that is cheap and abundant. If that does not exist, then a third world economy could very well be an unintended consequence.
Cass Sunstein, a close advisor to Obama who has been much vilified by the far right for some of his radical eccentric views, has done a cost/benefit study of combating global warming, and the condensed version of his findings is the cost to our economy of fighting global warming is not worth the damage it will do.