The world’s largest solar thermal plant was just licensed ... in California. Texas has excellent solar potential and there is a fine resource here on the State Energy Conservation Office web site that provides an overview.
A gigawatt of electricity is worth $20,000 an hour at a deeply discounted wholesale rate. Such a plant would produce nearly $6 million a year in revenues for its operators.
Why don’t we have this sort of thing being built everywhere in Texas? Bad decisions like that are the result of bad policy. We need to fix that right now.
Large scale solar thermal is a stone simple technology - lots of mirrors, a working fluid to spin a turbine, and every sunny day the system is producing precisely when electricity use is at its peak. There are concerns with renewable sources due to their intermittent nature, but this one is a perfect match for our needs. The only real technological magic is the control system that aims the mirrors and that isn’t terribly complex.
As an absolute bare minimum we need a federal policy that encourages the investment needed so that every bit of air conditioning in the sun belt is produced using either solar thermal or solar photovoltaic. Each technology has its place, and for solar thermal it’s either right next to a power line that can bear the output, or very close to the place where the power will be used.
Plants like this produce jobs. Someone has to make the mirrors and plumbing. Someone has to go install them. Once the plant is producing a portion of the revenue goes into the pockets of maintainers. The power can be discounted, as they do with the massive output from Niagara Falls, so that local jobs can be created in industries that use a great deal of electricity.
Texas has both wind and solar. These sources naturally compliment each other; hot windless days drive the solar thermal plants, cool windy days make turbines spin. We’d need some coal or nuclear to provide the ‘baseload’ but much of our electricity needs could be easily serviced by the renewable sources we have available to us.
Texas has salt domes. It’s possible to pump water into them to form a cavity - this is called solution mining. Once filled energy could be stored by pumping the water to the surface, and when needed it could be allowed to flow back to the underground storage, passing through a turbine on the way. Niagara Falls has a massive above ground impoundment for just this purpose. There are some technical issues here, namely what sort of equipment would be used to handle long term exposure to very saline water, but that is resolvable. This solution would allow Texas to use pumped hydro storage in places that are too flat to otherwise take advantage of this technique.
None of this is rocket science. All that is required is a little bit of engineering knowledge and a willingness to publicly state an unpopular, but entirely true assumption: “Our energy costs are likely to go up dramatically.” I can get up in front of a crowd, say precisely that, and then speak about details and field questions from the audience. My opponent, Joe Barton, would not dare to voice such a vision - his owners at British Petroleum would promptly punish him.
Let me make a campaign promise, right here, right now. Renewable energy, produced locally, is a tremendous job creation engine. I know the people of Texas 6 want a hand up, not a hand out. If elected I’ll bend all of my effort to putting the opportunities renewable energy presents in front of both the working class residents of the district and the investors who will put their money into such projects.
Massive Solar Thermal Plant in California
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