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Consultant: Sky's the limit for solar in Texas
Texas has the most potential for solar power in the country, especially in West Texas, consultant says.
- Nicholas Sakelaris
- Staff Writer-Dallas Business Journal
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Someday, solar panels could be just as common as wind turbines in West Texas and the two renewable energy sources would use the same infrastructure.
That’s the vision of energy consultant Ron Siedel, who sits on the board of directors at Principal Solar, a Dallas-based company that aggregates solar generation into a single solar utility.
I talked with him today about the future of solar in this state and what he said might be surprising to Texans.
"It may expand a lot faster than anyone anticipated, especially if prices continue to come down," Siedel said. "I frankly think it could easily follow the same path as the wind power has."
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas projects that solar power could grow to 23,000 kilowatts by 2022, Siedel said.
The total potential for solar energy in the state is more than 20,000 gigawatts, about 300 times the total power generated in Texas from all sources, he said.
"That’s the highest potential of any state," he said. "Will we ever produce that much solar power in Texas? No we won’t. We really don’t have a lot of solar. There’s a lot of solar potential."
It will take forward-thinking investors and developers for the solar utility concept to take off. Right now, there are some solar farms in the Austin and San Antonio area where there are cooperative power companies.
To kick start private solar, solar developers plan a project and determine how big it’s going to be and how much power it will produce. They pitch the plan to service providers, such as Luminant Energy, the biggest power producer in North Texas, and strike a deal that produces enough revenue to finance the construction, Siedel said.
As the price for solar panels drops, it will be able to compete with other sources of power generation, including natural gas, he said.
Renewable resources have positives and negatives. There are no fuel sources with wind or solar energy so it’s not affected by the volatility of the market like oil and gas can be.
"It’s a lot easier with wind and solar to know what your costs are going to be because you don’t have fuel to worry about," he said.
And solar has even less maintenance than wind because there are less moving parts.
The downside is that wind and solar are subject to weather conditions and aren’t always reliable.
"You can’t make it produce more power," Siedel said. "That lack of controllability does present some problems from a reliability standpoint."
Nicholas covers energy, banking and other topics for the Dallas Business Journal.
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