Climate Changed
Power-Hungry Texas Oil Drillers Get a Little Help From Solar
- Developers plan to more than quadruple capacity by 2022
- Volatile power prices, falling development costs spurring boom
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Texas, home to the world’s largest oil reserve and America’s biggest source of coal-fired power, is on the verge of a clean-energy boom.
Wind already supplies about 15 percent of Texas’s electricity, and now developers are about to quadruple the state’s solar capacity, adding enough panels by 2022 to light up all of Dallas. But they won’t just power homes. Solar developers are responding to demand from oil and gas drillers, whose booming operations are gobbling up electricity and pushing prices spiking above $1,000 a megawatt-hour.