(CN) – Seen from above, the sprawling landscape of West Texas can look something like a checkerboard.
Anyone who has ever flown into Midland, the heart of the booming Permian Basin oil patch, knows the sight: dirt roads crisscross huge swaths of desert scrub, sandy veins in the sparse vegetation connecting thousands of oil and gas wells.
But change is in the air and on the ground here and across much of oil-rich Texas, as renewable energy companies from around the world rush to add industrial fields of blue solar panels and towering white windmills to the landscape.
The wind and solar industries are poised for an unprecedented boom in Texas over at least the next two years, as builders hurry to take advantage of federal tax incentives that are beginning to fade away after pushing the technologies to a place where they are now economically competitive with coal.
Reports from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, the grid operator for most of the state, paint a picture of the planning and building spree underway.
Near the dusty Texas panhandle city of Lubbock, a radiologist teamed up with a Latin American energy company to buy more than 5,000 acres for a massive solar farm next to a planned Tesla “supercharger” station.
A California firm wants to build what would reportedly be the world’s largest solar farm attached to a power storage facility, a grand-scale effort to overcome one of the industry’s biggest challenges: cloudy days.
An Italian developer with projects in Indonesia and Australia, among other countries, is pursuing a sizeable solar farm near Midland. Companies based in Spain, Canada and Germany are getting in on the action too, as is a Florida firm that traces its roots back to the founding of the Florida Power & Light Company in the early 1920’s.
Those projects and dozens of others are in various stages of planning, approval or construction. Experts say some will get built, while others won’t.
Still, ERCOT records on projects that are more than just talk – that is, those that have signed an “interconnection agreement” with the grid operator and have posted some kind of financial security – suggest the potential for explosive growth.
Solar generation in Texas could grow by more than 4,000 megawatts in 2020 and by more than 5,000 megawatts in 2021, the numbers show, in what would be a substantial increase from the state’s current capacity of roughly 1,900 megawatts.
Texas already leads the nation in wind generation with more than 20,000 megawatts of capacity, but companies in that sector are moving aggressively as well. The grid operator is tracking the potential for more than 10,000 megawatts of new wind power in 2020 and more than 11,000 megawatts in 2022.
“We’re not exactly sure what’s going to get built, but we can see trends,” Warren Lasher, ERCOT’s senior director of system planning, said in an interview. “Certainly, if you look at the amount of wind and solar that has that signed contract and has put down collateral, it’s a significant amount.”
“There’s certainly a lot moving forward, a lot under construction,” said Charlie Hemmeline, head of the trade group Texas Solar Power Association. “What specific number we get to by what date, there’s obviously uncertainty there.”
