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Texas really seem to be going for it. I guess they have everything you need to make a success of solar energy. Money, infrastructure and plenty of money!
http://www.totalsolarenergy.co.uk/texas-solar-power.html

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Though I've lived on the other side of the planet for about a quarter of a century, I grew up in northeast Texas on a small ranch in what was then a rural area (changing fast now, though).

I'm soon 58, and if anyone had told me as recently as, say, 10-15 years ago that Texas would embrace alternative energy, I would have said that person was crazy, given the innate-to-the-marrow conservatism of a lot of Texans, and not just on the farms and ranches.

I've tried to noodle it out, and while I have absolutely no research or even much by way of anecdotal evidence to support a few ideas, I have come up with some.

1. Lately, T. Boone Pickens is having a HUGE impact. After all, the man has made his fortune for decades in oil, one way or the other. And when a giant like him says "oil's dead" -- as he has -- people tend to perk up and listen, from the tiniest farm to the corridors of power in Austin and Washington. (Full disclosure: I'm a tremendous supporter of his Pickens Plan and signed onto his "Pickens Army." But I have no financial interest in anyway whatsoever.)

2. More speculatively, I wonder if the tens of thousands of traditional farm windmills that still dot the Texas landscape might have started people thinking; after all, what Pickens is doing in the Panhandle is nothing but the same technology writ large. Where I grew up, Dad rigged one of our two windmills to provide part of the electricity needed for a medium-sized barn. It's not a mighty leap, just recognizing scaling.

3. While Texas can get plenty cold, by most people's standards, it's usually thought of in the context of HOT, HOTTER, and HOTTER still. Annualized, that's of course true for the entire state. While weather patterns reduce the promise of solar in place such as southeast Texas (cloudy a lot), a lot of places can benefit from it, on some scale or the other.

4. Then there's trash-generated energy. Why PAY to have a public landfill accept your trash if you can give it for free (and maybe even for a bit of money) to a landfill, public or private, that will use it to generate electricity -- reducing the bills of folks on the grid (including you)? Tight Texans can warm right up to that thought! [Exhibit A: my Mother. Exhibit B: my Sister: Exhibit C: the rest of my family. Enough exhibits to establish the pattern, Your Honor?]

5. Certain places in Texas hold varying degrees of promise for energy derived from geothermal sources.

6. An indirect motivator must be the increasing smog in the state's metropolitan regions, especially places such as the Houston-Port Arthur-Beaumont "Golden Triangle" and the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex (near which I grew up). Combined with that is a sneaky suspicion oil, coal, and gas will run out, sooner or later -- globally; they already have in some places in Texas, so that claim is an easier sell in Texas than it may be in, say, Alaska.

I'm not going to put a number on this last one, but I feel in my bones my fellow Texans are rather enjoying the spotlight, which got brighter when the state government fairly recently committed -- what? 4 or 5 billion -- yes, BILLION -- dollars to alternative energy sources. (Of course, that commitment is dwarfed by one I read about just today: it appears likely Austin will commit some *20* billion bucks to ROADS. We Texans do love our roads. Even in places where light rail, say, would make far more sense.)

Finally, and also not numbered since it applied all over the planet, the spike in oil prices really spooked Texans, as it did everyone. (I was in Texas on a 2-month vacation when gas prices peaqked, so I saw this first-hand.) Not that everyone started hollering for electric or natural-gas cars, nor even hybrids. But some who previously wouldn't have even *looked* at, say, a Smart suddenly started casting sidelong glances, especially people who commute apreciable distances to work.

I've thought about this hundreds and hundreds of hours, and think I'm in the right field, and maybe actually on the right road.

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