BIG
BEND
SOLAR:
How sunshine can power the Last Frontier
Story and photos by L. G. Lindsay
N
orwegian playwright Henrik
Ibsen has a message for the
people of Big Bend: Don’t
shoot the messenger! In his 1882 play
ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE, Ibsen
depicts a small town rent by a realiza-
tion the source of its local economy,
medicinal hot baths, brings not healing
but sickness to tourists who dip into the
town’s polluted waters. Sensing a
threat to their income stream town eld-
ers declare the citizen who pointed out
their polluted springs to be an “enemy
of the people.” Some 132 years after
his play was published Ibsen’s insight
10
Cenizo
into the human condition applies to
our quest today for new energy
sources.
The sun shown in West Texas long
before we discovered stock dividends,
depletion allowances, trade secrets,
and fracking. Pre-Columbians in
Machu Picchu (Peru) based their civi-
lization upon exploiting the sun’s
power. No moving parts, no carbon
pollution, long system life, and low
maintenance: What is not to like about
solar photo-voltaic (“PV”) electricity?
Had this technology existed in Ibsen’s
time, even town elders might have
Fourth Quarter 2014
embraced it. Average annual 6.48
peak hours of daily sunshine make Big
Bend an ideal region for harnessing the
sun.
West Texans are self-reliant, but
solar PV is not a field in which the
inexperienced may dabble. A NAB-
CEP-certified solar PV installer is the
right guide. He will install the PV sys-
tem as well as guide a homeowner
through the daunting techno-speak
and paper-intensive, pre-installation
process. For example, after having
heard about the size of my pocket-
book, the installer said: “Well, that dol-
lar amount will buy a one-kilowatt
(“1kW”), pole-mounted, grid-tied PV
system which would meet only a por-
tion of your home’s power require-
ments.” Further, he informed me, I
could export back to the grid and sell
to my retail electric provider any
excess power (i.e., “unconsumed”
power) which my system produced
during daylight hours. If, for any rea-
son, the electric grid went down or
failed, the PV electricity generating
system would not supply my home’s
electrical loads unless I purchased sep-
arately a “battery-backup” module.