How the oil capital of the US welcomed a solar power boom
Steve Cargil's family has farmed the flat, dry land around Uvalde, a small city in southwest Texas, since 1953. Cargil, 67, had always assumed that one of his three children would eventually take it over, the way he had from his father. Cargil and his son, Ryan, had spent months nursing crops of cabbage and onions to harvest. Then a storm rolled through and destroyed them overnight. "I remember my son saying, 'Dad, I just don't know if I can do this. You do everything right, and we work so hard, and you come out one morning and it's all gone'," Cargil says. Cargil's farm was at risk of ending with him, he says, with none of his three children wanting to farm full time. For years, that left him wondering what would happen to the land, and to his own retirement, since farmers rarely have a pension to fall back on. Then in 2001 Cargil signed a deal to lease 600 acres of his land, about a quarter of the total, to a company called OCI Energy which built a vast solar farm. "Never in my wildest dreams did I think that a solar project would be on my farm," Cargil says. Looking back now, he calls it a blessing. The lease, which pays Cargil $200,000 (£150,000) a year, has let him keep his farm running through a punishing drought. He has been able to concentrate his water irrigation allowance on the land he still farms, and he has stopped losing sleep over rises in the price of things such as diesel and fertiliser. "It's changed my life." Texas, which remains the largest oil producer in the US, earlier this year overtook California to become the country's biggest generator of electricity from solar farms., external And in March of last year, more electricity was produced by solar in Texas than from coal for the first time, according to the US Energy Information Administration. On hot afternoons, when demand for power peaks, solar is now regularly supplying around a third of the electricity used across Texas, says Mark Stover, executive director of the Texas Solar and Storage Association. He says that the solar boom is being driven by two main things. Firstly, it is cheap and quick to connect solar farms to Texas' power grid, which is separate to the rest of the US. Secondly, Texas has a huge and growing appetite for electricity, driven by a burgeoning population.
