By Pete Parsons, TXSES Executive Director
This much-deserved fall-like weather is our reward for those brutal triple-digit months. Finally. And while we’re reveling in the moment, we’re already on high alert for winter and its unpredictable temperatures.
Source: NOAA
If it feels like there are more people than ever in your hometown, you’d be right. According to a recent U.S. Census Bureau report, nearly 1 million people have moved to Texas from another state or abroad since 2022, bringing Texas’ population to more than 30 million. That’s not a typo. While Harris County added the most residents between 2000-2022, Tarrant, Bexar, Collin, Denton, Fort Bend, Travis, Williamson, Montgomery, and Dallas counties did their part, too.
While those numbers might bring worrisome thoughts of more traffic, construction and crowds, we at TXSES are all smiles. We see those numbers as more eyes to see and ears to hear from us about the value, benefits and results of sound, favorable solar policies that are growing a strong distributed solar industry in Texas’ rapidly changing clean energy economy.
Infinite Power: Take Your Share of the Texas Sun is our response to unrelenting consumer demand for solar while addressing the unreliability of the Texas grid. This statewide educational campaign aims to double the amount of distributed solar in Texas by 2030.
Using EIA data and Google’s Project Sunroof, TXSES policy committee member Larry Howe and TXSES intern Ethan Miller estimate conservatively there are nearly 300,000 residential and commercial distributed solar rooftops in Texas. Infinite Power: Take Your Share of the Texas Sun represents a natural progression for TXSES in our nearly half-century of educating and raising awareness of the advantages of distributed solar in Texas. We’ll carry out the multi-faceted educational campaign via media, social media, events and one-on-one engagements with decision-makers, focusing on three target areas:
- Policy: promoting solar policies that align with our mission for energy justice, equity, diversity and inclusion.
- Workforce: ensuring that our clean energy workforce is well trained to quality, competency-based standards and trained by programs that teach the skills in demand by employers.
- Outreach: helping communities streamline the solar permitting processes through Solar APP+;
promoting Virtual Power Plants that contribute to enhanced grid resilience and compensation for consumers; advancing development of net zero subdivisions; and leveraging federal funds like the Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, to bolster our statewide initiatives and strengthen our impact in the distributed solar sector.
It’s an ambitious goal to go from 300,000 to 600,000 distributed solar rooftops in seven years. It’s also nothing short of a unique opportunity to take advantage of the momentum so that every Texan is able to benefit from solar energy as part of an equitable, 100% clean energy future. Keep an ear and eye out!