Thirty-five years ago, 2,000 solar thermal systems saved the residents of this South Texas town
By Michael G. Albrecht
Drawn to Texas from the East Coast in the mid-1970s by the first academic sustainable architecture program in the country at UT Austin, Pliny Fisk found himself unexpectedly embroiled in a political hotbed in south Texas. His involvement in six impoverished south Texas towns would result in the installation of some 2,000 solar water heaters fashioned from recycled materials.
Fisk was presenting a paper at a conference in San Antonio in the fall of 1977 when members of the Community Development Corporation (CDC), operated by the local La Raza Unida Party, approached him. With a sense of urgency, they explained that the natural gas supply to their entire town of Crystal City, Texas, was about to be cut off by the provider, Lo-Vaca Gas Company.
A contract dispute between the city and Lo-Vaca had been escalating for years as natural gas prices rose from 36-cents to $2.05 per thousand cubic feet. The CDC wanted to know if Fisk, by then founder of the Austin-based sustainability think tank Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems (CMPBS), could assist their efforts to provide heat and hot water to low-income residents during the encroaching winter. Crystal City manager Raul Flores had stated that, without hot water and heating, “some of them are going to die.”
Lo-Vaca, itself under financial pressure, had petitioned the Texas Railroad Commission for relief, which allowed Lo-Vaca to waive the contract and raise rates. Crystal City officials, representing their low-income constituents, refused to comply with the rate increase. When city debt to Lo-Vaca reached over $700,000, Lo-Vaca cut the supply to the town of 8,000 on September 23, 1977. The event made national news.
Sandwiched between fractious members of the La Raza Unida Mexican-American political party, who were wrestling for control of Crystal City government, and politicians in Austin and Washington wary of the challenges posed by the activist La Raza movement, Fisk threaded his relief efforts like a needle through intransigent bureaucracies and political stonewalling.
Soon the National Center for Appropriate Technology (NCAT) approached Fisk at CMPBS with an offer to assist the project. NCAT provided grant money, which Fisk used to design, engineer, and test a simple batch water heater system. Fisk constructed a makeshift assembly line to build the devices in a WWII-era Japanese internment campsite building in Crystal City.
Various iterations of the solar water heaters evolved. Ultimately, Fisk’s 2,000 rudimentary passive solar water heaters each produced 50-75 gallons of 105-degree water, enabling energy-disenfranchised south Texas residents to weather an unusually cold winter, one that in fact produced a rare snow event that January.
It was a promising era for renewable energy in which Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the White House. In a paper presented in October 1979 at the American Solar Energy Society’s (ASES) 4th National Passive Solar Conference (now into its 37th session), Fisk wrote “Passive solar technologies (such as the hot water heaters)…may become our next stage in solar innovation. Cookbook approaches and indiscriminate borrowing of technologies is only one adolescent step in our progress.”
Looking back on the Crystal City gas crisis today, Fisk reflects 35 years later that “we have more work of a similar nature than we can handle, but are more focused on larger scale projects.”
The Crystal City gas crisis led Fisk into government contracts with U.S. Department’s of Energy, Housing and Urban Development, and others. He was instrumental to the formation of Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), the national certification program that recognizes the design, construction and operation of high performance green buildings, homes, and neighborhoods.
Patents on solar water heaters in the U.S. date back to the 1890s. According to the Solar Energy Power Association, by 2010 the U.S. had 2.3 gigawatts-thermal of installed solar hot water capacity. These systems represent a variety of active and passive design types, including flat plate collectors, evacuated tube collectors, closed and open loop systems, and gravity-assisted systems. Pliny Fisk’s Crystal City solar water heater design represented a rudimentary evacuated tube model. Many of the solar water heaters remained in use for years.
Energy from the sun 93 million miles away helped make the difference in the lives of thousands of Crystal City residents during the turbulent winter of ’77 and thankfully, no known fatalities resulted from the lack of natural gas.
A postscript: It’s now weeks since Hurricane Sandy knocked out power to residents of New Jersey and New York. Many are still without electricity. Had solar thermal water heating systems been encouraged through policy and economic incentives, as have been oil, gas, telecommunications and the Internet, it might now be providing hot water to these people.
Michael Albrecht is retiring from the TXSES Board after serving for four years. He is a tireless supporter of renewable energy and energy efficiency policies, and has generously contributed his writing skills to many issues of the Solar Reflector. Thank you Michael for taking endless meeting notes, reminding us that policy matters, showing up to volunteer at almost every event TXSES ever created, and thank you especially for your keen ear for a good story.