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Solar power in Texas: Granjeno gets off the grid
This is the story of a little city on the Rio Grande that couldn't pay its light bill.
After the town fell more than $10,000 in debt, the folks at the power company pulled the plug on the streetlights of Granjeno. For more than five years the tiny burg was just plain dark at night.
That might not sound like such a big
deal—better to light a single candle, and all that—but it led to a heavy surge in nighttime foot traffic in Granjeno which is a stone's throw from the border.
The front page of yesterday's regional paper, The Monitor, yesterday showed a photo taken there at the site of the unpopular new border wall whose construction is
reportedly going along quickly. We went to Granjeno yesterday to take some pictures of our own, of a much more progressive infrastructure project.
Despite the long history of this settlement, it was incorporated as a city only about 15 years ago. Not long after that happened, Texas electricity prices spiraled out of control.
An article in April of last year in our late, lamented alternative news rag The Paper of South Texas titled
"Lights On: Tiny town first in region with solar energy hopes to keep immigrants away and habitat green" tells part of the story. Since the time that article ran, Granjeno's amazing grant-funded project, several years in the making, to get its streetlights going again using the power of the relentless South Texas sun moved on to completion. Now its long main drag and its one residential street are lined with poles, each sporting a black solar panel at the top angled toward the southern sky.
The engineering and the equipment to make all this happen came from a company downriver in Weslaco, SOL Technologies—I have always had a soft spot for that name—whose expertise has lit up a skateboard park, has heated homes, has powered traffic signals, all without a single painful payment to any of Texas's world-famous energy companies. A news digest on the SOL Technologies site shows off some of the coverage they've had in papers from here to Brownsville.
There is plenty of sunshine for everyone around here. It reminds me of a city I lived in called Hermosillo, Sonora where it's regularly 105 degrees this time of year. Back then, my tocayo Bruce
Quinn, a science teacher, set me up with a water tank inside a hollowed out little refrigerator lined with aluminum foil.
Don Xavier, the easygoing landlord in an old house downtown, was okay with us hauling the contraption up to the roof and running a hose from there down into the shower. We angled the foil-lined door of the fridge to reflect more sunlight toward the tank. As if that was necessary.
It was a mighty good water heater, and of course it was cheap to run. The only thing was, you had to be awfully careful not to scald yourself with what came out of it.
Solar power in Texas: Granjeno gets off the grid
August 10, 2008
This is the story of a little city on the Rio Grande that couldn't pay its light bill.
After the town fell more than $10,000 in debt, the folks at the power company pulled the plug on the streetlights of Granjeno. For more than five years the tiny burg was just plain dark at night.
That might not sound like such a big
deal—better to light a single candle, and all that—but it led to a heavy surge in nighttime foot traffic in Granjeno which is a stone's throw from the border.The front page of yesterday's regional paper, The Monitor, yesterday showed a photo taken there at the site of the unpopular new border wall whose construction is
reportedly going along quickly. We went to Granjeno yesterday to take some pictures of our own, of a much more progressive infrastructure project.Despite the long history of this settlement, it was incorporated as a city only about 15 years ago. Not long after that happened, Texas electricity prices spiraled out of control.
An article in April of last year in our late, lamented alternative news rag The Paper of South Texas titled
"Lights On: Tiny town first in region with solar energy hopes to keep immigrants away and habitat green" tells part of the story. Since the time that article ran, Granjeno's amazing grant-funded project, several years in the making, to get its streetlights going again using the power of the relentless South Texas sun moved on to completion. Now its long main drag and its one residential street are lined with poles, each sporting a black solar panel at the top angled toward the southern sky.The engineering and the equipment to make all this happen came from a company downriver in Weslaco, SOL Technologies—I have always had a soft spot for that name—whose expertise has lit up a skateboard park, has heated homes, has powered traffic signals, all without a single painful payment to any of Texas's world-famous energy companies. A news digest on the SOL Technologies site shows off some of the coverage they've had in papers from here to Brownsville.
There is plenty of sunshine for everyone around here. It reminds me of a city I lived in called Hermosillo, Sonora where it's regularly 105 degrees this time of year. Back then, my tocayo Bruce
Quinn, a science teacher, set me up with a water tank inside a hollowed out little refrigerator lined with aluminum foil.Don Xavier, the easygoing landlord in an old house downtown, was okay with us hauling the contraption up to the roof and running a hose from there down into the shower. We angled the foil-lined door of the fridge to reflect more sunlight toward the tank. As if that was necessary.
It was a mighty good water heater, and of course it was cheap to run. The only thing was, you had to be awfully careful not to scald yourself with what came out of it.
Posted by Bruce Jensen on August 10, 2008 | Comments (1)
August 12, 2008
In response to: Solar power in Texas: Granjeno gets off the grid
Wangjexi commented:
In response to: Solar power in Texas: Granjeno gets off the grid
Wangjexi commented:
Great story! If only this trend could spread to other cities in the Valley.
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