How one solar power plant might chart a sustainable path forward for enlisting American capitalism in the fight against climate change.

Most Americans consider electricity essential to their lives, but the historic disparity of its distribution and use challenges notions of a democratic lifestyle, economy, and culture. By the beginning of the twentieth century, substations, wires, towers, and poles had followed migrants westward as the industrial era?s most prominent symbols of progress and power. When private companies controlled power production, electrical transmission, and distribution without regulation, they argued that it was not ?economically feasible? for many ethnic and rural communities to access ?the grid.? Yet, government agents continued to advocate electrical living through federal programs that reached into and across farming communities and American Indian reservations to homogenize and assimilate them through urban technologies. In the end, however, rural electrification was a locally directed process, subject to local and regional issues, concerns, and parameters. ø Electrifying the Rural American West provides a social and cultural history of rural electrification in the West. Using three case studies in Arizona, Leah S. Glaser details how, when examined from the local level, the process of electrification illustrates the impact of technology on places, economies, and lifestyles in the diverse communities and landscapes of the American West. As today?s policy-makers advocate building more power lines as a tool to bring democracy to faraway places and ?smart grids? to deliver renewable energy, they would do well to review the historical relationship of Americans with electronic power production, distribution, and regulation.

This volume explores how Texas's groundbreaking program of electricity restructuring has become a model for truly competitive energy markets in the United States. The authors contend that restructuring in Texas has been successful because the industry is free from federal over...

Examines the potential for the use of renewable resources to supply energy needs in Texas. Explores and compares the benefits of wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass energy. Discusses residential and industrial electrical efficiency, and gives an overview of natural gas as a backup fuel source. Proposals for the implementation of sustainable energy programs are accompanied by a look at the market barriers to these programs and suggested incentives and targets for achievable objectives. Contains maps, tables and schematics.

Texas National Energy Modeling Project: An Experience in Large-Scale Model Transfer and Evaluation reports on the Texas National Energy Model Project (TNEMP) experience. The TNEP was tasked with providing an independent evaluation of the Energy Information Administration's (EIA) Midterm Energy Forecasting System. It also provided recommendations to the Texas Energy Advisory Council concerning the maintenance of a national modeling system by the Council to evaluate Texas impacts within a consistent national modeling framework. The book provides all of the summary material documenting the entire experience, sequentially, from beginning to end. It first lays out the purposes of TNEMP, the organizational structure for the study, and an explanation of the evaluation criteria used to guide the model critiques. It summarizes in some detail the important findings of each of the 11 studies contained in Part II published under a separate cover. It presents the National Advisory Board’s assessment of the integrity of the evaluation project, their views of important outcomes of the TNEMP experience, and important recommendations to TNEMP and EIA. The final chapters contain an overview reply by EIA and a summary of a workshop held at the end of the project to discuss substantive issues raised by TNEMP.