The West Texas Power Plant That Saved the World

Energy, Capitalism, and Climate Change

Andy Bowman

• Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781682830949
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sustainability in Business
• Index: Business

What if the harbinger of our greener future was a small power plant set in the middle of nowhere in West Texas? Longtime alternative energy executive Andy Bowman's book makes exactly this case, outlining what he suggests is a more sustainable future for American capitalism. The West Texas Power Plant that Saved the World takes the Barilla solar plant in Pecos County as a test case for the state of renewable energy in the twenty-first century United States.

For author Andy Bowman, this is a very personal story. Bowman grew up in Galveston and acutely remembers watching stormwater climb up seawalls and wreak havoc on his home. He weaves these memories into his coming of age over two decades in the alternative energy industry, beginning in the 1990s, and tracks it's the industry's fits and starts that lead to the Barilla project. Barilla was the first solar project to be built "on spec": essentially, the plant was built without a contract in place and with the assumption that customers would come. That trailblazing wager represents a tidal shift in the alternative energy industry.

In a clear voice, Bowman explains the climate science that necessitated this shift and makes business-based arguments for what the future should look like. The result is a book that tells a personal story of West Texan innovation, gumption, and vision, while also outlining how our society needs to equip itself to confront climate change.

Part 1:
The Power
Plant That
Saved the
World

Chapter 1:
The Ghost of Indianola

Galveston’s infamous 1900 Storm, and the city’s response to it, have much to tell us about our inclination to think we’re managing climate change better than we really are.

Just after midnight on August 17, 1983, an unusual hurricane “drought”—more than three years without a single storm making landfall on the continental US—broke with a vengeance on Galveston Island’s west end. I was fifteen at the time and, having grown up steeped in Galveston’s rich but traumatic history of hurricanes, was not going to miss it. Late that night, my best friend and I quietly took our bikes from the garage and rode out into the flooded streets and wailing wind. Some kids sneak out to parties at night; we snuck out to see the hurricane.

Hurricane Alicia had been born days earlier when a faint eddy in the upper atmosphere spun off an odd August cool front. This slight convection sat over the warm Gulf of Mexico long enough to brew a tropical depression, which quickly grew into a tropical storm and then a hurricane. Steering winds pushed it toward the coast and just prior to landfall, as if making up for the last few years’ missed storms, Alicia blossomed unexpectedly into a Category 3 major hurricane.

Normally I would have been prevented from doing something so foolish as going out that night, but my father was asleep, and my mother had failed to convince me the day before to evacuate to her house in Houston. I also thought, wrongly, that Alicia wouldn’t be much different from all the other tropical weather I witnessed growing up in Galveston. Fierce storms with heavy rain, thunder, and lightning that flooded our neighborhood happened all the time on the island. In fact, my friends and I would often bodysurf in the big waves from a tropical disturbance and venture out after storms to paddle the streets in canoes or surf behind a bicycle.

We could just manage to ride our bikes through the foot or so of water covering the streets, stopping every couple of blocks to look around in wonder. Powerful sheets of rain bore down across the dark neighborhood, brightened occasionally like daylight by lightning spidering across the sky. In the midst of Alicia, Galveston was an alien world. Not a person in sight, rain almost too dense to see through, wind shrieking and howling, and the water in the streets eerily ocean-like, whipping into small whitecaps where cars normally drove.

We finally approached the main event: Galveston’s Seawall Boulevard, the street running atop the giant wall built nearly a century before to hold off storms just like this one. Here was ground zero of the war between the furious ocean and the island. We left our bikes and trudged up to the side of a building shielding us from the wind, took a last breath, and then ventured into the full-bore hurricane. The raindrops, warm like the summer ocean, felt like blows against our bodies, and we could only barely hold our ground against the wind. It was frightening, but even more exhilarating, to experience the storm at its height. Just then, a piece of debris—a board or part of someone’s roof—whizzed by my arm, and I suddenly realized what I somehow had not before: that the wind could carry more than just rain, something that could do us great harm. Having survived a few moments, we decided to call it quits. We took one last look at the enormous waves blasting up against the seawall, got back on our bikes, and made it home to safety.

I often reflect on that night and how easily one of us could have been hurt or killed, and what a senseless death it would have been; as a parent today, I am utterly appalled at myself. That said, I will never forget the experience of peering beyond the seawall and witnessing the full fury of the hurricane firsthand.

By the next afternoon, the storm had passed and the sky was blue, but the damage was unbelievable. Houses and cars everywhere were flooded and debris several feet high lined the streets. The power and water were out and would be for days. Along the seawall, a large video-game arcade built over the sand—a building in which we had spent countless hours in prior summers—was completely gone; only the poles on which it had rested remained. The National Guard was then deployed, and soldiers patrolled the streets with machine guns draped over their shoulders. This seemed like overkill to me, but looters had been on the streets since the morning after. A sunset curfew was imposed and with the power out, there was nothing to do but explore the damage by day and listen to the mosquitoes buzz in the hot air at night. The next day, leaving the island for my mother’s place in Houston, we passed boats, parts of houses, chairs and debris of all kinds—perhaps even including pieces of our favorite arcade—for what seemed like miles resting atop the freeway.

•

My obsession with Mother Nature’s wrath—precursor to my eventual career in renewable energy and my personal frame of reference on climate change—all began with Galveston and its hurricanes.

The small city of about 50,000 people sits on the eastern tip of the twenty-seven-mile-long barrier island, its back to the mainland and its gaze far out to sea. Behind it lies the rich and fertile coastal prairie inclining to the Great Plains and Chihuahua Desert; before it lies more than 650 miles of open ocean, the same distance to Kansas City, Missouri, in the other direction.

Geography being destiny, Galveston’s perch at the edge of the warm and restless Gulf of Mexico has shaped its history, both for better and for worse. First settled by Karankawa and Akokisa tribes who fished and oystered its rich shores, it was established as a trade center by French, Spanish, and Mexican settlers and then a pirate base of operations before becoming one of the busiest cotton ports in the American South. In the 1920s, its bustling port and ready access to international waters made it an ideal bootlegging, gambling, and debauchery destination, earning it the nickname the “Free State of Galveston.” During World War II, US Navy ships launched from Galveston prowled the Gulf for menacing German submarines. These days, the island is mainly a tourist destination where beachgoers suntan as nearby tankers line up to move through the Houston Ship Channel, one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world.

Punctuating its remarkable history like a drumbeat is the march of terrible hurricanes rising up from Gulf waters to strike the island. Galveston, it seems, is never far from the next storm: on average, hurricanes with winds over a hundred miles per hour strike the island once every nine years. Island cities sit on civilization’s front porch, wide open and exposed to the elements like nowhere else.

Of all the storms that have struck the island, one towers above all the rest, the simply named “1900 Storm” that devastated the city so completely that its very survival has come to define it more than anything else. Likewise, the ordeal of the storm, the community’s epic response to it, and the century of storms that have come behind it have marked us Galvestonians with a special view on the question of mankind’s ability to manage natural phenomena.

On September 8, 1900, an unexpected gale arrived late in the day and that night, in pitch-black darkness, the storm’s 145-mph winds and fifteen-foot storm surge overwhelmed the island, which stood not even eight feet above sea level at its highest point.1 At some time during the night, the steel streetcar tracks that ran beachside across the length of the city were uprooted, turned sideways, and then pounded forward by the raging waves, picking up more debris as they went. This makeshift battering ram scraped the ground clean where city blocks had stood the day before. Among the countless heartbreaking stories of that devastating night, none is more tragic than the ten nuns and ninety-three orphans of St. Mary’s Orphan Asylum. The nuns and children took shelter in the two-story building, but as the waters continued to rise, the building collapsed and the group was forced out into the raging black waters. One of the nuns tied herself, using bedsheets, to the ten orphans in her charge; they were all found together buried in the sand the next day.2

As quickly as the storm had appeared, it then passed further inland. By late the next morning, the rains stopped and the angry waters of the Gulf had eerily calmed to nearly normal.3 A city of 38,000 at its peak both economically and politically on the eve of the storm, Galveston was cut down to rubble literally overnight. Photographs of the aftermath more closely resemble Hiroshima or Dresden than any storm-damaged town. In all, the storm claimed the lives of between six thousand and twelve thousand people; so massive was the destruction that the exact number of dead has never been determined. To this day, the 1900 Storm is the deadliest natural disaster in US history.4

In the aftermath, as Galvestonians began to pick up the pieces, there was much discussion about what should be done in light of the certainty of future storms. Everyone in Galveston at that time knew the story of a different town, just down the coast, and a different storm. Fourteen years earlier, a fierce hurricane had struck the small port town of Indianola, which had only recently recovered from a prior direct hit in 1875. Indianola was a growing commercial center just beginning to compete with Galveston for shipping, but the 1886 hurricane changed everything. The Indianola Storm was a monster, the fifth strongest ever to strike the United States, and its 150-mph winds leveled almost the entire town. Adding insult to injury, hours after the storm passed a fire started that burned most of what remained. Unbelievably, five weeks later yet another hurricane came ashore down the coast, close enough to flood Indianola once again. Understandably, Indianolans had had enough: the town was simply abandoned, and the surviving residents dispersed to other places. Today, Indianola’s remains can be found resting under Matagorda Bay, within view of a lonely historical plaque.

Storms had come and gone as long as anyone on the island remembered, but just as Galveston plunged forward into the new and modern twentieth century, it had been reminded of something terrifying and timeless. What Indianola represented was the idea that a big enough storm coming at the wrong time and place could deal a truly mortal blow to a coastal town. This would not be Galveston’s fate, city leaders decided. As Galveston worked to recover from the storm, it built its resolve not to let the storm, nor any future storms, vanquish it. As a result, the effort to rebuild after the 1900 Storm came to rival the intensity of the storm itself. The city not only completely rebuilt its damaged and destroyed buildings, roads, and bridges but also embarked upon not one but two massive infrastructure projects, each of such a scale that it must have seemed at the time like something out of a science fiction novel.

First, to protect against future storm surges, a seawall standing seventeen feet high was planned along three miles of the Gulf side of the island. A special board of expert engineers from around the country devised the extraordinary plan, which accounts at the time described as “one of the most stupendous schemes of protection and rehabilitation that has ever been attempted on the engineering stage.”5 Construction started in 1902 and lasted two years. First, massive anchoring timbers were pounded through the sand into the clay far underneath; then the seawall was poured, weighing about 40,000 pounds per foot; behind it, a one-hundred-foot-wide embankment was constructed.6 Expanded several times over the decades as the city grew, Galveston’s seawall today is almost ten miles long and is said to have created the longest sidewalk in the world.

The second project was even more ambitious: Galveston raised the grade, by several feet, of the entire populated portion of the island. The new seawall could protect against violent waves, but alone it would only get half the job done; only by literally raising the island behind it up to the same height could it be made secure from future floodwaters coming in from the bay side of the island. For this massive undertaking, about twelve million cubic feet of sand dredged from the bottom of Galveston Bay was pumped in to raise four square miles of land. An account at the time noted that the amount of sand was enough “to build five Egyptian pyramids as large as the famous Cheops.”7 This portion of the island was raised by an average of four feet, although most residential areas were raised about eight feet and some areas were lifted by as much as seventeen feet.8 As the city later grew, and as late as 1950, additional parts of the island were similarly raised.9

Even by today’s standards, Galveston’s grade raising is on a scale difficult to imagine. The most populated part of the island was cut open with a new manmade canal that provided access to the dredge boats ferrying in spoils from the bottom of Galveston Bay, raising the ground block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood. Completed over eight years b...