A Texas Energy Proposal:

Texas is one of the few states that have all the flavors of power generation with in her state borders. We have coal and natural gas power generation as well as several nuclear power plants. We also have wind farms and limited use local solar panels.

What Texas lacks is a side by side approach to power generation. If the state of Texas were to build solar generation power plants using the parabolic trough approach and locate those plants side by side with the coal and natural gas plants in far west Texas duplicating the connections to the grid could be reduced. Parabolic troughs is where long, curved mirrors that concentrate sunlight on a liquid inside a tube that runs parallel to the mirror are used as a source of thermal energy.

See this URL:

http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/renewable_energy_basics/how-solar-energy-works.html#Solar_Thermal_Concentrating_Systems

Because the sun does not shine 24 hours a day even in West Texas the side by side locating of this new solar plant would insure on cloudy days the energy from fossil fuel burning could still be pumped onto the power transmission grid. The same approach could be used after sunset until the engineers can come up with an efficient way of storing vast amounts of electrical energy.

Texas has the right to tax her citizens and I for one would like to see an additional energy tax added to all consumption of fossil fuels. These tax dollars to directly fund solar power plant construction in this side be side approach. I think TXU would jump at a chance to receive additional funding and at the same time be branching out in their basic industry.