[I'm half serious about this. I'm somewhat doubtful that it would work, but I like the idea. At the very least I think it would make a fantastic plot for a solar punk novel. If you want to rip it off for a story, go right ahead.]

I went to an ACX meetup yesterday and mentioned an idea that I’ve had off and on for a few years- terraforming the West Texas desert. They suggested I write something about it, so here is that something.

Land

West Texas has a huge amount of cheap land. I just went looking again and the first page of results were all between about $800 and $1700 per acre. Sorting by cheapest price per acre, I found several lots of 50 acres or so for 27-30k, which works out to about $550 an acre- and there are cheaper prices for larger chunks of land- there are multiple listings for 1000+ acre lots. The reason I mention this is to make it clear that the land out there is cheap and plentiful. The reason why it’s cheap and plentiful is because it’s damn near worthless- it’s desert. The water underneath the land is often brackish. The heat is unrelenting. The sun never stops shining.

Sunlight

West Texas is hot, dry and bright almost year around. Go to this website and select El Paso from the drop down- that region gets 5.87-7.42 peak sun hours every day, where “peak sun hours” is sunlight at maximum, unobstructed intensity- ~1000 watts of power per square meter. This is prime solar-panel land, but you can’t get that power to anywhere that people actually want to live. At a minimum, it would require hundreds of miles of power lines and infrastructure. If you wanted to use your electrical power locally, however, you have a near-endless supply. The only problem is storing it.

Storage

Conveniently, one of the other things that West Texas has in large quantities is brackish water, which coincides neatly with the cheapest land prices. You could store your electricity by pumping this water up into large reservoirs and retrieve it by allowing the water to flow back down to the aquifer through turbines. This is called pumped-storage hydroelectricity and it’s about 70-87% efficient- you lose 20-30% of your power, but once the water is pumped to the reservoir, there’s no loss of power over time- it can sit in a covered reservoir forever. Cool- but now what? You have endless electrical power and a method of storing it until you need it, but what’s the point?

Water

Th...

wanderer314

wanderer314