photo by Mark Glover
John Wells shows off the solar panels at his residence in Terlingua.

At a town hall meeting last Sunday in Alpine, 40 residents gathered to discuss the implications of peak oil, a theory that suggests fossil fuel production has crested and less and less will be discovered each year, making it, in the long run, more expensive.

“Our whole economic development for the past 100 years was based on cheap oil and now that era is coming to a close,” Max Miller, a Houston artist and meeting attendee said.

The group is part of a nexus of other small groups worldwide joined under the umbrella of a grassroots coalition known as the Transition Town Movement that was started in Ireland four years ago. According to their website, their mission is to bring “the head, heart and hands of communities together to make the transition to life beyond oil.”

Jones and his family, compared to most, are way ahead on the transition scale. They live in polystyrene Smart Home made from recycled materials and will soon host a collection of solar panels on the roof.

“The house was designed to produce as much energy as it uses,” Jones said.

Jones, together with Eric Faust, operates Alpine Solar Sales, located inside the Alpine Furniture Store on Highway 90. The store offers a variety of equipment to help people use less energy.

“Tax payers are forced to support the well-established dirty energy technologies of coal, oil and nuclear because their representatives in government consistently promote these industries. If we can make the transition to clean sustainable energy like solar, we can clean-up the environment automatically, and save money doing it,” Jones said.

Photons – sub-atomic particles of light – rain down from the sun every day. Photo-voltaic technology converts these particles to energy by capitalizing on the photons’ ability to seek and alter an electron’s positive charge to a negative charge. Electricity is a current of negatively charged electrons. Silica crystals have been found to be the best conductors for this photon/electron switching process and are the main components in solar collectors.

Nailuj Arapaho of Brewster County runs his house almost entirely from solar collectors.

“I’m still on the grid, but we produce 99 per cent of our own energy. I only have one plug and that’s for my welder,” Arapaho said.

Back at the town hall meeting, the group watched a film called, “The Power of Community,” a film about how the Cuban people marshaled together to effect change in their country after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990 and stopped exporting subsidized crude oil to the island nation.

“We went from 14 million barrels of crude per year to 3 million, almost overnight,” the Cuban narrator states.

Most of the power plants shut and the use of synthetic chemical fertilizers, pesticides and tractors in agriculture were drastically reduced. Today, according to the film, 80 per cent of Cuba’s food is grown organically and locally. Each Cuban uses 1/8 the energy that an American does. Two thousand of their public schools are solar powered.

Texas State Representative Pete Gallego and his Chief of Staff Patrick Tarlton met with area residents in his Alpine office last Friday morning to discuss the future of residential wind and solar power devices.

“Affordability is the key,” Gallego said at the meeting.

John Wells, director of the Field Lab Project in Brewster County, is completely off the grid and has done it on a shoestring budget.

“I chose panels from Harbor Freight to field test the cheapest panels on the market - $ 179 for a 40W collector,” Wells said.

 I started experimenting with off-grid living during the summers on my property in upstate New York while renting my farm house to weekenders from New York City. I loved the simplicity so much that I decided to come out to Texas to take it to the max.”

He participated in Marathon’s Living With Nature festival last year, demonstrating his simple do-it-yourself 12vdc swamp cooler that keeps his small house in Terlingua, “below 80F inside no matter how hot it gets outside.”

David Hart, another Brewster County resident who operates part of his home with solar power, bought used solar collectors from a factory in California.

“They’ve been running without a problem for 12 years,” Hart said.

The Big Bend has hundreds of sunny days per year, so going solar has a natural appeal.

“Some are concerned about the aesthetics of solar panels, others are concerned about selling their excess output power back to the grid,” Jones said. “But nobody in the Trans-Pecos is concerned about a shortage of sun.”

To contact Alpine Solar Sales call 432.837.5949 or email This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it For wind generation call Big Bend Green Energy Systems at 432 386 0342 or email This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it