Pliny Fisk III

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pliny Fisk 1944-2026

 

 

I was in the back and away from my phone when it began to ring or whatever it does now.  Rarely do I make an effort to get to it.  If it's important, they'll leave a message,  but this time I ran to answer like a teenager in the sixties.   It was GV.

The moment I heard the emotion in her voice, I knew what words were coming:  

"Pliny passed away last night."

She gave me some details and I asked if he passed peacefully, and she said yes.

Given that I am the Godfather of her son Ariel, I asked if I can drop by in a few hours and bring some food for the family.  Three out of the four  kids were already here with grandkids and all. 

I met Pliny Fisk 50 years ago in the architectural lab at the University of Texas.  We were both building passive solar homes at the time and he was going to use an earth-air exchanger to help cool the house.  I was considering doing the same with my half buried replica of a 19th century Texas ice house.

It was in the crucible of exploration and scientific adventurism that we forged our friendship.  His infectious enthusiasm was his superpower.  There were always new things, new possibilities, new discoveries. Sometimes, perhaps even often, they didn't work or they weren't practical.  The earth/air exchangers turned out to be legionaires disease breeders. 

But he was a fountain of ideas and hope and change.

This from Texas Architect:

Driving down FM 969 in Austin, one would never imagine that just off the road lies one of the world’s most influential and progressive centers for sustainable architecture and planning: the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, known colloquially as Max’s Pot. Founded in 1975, Max’s Pot is run by Pliny Fisk III and his partner, Gail Vittori, along with a rotating cast of overall-clad designers who can be found around the center—some drafting, others welding. 

Fisk, who bears a remarkable resemblance to both Albert Einstein and Anton Newcombe, studied at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1960s, where he earned master’s degrees in both architecture and landscape architecture. Exposed to Louis Kahn, Ian McHarg, Ross Ashby, and others, Fisk became fascinated with systems thinking and the natural environment as they relate to the built environment, developing a rich architectural philosophy early in his career. 

Originally called the Laboratory for Maximum Potential Building Systems, the CMPBS office was first built for the University of Texas School of Architecture in 1973. Fisk, along with his then-partner, Daria Bolton Fisk, received the university’s approval to establish an architecture laboratory focused on forward-thinking design pedagogy, green building, and hands-on construction. True to the philosophy of green building from the outset, the Fisks rejected UT’s plan to equip the lab with standard electricity, running water, and cooling, choosing instead to figure those systems out themselves.  

Soon after its opening, however, UT began to distance itself from the Lab. Tensions peaked in 1975 when a letter arrived from the United Nations inviting the Fisks and students to present at Habitat ’76 in Vancouver. The letter was addressed to “Max’s Pot, School of Architecture, UT Austin”—by then the accepted nickname for the Lab. The university had a fit over the use of this unauthorized moniker, to which Fisk famously replied, “Don’t worry—it’s just the United Nations, after all.” That same year, the Laboratory for Maximum Potential Building Systems became the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, an independent nonprofit."

I was on the Board of the Center in those early days.  I was the auctioneer at several fund raisers.  Occasionally, Pliny would give me a chance to represent the fledgling center at a Solar Conference.  And in so doing, he brought me into the discussions and consciousness of those worlds.

And it would lead to my speeches and presentations throughout the Americas and in Europe. 

This from wikipedia:

Pliny Fisk III (May 30, 1944 – July 27, 2026) was a co-founder and co-director of the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems (CMPBS),^[1] a sustainable design and planning organization established in 1975. Fisk also served as Fellow in Sustainable Urbanism and Fellow in Health Systems Design at Texas A & M University, where he held a joint position as signature faculty in Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Planning.^[2] Fisk previously held positions at Ball State University, the University of Texas at Austin, Mississippi State University and the University of Oklahoma. 

But Fisk was no ivory tower academic.  

When the Lo-Vaca Gathering Company shut off the natural gas supply to the small town of Crystal City, Texas, in the fall of 1977, Fisk developed the idea of using Army surplus wood stoves and abundant mesquite for heating. By January 1978, Crystal City residents had installed nearly 1,000 wood stoves. 

In subsequent years, the Center led an effort to manufacture and install inexpensive solar hot water heaters using salvaged materials. The production of the solar collectors also helped bolster the job market of Crystal City.

Somewhere in there, I remember going down to Crystal City to get Pliny out of jail.  He was being held for exciting the natives. 

In 1983, Fisk was sponsored by the Center for Investigation and Documentation of the Atlantic Coast (CIDCA) to set into motion a large scale indigenous housing program for the Miskito Indians of Nicaragua's Atlantic Coast. Fisk's goal in the project was to draw upon the available natural and human resources of the region to address an extreme housing shortage.

In 1991, the Texas Department of Agriculture (and Laredo Junior College) hired Fisk and CMPBS to design and build a demonstration farm (outside the South Texas city of Laredo).

In 2002 Fisk was awarded the U.S. Green Building Council’s first Sacred Tree Award in the public sector category.^[18][19] He was also a recipient of the Passive Solar Pioneer Award (from the American Solar Energy Society)

All of this would have been impossible without GV. (Gail Vittori), his long time partner and co-director of the Center.  For Gail's contributions were and are critical.

But perhaps most importantly they should be recognized as the creators of the Green Building Programs that are in so many communities and cities today. 

For in 1991, Fisk and Vittori developed "A Conceptual and Contextual Framework for the City of Austin" that served as the basis for the formation of the world's first municipal green building program (now operating as Austin Energy Green Building).^[15][16] The cooperative effort earned the United Nations Earth Summit Award for Exemplary Public Environmental Initiative, in 1992 (the only United States organization to receive recognition at the Earth Summit).

At the large late afternoon gathering at the Center on Wednesday,  perhaps 30 people spoke after Gail thanked everyone for coming.  All those there had some connection with Pliny and Gail that was deep and personal.  

For me, I spoke of Pliny's power to inspire us to do the important things and to strive to make things better, And I reminded us all that here in Texas we have about 40 GWs of Wind, almost 40 GWs of Solar, 20 GWs of storage.  That's enough to provide over 50 % of our power on many of our days.

The record will show he made a difference during his walk with us. 

And that he brought us  Serious Commotion. 

That to have known him,

was a Grace. 

 

 

 

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From a Firehose

 

 

If you feel like you've been drinking from a firehose, join the club.  

Just this month alone, the US is now bragging about bombing a 5000 year old civilization back to the stone age, and in so doing has caused the almost closure of the Strait of Hormuz, rocking energy prices and fertilizer shipments to the West.  Eight million or so have demonstrated in the NO Kings protest against the most corrupt, vile, undemocratic administration in the 250 year history of our Republic. It just goes on and on.

But last night, we  saw the AI Doc.

This from Wikipedia:

"The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist is a 2026 American documentary film directed by Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell. It is produced by the Academy Award–winning teams behind Everything Everywhere All at Once (Daniel Kwan and Jonathan Wang) and Navalny (Shane Boris and Diane Becker)."

So this is no fly by night outfit. And despite the firehose of gluttony and ignorance we see in our daily political existence, this movie might very be the scariest movie you'll see this year.  (or any year)

This from KQED, 

"Roher gathers the interviewees into three broad groups: the terrifyingly pessimistic ones, the naively optimistic ones and the CEOs who are casually working on something that may or may not spark humanity’s demise. (Well, three out of five of them, anyway: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei all appear. Mark Zuckerberg declined to participate and Elon Musk apparently backed out at the last minute.)

The worst AI predictions are presented first. Eliezer Yudkowsky, co-founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, calmly talks of the “abrupt extermination” of humanity. Author and historian Yuval Noah Harari calls AI “a deadly threat.”

Center for Humane Technology President Tristan Harris — one of the most measured commentators in the movie — also shares some truly sobering views, the worst of which is that he knows active AI researchers who “don’t expect their children to make it to high school.” It doesn’t help matters that machine learning researcher Shane Legg follows this with the assertion, “The really powerful systems are coming and they’re coming soon. (clip)

In his conversations with Roher, Sam Altman talks a good game about the safety protocols that OpenAI has in place. Given his company’s highly controversial new contract with the Department of Defense, his words will either ring hollow or serve as comfort, depending on your viewpoint. For his part in The AI Doc, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei simply says, “Am I confident that everything’s going to work out? No, I’m not.” Hassabis is even more vague: “If something is possible to do, humanity is going to do it,” he says.

The feeling I left The AI Doc with is that the future of AI is overwhelmingly — and unfortunately — out of the hands of everyday people. "

That's just not just scary,  that's undemocratic.   

After the movie, we went down to our favorite italian restaurant and bar on the corner.  There we ordered our usual meal of Kale Salad and Meatballs on Polenta.  We were still  working on digesting the movie when the food arrived.   Next to us at the corner of the bar were two 40ish males  One of them was in High Tech and the other was in Property Management.  The conversation went on long enough for me get a couple of doubles in.  But they were moved by the movie.  My partner was moved.  And my hair went from being on fire to whatever the plasma version of that is. 

I told my story about how I have spent most of my adult years (after my Armadillo daze) working in Renewables trying to deal with the existential challenge that humanity faces with Climate Change.  How I built the first commercial wind farm in Texas, how I served as Chairman of the Electric Utility to adopt renewable energy goals that far exceeded the tepid goals of most organizations, how I lobbied the PUC for an energy only payment protocol ultimately creating an economic environment such that rosy red Texas has more Wind, more Solar, and more Storage than any other state.  And even with the R's trying to stop the train, the tracks are laid.

I didn't mention that I had been blogging about it for 22 years now. 

But I did tell them that I no longer think that Climate Change is  the primary existential challenge of humankind.  Oh it is, but it's like a meteor that  is way out in deep space but clearly heading our way.  The AI meteor is in our solar system.  And there are billions and billions of dollars and other currencies being spent right now as the race for  artificial general intelligence (AGI) dominance goes into overdrive.

According to  Google AI, 

As of early 2026, true AGI does not exist. Current research focuses on improving large language models (LLMs) to handle more generalized reasoning, though they still fail at complex, novel tasks that humans easily solve. It also says,  Development of AGI brings significant risks, including ethical issues regarding AI safety, job displacement, and alignment with human values.

Global investment in artificial intelligence is currently witnessing an unprecedented surge, with projections indicating that it will reach roughly

$1.5 trillion in 2025 and exceed $2 trillion in 2026. This massive influx of capital is driven by a global race to build AI infrastructure, specifically data centers and hardware, with total annual investment expected to grow by over 40% annually.

 

Global military expenditures reached a record high of approximately $2.7 trillion in 2024.

At 40% annual growth, AI investments will eclipse our war investments by next year.

We cannot drink from the Firehose.

We must point our efforts elsewhere. 

My brother Frank would say: 

You can't worry about your Dandriff,

When you are dying of Cancer.

Something else got him. 

 

 

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Where the Future Is

 

Most of my immediate family goes to Idaho to ski about this time of year leaving me at home to piddle around and stay up late reading or writing early into the morning.  My current mind challenge is trying to get my hands around the spectacular growth in Artificial Intelligence in the last  year and the resource and political  implications of it all. 

But last night, I was watching (actually binging) a new civil war series called the Gray House.  At around 3:00 having had enough of the spymaster story of the Confederate White House apparently named Gray House, I did my oral care and hopped into my solitary, super comfy bed.  Often, when I sleep alone, I like to leave NPR on as company and as an aural filler.  I lit the essential oil candle and turned off the bed lights behind the headboard, laid my head down, and then heard something about Drumph having just made a statement on his Truth Social account that he and Bebe just bombed Iran. 

I jumped up, flipped open my mini, and watched my normal center left news networks and yup, right there from Mar a Lago, was the POTUS in a white USA baseball cap telling the Iranians and the rest of the world that he is giving them a chance to be free; but for now to stay in doors because there is going to be a lot of bombs out there. 

And now, that's all there is on our media and will be for a while.  Most of the actual pictures come from Al Jazzerra right now.  The Fairmount in Dubai got whacked by a drone, and the Navy took some shots on their 5th fleet.  But we got our man, or at least the Israeli Air Force did.  And Khamenei, their supreme leader is now officially a martyr. We apparently also got a school full of young girls.

And now the Revolutionary Guards are warning of an intense offensive to come.

In the meantime, the Pentagon is trying to force the creators of Claude to allow their AI to not be restricted by their terms of service regarding AI homicide.  The Justice Department excluded FBI reports that Drumph forced a teenager's head onto his mushroom which she bit, and then he socks her with his fist. And we can't forget that the EPA just rescinded the endangerment finding regarding CO2 and its regulatory foundation for climate change policy.

All of this while the warnings regarding AI go unheeded:

Industry warnings regarding AI have escalated significantly as of February 2026, ranging from immediate economic disruption to long-term existential threats. High-profile executives and researchers from

OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind have reached a consensus that AI risks should be treated with the same urgency as pandemics or nuclear war.

Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei,  warned in May 2025 that AI could eliminate up to half of all entry-level white-collar jobs, potentially spiking unemployment to 10–20% within five years.

In late February 2026, Jack Dorsey’s Block announced plans to cut over 4,000 jobs—nearly half its staff—citing AI-driven productivity gains.

 Financial institutions like Citigroup have cautioned that AI implementation may lead to higher unemployment and deflation. Some analysts warn of a "vibe coding" shift that could render traditional software roles obsolete.    

 This from Wikipedia:

Experts disagree on whether artificial general intelligence (AGI) can achieve the capabilities needed for human extinction. Debates center on AGI's technical feasibility, the speed of self-improvement,^[7] and the effectiveness of alignment strategies.^[8] 

Concerns about superintelligence have been voiced by researchers including Geoffrey Hinton,^[9] Yoshua Bengio,^[10] Demis Hassabis,^[11] and Alan Turing,^[a] and AI company CEOs such as Dario Amodei (Anthropic),^[14] Sam Altman (OpenAI),^[15] and Elon Musk (xAI).^[16] 

 In 2022, a survey of AI researchers with a 17% response rate found that the majority believed there is a 10 percent or greater chance that human inability to control AI will cause an existential catastrophe.^[17][18] 

In 2023, hundreds of AI experts and other notable figures signed a statement declaring, "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war".^[19] 

Following increased concern over AI risks, government leaders such as United Kingdom prime minister Rishi Sunak^[20] and United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres^[21] called for an increased focus on global AI regulation.  

Researchers warn that an "intelligence explosion"—a rapid, recursive cycle of AI self-improvement—could outpace human oversight and infrastructure, leaving no opportunity to implement safety measures. In this scenario, an AI more intelligent than its creators would recursively improve itself at an exponentially increasing rate, too quickly for its handlers or society at large to control.

Something tells me that Drumph and his DoW boy wonder have a plan for Iran.  And it probably came from Claude. ( or one of his brothers)

And sooner than you think, our boots on the ground may not be leather.

I told my grandson that all my life I've wondered where the future is.

And now it's here. 

And it's just like the movies. 

 

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A New Year

 

 

As the New Year headed our way, my little family made its way to Europe, specifically, the Iberian Peninsula.   Over the years, we have spent the New Year all over the place.  We have done the big cities, NYC, Mexico City, San Francisco, LA/Las Vegas, Austin, Buenos Aires, Paris, London, and now Madrid. And we have done the smallest hole in the walls from "Bernies" in Port Aransas, Texas to Real de Catorce, Mexico.  

In Catorce, we used to celebrate the New Year with 50 or 60 international friends from all over the Globe.

After dinner in El Real, we would go to the top of the Hotel and experience the greatest, most dangerous fireworks extravanganza at close range.  The six inch  firework mortars would suck the air from around you as everyone on that roof realized that this unregulated display was not only top notch, it was also a 7 or 8 on the Peligroso scale.  The finale was a Gyro-Gearloose contraption made of bamboo by an aging  Matehualan craftsman down in the valley.  It would light up and spin and slowly but surely ignite all of its arms and appendages,  spraying rivers of sparks in every direction, and then all of a sudden, the very top crown would ignite, start spinning at high speed, and then lift off into the heavens to the screams of delight from the equally lit crowd.

We would find it smoldering on someones concrete roof in due time. 

But before we made it to Madrid, we spent 4 days in Lisbon. The last time I was in Lisbon, it seemed a little sleepy but well maintained.  Perhaps the most picturesque city in Western Europe, it has grown to become a destination for tourists of all stripes.  The restaurants are many, the Hotels are modernized, and with the shops and views from the hills of Barrio Alto and the history of the Castle of St George and Alfama on the opposing hill to the north, the historic old town is nicely knitted into the larger metro area. 

Just south of Alfama is the back road up to the Castle.  On the way up is a great Brunch place called Dear Breakfast.  Up the hill a little further is the Cathedral of Lisbon and across the street is the Museum of Resistance and Freedom.

It was there that we were reminded of the recent history of Portugal during its fascist period beginning before World War II.  

Portugal's history of repression, particularly under the

Estado Novo (New State) dictatorship (1933-1974) led by António de Oliveira Salazar, was characterized by strict censorship, pervasive secret police (PIDE/DGS) surveillance, torture, imprisonment of dissidents (like at Aljube prison), suppression of free speech, and control over media and political life to maintain colonial power and traditional values. 

This authoritarian rule, a continuation of earlier military dictatorships, ended with the bloodless Carnation Revolution in 1974, which ushered in democracy. 

The Museum WAS Aljube prison.  And many of the inhuman cells were still intact.  The place gave me the eeby-jeebies. The fact that it was just a few yards from the Cathedral of Lisbon was not just a brutal juxtaposition, 

It is a metaphor of the unholy alliance of church and state. 

The Portuguese people have a long history of courage and exploration.  They were the first to navigate the seas beyond the safety of visual reference.  Thus we have Brazil.

Portuguese maritime explorations resulted in numerous territories and maritime routes recorded by the Portuguese on journeys during the 15th and 16th centuries. Portuguese sailors were at the vanguard of European exploration, chronicling and mapping the coasts of Africa and Asia, then known as the East Indies, Canada and Brazil (the West Indies), in what became known as the Age of Discovery. 

And their technology was advanced:

Portuguese nautical science evolved from the successive expeditions and experience of the Portuguese pilots. It led to a fairly rapid evolution, creating an elite of astronomers, navigators, mathematicians and cartographers. Among them stood Pedro Nunes with studies on how to determine latitude by the stars, and João de Castro, who made important observations of magnetic declination over the entire route around Africa.  

Today Portugal and Lisbon specifically is a model of urban design and commitment to that 500 year history of exploration.

But like the US, Western Europe is facing the large movements of peoples as climate change and a new age of political repression collide.  The Trump administration has claimed that around 140,000 people had been deported as of April 2025, and recent figures are closer to 600,000.

And, the number of people in immigration detention in the US has hit an all-time high according to data published by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement  (ICE).  The data, which comes out every two weeks, shows that as of December 2025, ICE held more than 68,400 people.

And as in the US, the flow of peoples across nation states is also moving those who are seeing their streets and towns change in complexion rightward.

And that explains Drumph.

I'm reading Bruno Latour's book, Down to Earth on climate and politics. In it, he says, "By pulling out of the Paris Accord, Drumph explicitly triggered, if not a world war, at least a war over what constitutes the theatre of operations. 

We Americans don't belong to the same Earth as you.  

Yours may be threatened; ours won't be" 

We made our way to Madrid for our New Year's Eve celebration in a place called Ginger.  

We all wore our funny hats and masks, and blew our little horns. 

For a New Year. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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On our Doorstep

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Magritte 

 

 

 

 

We had four out of five of my partner's brothers for Thanksgiving this year. Besides the usual boisterous cacophony of Idaho testosterone which I have learned to accept if not genuinely enjoy, a new meme has arrived in these circles. For the  American right has embraced the idea that to go forward with our current pace towards artificial intelligence, society must give up on removing carbon from our civilization and instead embrace whatever we must to power the new technological race for superiority in cyberspace. In short, electric power must be nuclear, or coal, or perhaps batteries.

Powering chips with chips powered by the sun, although elegant, is seen as unrealistic.

It was 21 years ago that I posted about the Singularity. 

The concept of a technological singularity as it is known today is largely credited to Dr. Vernor Vinge, a mathematician, computer scientist, and science fiction author who is best known for his Hugo award-winning novel, A Fire Upon the Deep, and for his 1993 essay "The Technological Singularity", in which he argues that exponential growth in technology will reach a point beyond which we cannot even speculate about the consequences.

Vinge's essay contains the following frequently-quoted statement:

"Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly thereafter, the human era will be ended."  Vinge wrote that thirty three years ago.  Now hold that thought while I gently change the channel.

In Texas, we have demonstrated that Renewable Energy and electronic stationary storage coupled with electric vehicle mobile storage supported with  modest amounts of legacy energy can meet the needs of an advanced society at a price that we can afford. To prove it, AI factories are popping up everywhere and putting pressure on our 90 GW grid.  And they are impressive consumers of our low prices.

But no Texan voted to bring these behemoths in to suck our affordable power.

This from Oil Price. (yes, Oil Price)

"The Cloud" might be the greatest branding trick in history. It sounds fluffy, ethereal, and notably light.

It implies that our digital lives…our emails, our crypto wallets, our endless scrolling…exist in some vaporous layer of the atmosphere, detached from earthly constraints. But if you actually drive out to Loudoun County, Virginia, or stare at the arid plains of Altoona, Iowa, you realize the Cloud is actually just a very big, very loud, and very hot factory.

We’ve been telling ourselves a lovely story about the energy transition. We were retiring coal plants, building wind farms, and decoupling economic growth from carbon emissions. It was all going according to plan."

But in comes Nvidia and its H100 GPU which uses 100 kW instead of 10 kW 

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), global electricity demand from data centers is projected to more than double by 2030. This is the same as the entire annual electricity use of a country like Japan.

The invisible hand is hitting a concrete wall.

We have effectively moved from powering a toaster to powering a neighborhood, all inside the same metal box. Air cooling…fans blowing over hot metal…doesn't work anymore. Air just isn't physically dense enough to move that much heat away.

We are now plumbing data centers like chemical refineries, running liquid coolant loops directly to the silicon die.

The irony is palpable. We spent billions trying to kill coal, only to have the most futuristic technology on earth, AI, throw it a lifeline. In places like Virginia or Kansas, utilities are delaying the retirement of coal plants. They simply cannot risk the grid instability when a gigawatt-scale data center comes online.

The "future" is being powered by the "past."

Amazingly, this is the view of an Oil and Gas Website.

Experts stress that the effects of climate change are not a distant future problem, but a present crisis that requires urgent and wide-ranging measures. And moving to a future where Climate Change management becomes subordinate  is a recipe for not only calamity, but authoritarianism. 

But AI must still be managed. And not all of AI's prophets see the future the same way.  The now defrocked Elon Musk has concerns.

He has repeatedly called AI “humanity’s biggest existential threat.”  He likens unchecked AI development to “summoning the demon,” emphasizing that once a super-intelligent entity exists, controlling it might be impossible if its goals diverge from ours. 

Key points from Musk’s cautionary outlook include:

1. AI Alignment: Ensuring AI goals match human values — no small task.
2. Regulatory Oversight: Musk urges proactive laws and guidelines akin to nuclear safety measures.
3. Human-AI Symbiosis: Through ventures like Neuralink, Musk aims to merge human intellect with AI, perhaps mitigating the risk of obsolescence.

The future is uncertain but undeniably fast-approaching. By investing in education, ethical governance, scenario planning, and collaborative innovation, we can guide these explosive developments toward a future that enhances human life without undermining it. Whether or not the singularity arrives in 2045 (or next Tuesday), the decisions we make today will shape how these technologies intersect with economics, society, and — ultimately — the core of our humanity. 

The recent ugly bill by the Rs made it illegal for states to regulate AI. We can thank the Plutocrats for that. 

AI must be required to comply with  Global Climate Change Agreements now and in the years ahead.

Our leaders must respond or be replaced.

Just listen to Bernie Sanders. 

Because the Singularity is on our doorstep. 

And a different World is on the other side. 

The winds of fate await. 

 

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Wake Up All

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

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Last week, the major renewable energy groups that have brought Texas to be the leading renewable energy state in the country (yes I said Texas...RED Texas) had a luncheon in the Special Events Room at the Austin Public Library.

The  relatively new Library just off Cesar Chavez is worth a visit and the events room can hold several hundred folks handily.  The occasion was the 40th anniversary and formal recognition of the merger of the Texas Renewable Energy Industries Association and Clean Texas.  Given that it actually happened during the first days of Covid in the spring of 2020, there was not much fanfare for the merger.

Since the mid 80s, TREIA had been the leading proponent of Renewable Energy Policy in the State. Back then, Texas was just turning red, but not the kind of angry RED we have today.  Consequently, with an original push given by Governor Richards, we found open doors for making Texas an Energy state that included all forms of energy.  Those doors remained open even as we transitioned into the administrations of Governor Bush and Governor Perry. 

Consequently, the Renewable Energy Industry was able to make the argument that wind and solar fields from far west Texas should be connected to the Urban Centers in the center of the state, just like we built Farm to Market roads to bring farm products to market almost 100 years ago.  These electric transmission lines were called CREZ lines and their creation and funding was a critical element of the Texas plan. And that Texas plan came out of a series of reports that were created by the Sustainable Energy Development Council.  These reports dealt with energy in all the demand sectors and it estimated the amount of efficiency that could be mined as a result of smart energy management.

Now, Texas has over 50 GWs of Wind, 30 something GWs of Utility Solar, and almost 15 GWs of stationary storage.  This on a 90 GW peak load grid called ERCOT.  Among the greatest achievements TREIA  helped craft was an energy only-market and postage stamp wheeling rates.  That was what our producers needed to become highly competitive in the newly deregulated market and in the Nodal Market that would emerge.

Having been appointed to several state wide positions by Governors Richards and Bush, I was in the thick of all this.  Plus, I was also President or on the Executive Committee of TREIA for many of those critical years. And I was a Co-Founder with Russel Smith.

So the planners of the event honored me with a  Visionary Founder Award. And here are my short acceptance remarks:

40th Anniversary Award Remarks, September 23rd, 2025
 
Thank you…thank you. Thank you Raina, Lenae, Melissa, Hala,
 
And all of you.
 
Awards like this are truly special and they are so appreciated. But in many ways, they are also misleading and even a little bit hard on some. The good work we did 40 years ago was accomplished by more than just a handful of dedicated people.
 
Even though Margaret Meade said: 
 
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
 
It was almost 200 people who met at the Crest Inn in 1985 to start TREIA. It was exciting and there was so much future in front of us.
 
Surely some are here in this room today. (around 30 folks arise and  are recognized)

But even though we are gathered to honor the past, We need to use this time to contemplate the future. For the future  of our Industry faces uncertainty today,
 
Just like it did 40 years ago. 
 
And some of the predictions are pretty dire.
 
But some of them are not.
 
Here’s what the Sept 25 EIA ( Energy Information Administration) Report predicts:
 
We expect that total U.S. generation by the electric power sector will grow by 2.3% in 2025 and a further 3.0% next year. 
 
These growth rates are higher than expected at the beginning of the year when we forecast U.S. electricity generation would grow by an average of 1.5% each year. The higher growth in generation reflects colder-than-expected weather earlier in 2025 along with the incorporation of load growth assessments by grid operators in the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) and PJM systems.
 
Increasing electricity demand is being met by higher generation from most energy sources in 2025. We expect that utility-scale solar will grow the most, generating 33%, or 72 billion kilowatthours more electricity this year compared with 2024. 
 
New solar projects account for more than half of the new generating capacity expected to come online this year.
 
We expect wind will generate 4% more electricity in 2025 than it did in 2024, while we expect hydropower generation will grow by 2%.
 
We forecast that natural gas-fired power plants will generate 3% (61 BkWh) less electricity in 2025 than last year. In some regions, such as Texas and the Midwest, increasing generation from solar is also displacing some natural gas-fired generation.
 
Between now and 2026, the Short Term Outlook predicts that Gas will drop from 42 to 40 % of total generation, Renewables will grow  from 25% to 26%, nuclear remains flat at 18%, and coal still dropping falls to 16%.
 
We expect that total U.S. generation by the electric power sector will grow by 2.3% in 2025 and a further 3.0% next year. We expect that solar power will supply the largest share of the increase in both years.
 
They see GDP going up over 2% and WTI going down into the 50’s.
 
In closing I want to point out that some of us old die-hards have created the Historical Foundation for Texas Renewable Energy, also known as the Renewable Foundation, and we are archiving the 40 Years of work that got us where we are today.  Go to  the website and go back to the Newsletters in 92 when we got our first PUC Commissioner appointed, when the Utilities joined our ranks, and how we used the Governors STEPP project to create the policy that brought us an energy only market and the CREZ.
 
We’ve come a long way here in Texas.  We’ve got 40 GWs of Wind and 32 GWs of Solar, and 14 GWs of Storage on a 100 GW system.
 
If we work together we can stand tomorrow’s bad weather, because we know the climate is in our favor.
 
But I think we need to tell our story better.  Most do not recognize the sizable contribution of clean energy to their lives.  We need to fix that through organizations like this and other communication strategies. 

People need to know.
 
Thank you once again for this honor.
 
And now, allow me to do the honors and introduce Russel Smith, the Executive Director of TREIA for 3 decades." 

Yes, the Rs at the Texas State Capitol, and Drumph in DC are doing their best to slow this train down.   But the tracks are laid and the rest of the World knows that our current leadership is an embarrassment in this critical time of Climate Stabilization. 

His speech at the UN on Tuesday, the same day that I received my award will go down in History as colossal quackery    

But Hitler was an embarrassment until he proved that he was actually a menace.

And this Tuesday's likely government shutdown may prove to be more memorable than others. 

But as Yogi Berra said:

It's hard to Predict,

Especially if your talking about the Future. 

For we are in the hands of a foolish and cruel regime. 

I hope we Wake Up soon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 * Poster by James Montgomery Flagg 1917