Sean and Stormy Fravel met in 2012 in Alice, Texas.
If you told them then that they’d be living together in Sean’s truck in a couple years, they’d surely have laughed in your face.
Oil was over $100 a barrel and the two were right in the thick of it. The Eagle Ford shale deposit was teeming with rigs, trucks, roughnecks, and cash.
Sean drove for Halliburton, and did well enough to buy his own 18-wheeler. Stormy joined him and they were making six deliveries a week to oil patches.
By 2015, that work was gone. Thankfully the truck remained, but it had become a home as well.
The Wall Street Journal recently talked to the Fravel’s about what they have had to do to survive the oil downturn, but it had plenty of similar stories to pick from.
According to the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers, more than 84,000 oil workers have been laid off. That is just one state, though large in size and production it may be.
But Sean and Stormy Fravel’s story isn’t a sad one, it is a classic three-parter.
Boy meets girl and everything is great. Hard times come and put a strain on everyone. And finally, they stick it through and find a new life for themselves at the end.
Theirs is a story you can find all over, because a new hope and boom is coming to Texas, and it is going to be huge.
A New Hope
All told, the story of Texas oil jobs is tragic, but it shouldn’t have come as a surprise.
Texas is still littered with the remains of the last oil boom, and now there is a whole new generation of relics to bleach and crack in the dry heat and sun.
However, there is something different this time around. There is a new hope for the workers who flocked to the boom and got caught in the bust.
That hope is a massive increase in investment and long-term contracts for industrial-sized solar power generation.
There hasn’t been some big change in idealism that is pushing pipe fitters, truck drivers, and rig hands into going green. They’re going to work.
Forget solar being a (mostly) carbon-free power source. This is about business. It is just straight up cheaper to build, maintain, and generate solar power than anything else.
While solar jobs aren’t making up for all the oil jobs, there is a whole lot of work out in the arid plains and plateaus for anyone who can work hard and knows how to use their hands to make it a reality.
Sean Fravel and his wife are two of the many who have, and will, make this transition.
After living with his wife out of his big rig for half a year, they found work at the Alamo 6 solar site. He installs acre after acre of racks, while his wife conducts quality control checks on the installations.
The pay may not be as good overall, but that is because the ’14 days on, 7 days off’ overtime system isn’t being used. It is no longer being used in the oil fields, either, for those who have managed to keep their jobs.
Instead, the Fravel’s work steady hours with weekends off, safely protected by a three-year contract.
As Sean put it, “If oil booms I’ll send her [the truck] back to the field. I won’t go though. My grandfather always said it’s better to make a slow dime than a fast nickel.”
A New Boom
The new boom in solar couldn’t be better positioned for a number of reasons:
- The infrastructure is already in place,
- the base is tiny while growth is exponential,
- and the energy is as cheap as it can get.
Texas completed a nearly $7 billion electrical transmission system that connects West Texas to most of the major cities in the state. The solar version of a pipeline is in place and ready to get up to capacity.
In Texas, solar’s penetration into the ERCOT electricity market, which covers 90% of Texas’ demand, has been tiny, but it is growing fast as a result of the pivot to solar power.
2015 started with just 387 megawatts of capacity on a 70,000-megawatt grid. That year, it grew by 50%. This year, it will grow six-fold.
ERCOT predicts that by 2030, solar will add 14,100 megawatts of power, and — if solar builds out the way it expects — will account for more new capacity than wind and natural gas plants combined.
This isn’t just going to happen one day, this is starting now. And unlike many states, Texas doesn’t even offer incentives or rebates.
Last April, Austin Energy opened up bidding to provide 600 megawatts (MW) of solar power. Of the 7,976 MW of solar power proposed for the project, 1,295 MW of those solar project bids came in well below $0.04 per kilowatt-hour.
It was the lowest solar power price in the world, for merely a couple months.
In July, Berkshire Hathaway’s NV Energy secured the cheapest electricity rate in the U.S.A.
A 100 megawatt First Solar Inc. project in development is going to provide power at just $0.0387 per kilowatt-hour.
This will continue unabated, and become one of the biggest trends in power since we started burning fossil fuels in the first place.
The low solar costs will continue to spread nationwide over time, with total generation expected to more than double nationwide this year, and it is all starting with the new Texas energy boom.
If you want a good idea for how to get in on the ground floor, Nick’s research has you covered.
