This town wants to become the second city in Texas that use only renewable energy sources. It will probably reach this aim by 2020, without bigger obstacles. In Texas, which is considered as the cradle of innovation in this area, progress of renewable energy is expected to be on the high scale.
The natural gas boom has been good to the state of Texas. But residents in Denton, a midsize college town north of Dallas, aren’t banking on a fossil-fuel-driven future. Instead, they hope to make their community the second city in Texas to get all of its electricity from renewable energy. Denton is twice the size of the first Texas city to achieve that goal, but officials expect they will be able to reach 100 percent renewable by 2020 without having to increase rates residents pay. In conservative-minded Texas, that last point is key. Even in Denton, a city that voted to ban fracking four years ago, going 100 percent renewable would have faced significant backlash if residents would have had to pay more for it. Texas is widely considered a cradle of innovation in this area, however, in large part because its electrical grid is wholly confined within the state. That openness to innovation, experts say, will likely drive the growth of renewable energy in the state and encourage larger cities to increase their renewable energy capacities.
