Jack Kilby spent years working on solar cells, but confesses he made little progress. Progress might come faster if more money were put into the search for solar cells with higher conversion-efficiency rates. The national labs are working the problem: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory reported early progress in December with indium gallium nitride solar cells that could power satellites and other spacecraft.

Down here on earth, less-expensive materials are required to achieve affordable photovoltaics. An Austin-based company, HelioVolt Corp., is pursuing thin-film photovoltaics made from copper indium selenide that would be cheaper than silicon-based arrays. The company is searching for capital to set up a factory.

Solar arrays in roofs cut the energy load in many small increments. The big power utilities are more interested in the megawatts of wind farms.

West Texas, an area with the high mesas needed for large-scale wind power generation, already has $750 million worth of wind turbines and other power-generating equipment installed, much of it south of the Midland-Odessa oil- and gas-producing region. Driving east on Interstate 10, the quixotic wind turbines complement the area's natural beauty.

The problem, said Beth Garza of FPL Energy, is that the federal government has not put down a stable foundation in terms of a production tax credit for wind-generated power. At certain times, the big utilities can reduce their federal income tax by generating power from wind. But the tax credit has never been long-term, and for that reason investments have been sporadic.

Another issue is that the transmission network is still regulated, and not enough transmission capacity exists to ship power from the wind farms in the west to the more populated eastern half of the state, Garza said.

While Texas has a friendly regulatory environment, there are few subsidies to attract alternative-energy companies, said Steve Guengerich, a founder of the Austin Clean Energy Initiative, a grass-roots group. California and New York are using more of their tax dollars than Texas is to subsidize alternative power.

"This whole field," entrepreneur Guengerich said, "reminds me of the microchip industry in the early 1970s."

Let's hope so.

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