Texas at forefront of wind energy: MIT Technology Review
Texas has become the model for the rest of the US for generating wind power, according to the MIT Technology Review. Currently, Texas has nearly 18,000 MW of wind power capacity, and is the only US to have its own power grid. The MIT Technology Review finds that this, alongside a lack of regulation, is allowing entrepreneurs to work in a 'prospecting' fashion to create more cost-effective and efficient wind power for Texas.

With nearly 18,000 megawatts of capacity, Texas, if it were a country, would be the sixth-largest generator of wind power in the world, right behind Spain. Now Texas is preparing to add several thousand megawatts more—roughly equal to the wind capacity that can be found in all of California. Most of these turbines are in west Texas, one of the most desolate and windy regions in the continental United States. Fifteen years ago, when the groundwork for this boom was being set, this area had little but cotton and grain farms, oil fields, scrub and dry riverbeds, and small towns that were mostly withering.

A turbine at the Horse Hollow wind farm.

Today it’s a land of spindly white turbines that line the highways—and the pockets of landowners. At night, when the wind blows strongest and steadiest, if you stand out in one of the fields you can hear the great blades make a ghostly shoop-shoop sound as they turn. Wind power has brought prosperity to towns that were literally drying up less than a generation ago. “In the 2011 drought a lot of people around here would have filed for bankruptcy if not for the turbines,” said Russ Petty, one of Rolan’s brothers, who was giving me a driving tour of the property. “What it’s done is helped keep this land in the family.”

It has also shown that a big state can get a substantial amount of its power from renewable sources without significant disruptions, given the right policies and the right infrastructure investments. The U.S. Department of Energy’s 2015 report “Wind Vision” set a goal of getting 35 percent of all electricity in the country from wind in 2050, up from 4.5 percent today. In Texas, at times, that number has already been exceeded: on several windy days last winter, wind power briefly supplied more than 40 percent of the state’s electricity. For wind power advocates, Texas is a model for the rest of the country.

But it also reveals what wind power can’t achieve. Overall, wind still represents less than 20 percent of the state’s generation capacity—a number that dips into the low single digits on calm, hot summer days. And even with the wind power boom, the state’s total estimated carbon emissions were the highest in the nation in 2013, the most recent year for which data is available—up 5 percent from the previous year.

An abandoned gas station blown over by strong desert winds, just north of the Mexican border.

What’s more, the conditions that have spurred Texas’s boom may not be easily duplicated. Not only is Texas scoured by usually steady winds, but it has something most other places lack: a gigantic transmission system that was built to bring electricity from the desolate western and northern parts of the state to the big cities of the south and east, including Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, and Houston. Under a program known as Competitive Renewable Energy Zones, or CREZ, the power lines were approved in 2007 and cost nearly $7 billion to build. They have added a few dollars a month to residential electricity bills, but they now look like a far-sighted infrastructure investment that other states are unwilling or unable to make.

I drove nearly 1,200 miles, from Abilene to Amarillo and many places in between, this summer to explore the wind explosion in Texas. I wanted to understand what was driving this ongoing boom, and what the ultimate limit might be. How much wind power can the Texas grid absorb, economically and physically? And can other states, and other nations, achieve what Texas has, or are there conditions here that will be difficult or impossible to reproduce anywhere else?

Prospecting

Russ Petty at the door to one of the turbines that Invenergy operates under a lease with his family.

Guy Payne is one of the beneficiaries of the wind boom. A former prison guard, he was driving a chain bus—used to transport shackled prisoners—when “I started passing all these wind turbines,” he recalls. In 2003, a friend who’d left the corrections business mentioned the opportunities available in wind energy: free training, good pay and benefits, outdoor work, and a much lower chance of being assaulted by a convict. After a six-month training program with General Electric in Tehachapi, California, Payne became a wind turbine technician, a job that combines many functions: electrician, mechanic, tower climber, emergency first responder. He now oversees 65 technicians for a wind developer, Invenergy, working at multiple farms. One of them, with 100 General Electric turbines, sits in cotton fields east of Lubbock, on the edge of what locals call the Caprock and geographers call the Llano Estacado. This vast mesa, which covers much of northwest Texas and eastern New Mexico, has some of the best, most consistent wind on the North American continent—often well above the 28 miles per hour that’s ideal for generating electricity.