Wind farm plan worries Mason residents
MASON— They first started appearing in West Texas, where the wind howls through oil rigs. Then it was the Panhandle, and small towns along Interstate 20, like Sweetwater, where cattle farms have given way to giant, white spinning blades.
Now the wind turbines are getting closer. Too close, in the minds of many of the 4,000-some people who live in and around Mason, about two hours northwest of Austin.
An Italian-owned energy company, Enel Green Power North America, has leased thousands of acres of land atop a ridge that looms above Mason’s rocky outcroppings mixed with cactus and live oak. So far, it’s all preliminary, a company spokeswoman says.
Sitting on a front porch at his cattle ranch, Ron Crocker points off to the ridge line in the distance. Fifteen miles west of the town’s carefully preserved square, at night the ridge becomes a conduit for southerly winds before they dissipate into the surrounding valley.
“We don’t know for sure, but we’re hearing 30 to 35 wind turbines,” Crocker, 68, said. “There’s talk they’re going to be 520 feet tall.”
Mason, for most of its history, was a cattle town. But these days life is more about weekend visitors from Austin and Dallas and the mobs of hunters come deer season. An oasis of rolling hills in Texas, visitors fish beneath rocky crags and keep watch for an endangered Golden-cheeked Warbler.
But that peace has been disturbed by the prospect of wind turbines and the fears for the future of their Hill Country idyll.
It struck Nikki Sills just how contentious the issue was getting when two women she knew walked into the local chamber of commerce last week arguing about the wind turbines. Not wanting to get in the middle, Sills, who heads the chamber, did what people do when they’re uncomfortable.
“I just sat there typing,” she said. “Eventually I had to say I have to close up to go to lunch. People around here just like things the way they are.”
The project in Mason is complicated by a local colony of Mexican freetailed bats, which swells to more than 3 million in the summer.
They live in a cave on land owned by the Nature Conservancy.
Studies by the U.S. Geological Survey have shown bats have a tendency to fly into wind turbines. Researchers aren’t sure why, but they estimate tens to hundreds of thousands die each year.
A spokeswoman for The Nature Conservancy said in an email that the group was remaining neutral for now, awaiting further study.