Wind power blows away cultural stereotypes
Increasingly common in Central Texas, they surprise those who considered them a West Texas phenomenon
PRAIRIE HILL — James Lyles glided a dusty four-wheeler to a stop at the fence line. He answered the how’s-it-goin’ question the only way a farmer could this summer.
“Hot,” he said, pointing to the ghost of a cornfield. Stifling heat and stingy clouds forced Lyles to harvest a month early, slashing yields to 80 bushels per acre from their typical production of 130 to 150 bushels.
“It got too hot, too early,” he said.
But Lyles doesn’t fret about the weather as much as he used to. He’s two years into a 30-year lease with a renewable energy company that erected four large turbines on his land in exchange for a set fee plus a share of the electricity revenue they generate. In a typical year, the extra cash would help Lyles pay down land and equipment loans and get a head start on his next crop. This year, the $48,000 in lease payments and royalties will just about cover his droughtrelated losses.
“My banker is a lot happier knowing I have these windmills,” he said.
The 200-ton towers, nearly as tall as a football field is long, are increasingly common along the highways and FM roads of Central Texas. Developers promise economic benefits to rural communities, particularly through tax revenue for local schools. The turbines themselves may surprise passers-through who thought of them as a West Texas phenomenon.
One of the most active players in communities like this is Engie, a French power-generation company with North American headquarters in Houston. Its Prairie Hill Wind Farm, northeast of Waco, began producing electricity in December 2020 with 100 turbines across 30,000 acres and a substation connecting it to the state grid. It has a production capacity of 300 megawatts per day, enough to power all the homes in Galveston County for a year.
Engie has two power projects under construction nearby: the similarly sized Limestone Wind project and the 250-megawatt Sun Valley
Solar project. Both are forecast to be in operation by year’s end. In 2023, Engie plans to add 100 megawatts of battery storage at Sun Valley to allow it to hold on to electricity that can be released when needed.
These will give Engie seven wind and four solar projects in Texas with a combined capacity to produce more than 2.2 gigawatts of electricity. That is just over half of the company’s total solar and wind capacity for the U.S. and Canada, North American Vice President for Operations Russ Young said.
Executives are busily poring over the recently signed Inflation Reduction Act in search of even more opportunities, Young said. The legislation
provides billions of dollars in tax breaks and incentives to increase renewable energy and affiliated manufacturing designed to drive down carbon emissions.
Vice President for Government and Regulatory Affairs Julie Vitek said Engie, the world’s largest independent power-generation company, decided to focus on developing the “cleanest” energy options seven or eight years ago and has since divested most of its 70-plus natural gas-fired power plants to focus on wind and solar.
Even before the Inflation Reduction Act, the company was on track to add more renewable power capacity in 2022 than in any previous year, Vitek said.
The North American hub employs more than 600 people in Houston and includes a 24-hour trading desk to monitor electricity demand and price fluctuations.
Texas already leads the nation in renewables, and the industry is growing rapidly. Wind generation in May increased 32 percent from a year earlier and was 63 percent higher than in May 2018, according to an analysis by Enersection, a Houston-based startup that creates data-driven insights about the energy business.
Solar generation, while still a sliver of the Texas total, was up 545 percent here over 2018.
Only eight states produce more total electricity than Texas does solely from renewable sources, Enersection co-founder Jeff Davies said.
Building new wind and solar projects on the prairie east of wind power’s traditional base in West Texas puts Engie closer to established transmission lines that can supply metro areas like Houston and San Antonio more efficiently.
That requires abundant available land and amenable property owners. Lyles, who owns 735 acres, is one of 78 landowners who signed leases with Engie for the Prairie Hill Wind Project.
Lyles said he was “on the fence” when the first land agent showed up. He made trips to
West Texas and to an Engie wind farm in Goldthwaite to see how the industry fit into an agricultural environment. That allayed concerns about noise, aesthetics, damage to roads and infrastructure.
Two years into operation, Lyles said he’s found Engie good to work with and he enjoys wellmaintained gravel roads to the turbines on his properties.
He also said farm animals and wildlife seem indifferent to the gleaming steel structures, each with a trio of 220-foot-long, 40,000-pound blades whipping along at a deceivingly fast speed at their tips of 183 mph.
“It hasn’t scared the (feral) pigs off,” Lyles said with an exasperated smile. “They still eat my corn. I wish it would.”
He said his neighbors seem to have at least grown accustomed to them as well. That includes one major landowner whose initial reaction was, “I wish they’d keep them out in West Texas.” His grown kids did some research, however, and talked him into signing a lease for several of them.
Engie spent $300 million to get Prairie Hill Wind up and running, and the Limestone plant is expected to cost about the same.
Buddy McKay, construction manager for the new project, had 359 workers on site as he led a bumpy tour of the heavily rutted, 38,000-acre work site this month.
Towers and blades in various stages of assembly were a tribute to superlatives: a tower base lying on its side boasted a diameter of 15 feet; the next-generation blades come in two sections so the tips can be replaced when they become eroded.
Projects like these highlight the extent to which investment capital for renewable energy is flowing primarily into Republican strongholds despite the political rhetoric from many on the right.
Democratic-leaning metropolitan areas need to diversify their energy sources, for example, but they don’t have the land available to build sizable wind or solar farms.
Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress voted unanimously against the Inflation Reduction Act, even though their districts are poised to reap the expected benefits of increased spending on renewable-energy initiatives.
Away from the limelight, business is getting done.
“There’s a co-dependency that nobody really acknowledges,” Davies said.
Enersection found that 41 of the 50 U.S. congressional districts with the most capital dedicated to renewable-energy projects are represented by Republicans. That’s 82 percent. Limestone County, home to the Prairie Hill project, went 3-to-1 for Donald Trump in 2020.
Twenty-seven of Texas’ 36 congressional districts have at least some renewable projects in operation or on the books; Republicans lead all but six of those districts, including the four biggest and eight of the 10 that are home to the lion’s share of wind and solar projects.
“At the end of the day, people are incentivized by money,” Davies said, “and there’s a lot of money involved in these projects.”
At the 117-year-old Watson Feed Store in Mart, the closest town to the Prairie Hill site, most of the grumbling about the hulks on the horizon was in the past tense, related to the construction phase. Customers complained about cows that got loose whenever a crew cut a fence to move components into place.
Folks seem to have accepted them, even if reluctantly.
“I’m not going to say I’m for them,” feed store manager Blake Sielaff said. But, he added, “I can’t come out and say I’m against them.”
“All in all, our community benefited,” he said.
Business picked up at the feed store, Sielaff said, especially when there were a few hundred construction workers in town. And the Mart mayor is featured in a promotional video for Engie, gushing about the windfall for local schools.
Yet when Sielaff or his longtime customers see one of the turbines idle or being worked on, it makes them wonder if the machines are wearing out already. They also aren’t convinced that wind power can sustain itself without government subsidies.
Whenever Lyles hears the naysaying about subsidies he responds that he knows how much the turbines cost, and he can calculate from his royalty checks how much they earn in return.
“They get quiet,” Lyles said. “They can’t argue with numbers that I have seen myself.”
Davies, of Enersection, said evidence is mounting that the facilities will thrive with or without government aid. He cited one company that turned over 100 percent of its production tax credits to the host community, in addition to the royalties and lease payments to landowners.
“I’m not hung up on the subsidy issue,” he said.
Back at Watson Feed, customer Calvin Jones Jr., a cattleman and a Mart native, exemplified the local ambivalence. First, he said he had hoped to lease some of his property to Engie, but the company decided to build elsewhere. Instead, he gets $1,200 a year for letting it run a transmission line across his property. Then he said, pointedly, the turbines aren’t as carbon-free as people say because it takes a lot of oil to lubricate all those generators.
Still, he acknowledged one direct benefit that has made life better for him.
“All I know,” he said on his way out of the store, “is I got the best road I’ve ever had.”