Wind farms generate opposition - "We're destroying so much scenery for so little power."

When wind turbines began dotting the skyline around Dale Rankin's horse ranch near Abilene, he teamed up with other property owners to sue the company in charge of the project, FPL Energy. Brandon Wade: For the Chronicle

JACKSBORO — The wind rustling the oak trees on the Squaw Mountain Ranch soon may be its undoing as a starkly empty, unspoiled corner of North Texas.

Riding the boom that last year pushed Texas past California as the nation's leading wind energy producer, a wind power company wants to scatter 100 turbines across an area roughly nine miles long and two miles wide, with at least a dozen of the 250-foot towers on the ranch.

"I'm not interested in having blinking red lights causing the Milky Way not to be as bright or to hear them when now I hear nothing up here except the sounds of nature," said ranch manager Dan Stephenson, explaining why the ranch declined to lease land for the project and objects to its neighbors leasing as well.

"Wind farm, that's a spin term," Stephenson said as he took in a vista of tree-covered ridgelines. "I call them wind turbine industrial zones."

Though embraced by state political leaders as a clean, renewable electricity source and welcomed by many rural landowners as newfound income, wind farms are gathering fresh opposition from Texas ranchers who say they are an ugly, noisy blight on the wide-open landscape.

Opponents say the turbines, which extend up 400 feet to the tips of their blades, not only threaten birds and wildlife but devalue property in areas such as the distant outskirts of Dallas-Fort Worth, where ranchland is increasingly being used for recreation and second homes.

"We're in a 100-yard dash trying to fight these things and, they're already 50 yards ahead," said Stephenson.

Landowners' rights Because Texas does not regulate the siting of wind projects, power companies need only assemble a group of agreeable landowners to set up operations. Royalties paid to ranchers in the Abilene area average about $12,000 per turbine per year, according to testimony in a lawsuit there.

Without governmental oversight, wind farm opponents say, their only recourse has been to head for the courthouse.

In December, five Jack County landowners, including Squaw Mountain Ranch, sued in state court to enjoin several subunits of the Spanish wind giant Gamesa Corp. from erecting "monster wind turbines." It was the third such suit filed in the state, the other ones were in Taylor and Cooke counties.

Jack County Judge Mitchell Davenport characterized opposition to the wind project as "small but vocal" and said he expects most landowners will lease their land for the project if they have not already.

"I see it as very much a property rights issue," said Davenport. "If someone wants to lease for oil or wind or whatever, I think that is up to them."

The judge said economic growth in the county of 8,000 has been "very, very slow," making the wind proposals "one of our best new opportunities."

Stephen Wiley, director of Gamesa Development USA in Austin, said the company plans to invest more than $100 million in the first of three projects it has proposed in Jack County, the Barton Chapel Wind Project.

The company will install 60 turbines capable of producing 120 megawatts, enough to power about 85,000 houses, although the variability of wind cuts actual electrical production to about 30 percent of that capacity.

Development of the wind farm near the Squaw Mountain Ranch has been pushed back to 2009 because of a worldwide shortage of wind turbines, Wiley said.

The company, which is seeking property tax abatements, picked the county because it is near transmission lines and has "an abundance of wind," Wiley said. He said he would have preferred to locate the project in the Panhandle, which state studies rate as having the best potential for wind power. But the location lacks sufficient transmission lines to carry the electricity to more heavily populated areas for use.

State support Gamesa and larger producers in Texas like FPL Energy, which operates 11 wind farms in the state, have been encouraged to build by the Legislature, which in 1999 mandated renewable energy goals. In 2005, lawmakers called for an output of 5,880 megawatts by 2009 — about 3 percent of total demand — from sources such as wind, solar, landfill gas and flowing water.

Last year, wind turbines in Texas accounted for nearly a third of all those installed in the U.S., according to a report released last month by American Wind Energy Association. And the state now hosts the world's largest operating wind farm, the Horse Hollow Wind Energy Center in Nolan and Taylor counties.

"When they put 1,000 of those next to your property, you're not living out in the country anymore," said Dale Rankin, referring to the slim white towers arrayed on the bluffs around his property in Tuscola, about 20 miles south of Abilene.

Rankin, who raises horses on his ranch but makes his living in the chemical business, and eight other property owners sued in 2005 to stop FPL Energy's wind project.

In December, after a two-week trial, they learned just how difficult it will be to stop the wind industry in Texas.

A jury in Abilene found that the turbines were not a nuisance to neighboring landowners after the judge in the case narrowed the legal claims to one: noise pollution.

"We knew we had an uphill battle in a place that calls itself the wind energy capital of the world," said Steve Thompson, a Houston attorney representing the landowners. He plans to appeal the verdict.

Trey Cox, a Dallas attorney representing FPL Energy, said claims of ugliness have little legal support in Texas law. "Texas is very much a landowner's rights state," he said. "We don't want neighbors fussing over what things look like. ... As long as you're not doing anything illegal, if you want to have a broken-down barn or paint your house pink, you get to do it."

He said Texas ranches, including many of those of the plaintiffs, have hosted pump jacks and other energy industry equipment.

Jack Hunt, president of the legendary King Ranch in South Texas, scoffs at comparisons between wind turbines and power lines or pump jacks. "They're not 400 feet tall and moving," he said.

The King Ranch, owned by descendants of Capt. Richard King, has taken issue with a proposal to locate 267 turbines on a neighboring ranch near the coast in Kenedy County. County commissioners last spring denied the project a tax abatement, but it could go forward without one.

"The Kenedy and King ranches go back more than 150 years, and we're at each other's throats over this deal," Hunt said, referring to property owned by the John G. Kenedy Jr. Charitable Trust.

He said the proposed wind farm is likely to have a major impact on the so-called "River of Birds," the flyway from Canada to Mexico that funnels scores of migrating bird species through the area. "You're erecting a 10-mile wall," he said, echoing criticism from environmentalists and birders. "Nobody's looking at how the birds will react to it."

Two offshore wind farms that state officials are proposing to build in the Gulf will receive considerable federal scrutiny for their effect on the birds, marine life and other ecological impacts.

"Onshore, there is no oversight," Hunt said. "Once they start killing birds, and you happen to find out about it, then you can bring in the feds."

Hunt and other critics say the wind power hardly merits the major tax subsidies it receives. Because wind is so variable, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which controls most of the state's power grid, calculates it can rely on only 2.6 percent of wind power capacity being available during peak summer demand periods, council reports show.

"They've been on the cusp of becoming efficient and useful for a quarter-century now, and they never quite get there," Hunt said. "We're destroying so much scenery for so little power."

The point of sale is not where the loss is. It is in the large fees associated in maintaining them.

They are not worth it at this time. I do hope in the future they can do it better though.

OK so GE has not lost money on the 5000, 1.5 mw windmills they have sold. In fact they may have made a profit. I'm glad we've established that. Yet the utilities that have bought the windmills are losing money? That's ten billion dollars worth on windmills, one model by the way, and they are being bought by people that want to lose money?

The people who have bought them have lost money and in the past got slammed at times with taxes they were not supposed to owe (or at least they thought) when the IRS disqualified past deductions in losses of this type.

Not anything that would draw a knowledgeable investor to get into. Investment wise I see them like I would junk bonds (at least until they can stop them from breaking down as much as they do now).
Plus as I said, the maintenance is horrible on this things. Often many are NOT working because they broke down. They are a moving object and with often sand it is hard to keep them going.

"Can you provide a source for that. I don't think its true."

Oh, please. People have been passing zoning laws of all sorts for over a hundred years. It's settled law and been appealed all the way to the Supreme Court.

"If true, the size of the nuisance and the number of people impacted would definitely figure in to the outcome of any litigation. In both cases, it would be small. The property likely has very few adjacent landowners. The impact of equipment in the distance would be negligible as well. Environmental activists making their complaints from hundreds of miles away would not figure in at all."

Doesn't matter how "small". If a majority of the guy's neighbors are opposed, they CAN force him to stop. If existing law doesn't prevent it, they can go to court and sue to stop him. Neither you nor I know who his neighbors are, or their opinions on the project. But if it were going up on a farm next door to me, you bet I'd be either in court or at the local county commission.

"The ONLY reasons I can see for them building any since they lose money is for international PR or because some law makers somewhere created little known special tax breaks for them to build them into law.
Outside of those two reasons, I couldn't tell you why they would consider it."

I can tell you why. Its called clean air credits. Its a billion dollar market. For each unit of energy generated at some big coal plant, a fraction must be generated by some clean energy source to offset the pollution. This must be done regardless of cost or lack of profit. If the power companies don't meet their quotas, they get multi-million dollar fines. Some companies have been known to charge exhorbitant sums selling their credits to other companies who could not meet quota. You can thank the environmentalists and your congressmen for this.

As much as everyone complains about Bush, he deserves a whole lot of credit for not signing the Kyoto Treaty. It would have made this problem alot worse.

'People have been passing zoning laws of all sorts for over a hundred years.....Doesn't matter how "small". If a majority of the guy's neighbors are opposed, they CAN force him to stop. If existing law doesn't prevent it, they can go to court and sue to stop him. Neither you nor I know who his neighbors are, or their opinions on the project. But if it were going up on a farm next door to me, you bet I'd be either in court or at the local county commission.'

This isn't some California subdivision. Its isolated rangeland in Texas. To get a zoning ordinance passed there would be a great feat indeed. :-)

If sued with some kind of viewshed pollution lawsuit, the guy would probably get a team of lawyers pro-bono from the energy industry. They would not want to risk the tiny chance that a precedent would be set.

Around here, opponents of windmills are trying to say that they are impacting endangered species.

Worldwide net electricity consumption in 2001 was estimated to be 13.9 trillion kilowatt-hours. If we have a 25 GW electricity supply, by my ciphering that will produce about 219 billion kw-hrs annually (75 GW of capacity with a 33% capacity factor), or about 1.6% of the 2001 annual worldwide demand. If global electricity demand grows at the average annual rate of 2.4 percent predicted by the Energy Information Administration, 24.7 trillion kilowatt-hours would be consumed in 2025. However, the global average rate will be exceeded in countries with rapidly expanding economies. Anyway, assuming the 2.4% growth figure is correct, comparing the 25 GW source to the 2025 demand, it is about 0.89% of the annual demand. Just the 2.4% annual growth rate starting from the 13.9 trillion kw-hrs. in 2001 means an additional 333.6 billion kw-hrs growth in the first year alone. That exceeds the worldwide available production capacity represented by a 25 GW source by over 50%. What that says is that all of the work the world has done up to this point to install wind-based capacity would not keep up with the annual increase in worldwide demand, much less displace any other existing capacity.

Now, someone show me where I screwed up the orders of magnitude (which is easy to do in these kinds of calculations, mixing kw-hrs and GW of capacity).

What this tells me is that we're going to have a hard enough time keeping up with increases in demand, and we sure as h*ll better not be thinking about trashing any of the sources we already have in hand, because that will put us even further behind the eight-ball.

Source: http://www.clean-energy.us/facts/electricity.htm

It is amazing to me that France, Japan and other places in the world have safely done this for decades, but the US is unwilling to do so. By not reprocessing, we create more hazardous waste to be be stored. Combine that with the fact we now import more uranium fuel than we produce domestically. This hurts us in multiple ways.

OK, so GE is not losing money selling them and they are not being secretly subsidized by the government. But the utilities that have bought 5000 of one model from GE, by the way 2000+ more are on order, are all losing money by everchanging tax laws? There is a global shortage of windmills because demand is high but these utilities are all losing money buying them? You are talking about 20 billion dollars worth of investment for 07 from unknowledgable investors?

I don't see any drastic problems with your numbers. The only thing you didn't factor in is that windpower is growing at a rate of about 30-40 percent per year. At that rate windpower will be able to easily keep up with a 2.4 percent growth when wind accounts for 6 to 8 percent of the power supply. Wind power doubles about every 30 months. That 1.6 percent of world power demand could and probably will become 3.2 percent in just 30-36 months. That changes your calculations quite a bit.

If you want to regulate all of the scenery around you, buy property all the way to the horizon, IMO. If you don't own it, don't try to control it.

I wonder... do those who agree with both sentiments above - the general "buy it" one as well as the Bolded one - then apply it universally?

Do anti-abortion people agree with... If you don't own it, don't try to control it.?

Do those who applaud the govt's Forward Thinking in banning smoking in eateries agree with... If you don't own it, don't try to control it.?

Do those who cheered the liberation of Iraq agree with... If you don't own it, don't try to control it.?

While the rancher's story is designed to get a response, have you asked what the Details were? How big is his ranch, or the ranch that houses the windmills? How close to his fenceline - or living quarters - are these windmills? The answers that are needed before being able to make a more-informed decision on the validity of his complaint.

I post the above not to Troll but to simply make you wonder IF you - and You is the generic You - who agree with "If you don't own it, don't try to control it." apply it equally throughout your life or belief system, or only selectively.

It's easy to grow by apparently large percentages when your overall total is relatively small. When the first nuclear plant come online and added whatever it produced to an installed capacity of 0 MW, it had an infinite growth rate. When the next came online and perhaps doubled the capacity, you had a 100% growth rate. As capacity is added in fixed amounts (which is how power source construction works, no matter what it is) the incremental percentage growth becomes smaller. When you're small and showing big percentage gains, it's unlikely that you're going to be able to sustain percentage growth rates, because new capacity is added in a more linear manner, rather than as a fixed percentage of existing totals.

That's why I posted the numbers. Those are big totals. If you're talking about adding 25% to a small number (relative to the total), the overall contribution is going to be very small compared to the total. And even if you are talking about relatively large expansion of capacity, it is easy to imagine the hollering that will be going on then. As the original article notes, you've already got people out in the middle of Nowhere, TX, complaining about visual pollution. You've got people like Kennedy and Cronkite complaining about offshore visual pollution. Imagine the outcry that would result from a proposed 40% or 50% increase in use. My guess is that the courts will be clogged with lawsuits. It's going to make the anti-nuke kook protests seem like a picnic.

I’m not familiar with the Abilene area, but when I was in Southwest Texas most of the scenery was desert. I met several ranchers with what to me were large spreads - 100 or more sections. It was enough to raise half a dozen cows per section if the weather cooperated. Everyone had a second job in “town” (usually a post office, gas station and motel with restaurant and bar near the interstate exit).

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