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
Posted on 02/05/2007 1:56:56 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
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."
thomas.korosec@chron.com
Yet the rate of growth continues and order books are full. You can find people that complain about trees and puppies if you look hard enough.
Not really. I grew up in a rural area of comparable "remoteness", and the local governments in such locations are VERY sensitive to desires of the local constituency. It is that local constituency which controls their continuation in office, and what that constituency wants, it gets. If a sufficiently large number o f the near neighbors tell the country government that they don't want such a development, it won't happen.
They can get all the energy industry lawyers they want---those guys don't vote. The locals do.
Yeah, but they don't derail billion-dollar projects and put the nation's energy security as risk. These other wackos do.
Look, here's the deal. You've got an energy source, wind, which in 2005 had an average capacity factor of 26.8% (which was better than solar at 18.8%). You're looking at an average capacity for nuclear plants at 89.3%, over three times more. You've got coal-fired steam turbine plants at 72.6% average capacity factor. Combined-cycle gas-fired capacity came in at 37.7%. Now, compared with the nuclear-coal capacity factors, for wind capacity you have to build around three times as much infrastructure (generating capacity plus transmission) to get an equivalent amount of energy production. You're talking about huge differences in land use. Even with the advantage of zero-cost "fuel", that is a striking difference.
Just the added transmission infrastructure alone makes it a dicey proposition. In my state a local utility consortium just gave up after trying for seven years to site a high voltage transmission line that would run from the southern part of the state to the north, where it would tie into the regional grid. That was just for the transmission line, mind you, not anything to do with a generating plant. I can imagine the ruckus that would cause.
Yeah, the writer just wraps Jacksboro up into Abilene....they ain't "near" each other in any respect.
You're right about being out in W/SW Texas desert... a true rancher does not turn down a $12k/yr windfall from a windmill or a oil well because it has "blinky red lights" at night. A true rancher knows that kinda side money might just be the difference between the amount of hay you can afford during an extended drought.
Interesting, and yet another confirmation that James Earl Carter, Jr. was and still is a damned fool.
...well said. I heard that the taxes are getting high in places down there. Quite a few Texans have owned Colorado land and moved back and forth for over 100 years. They encounter the same kinds of neighbors and problems up here. For the most part, Texans are good to have around in meetings about property rights.
It's beautiful down toward Real County (TX, Leakey and all that), for sure. But man...what a drive from eastern parts of Texas!
Haven't been to Real County, but eventually, maybe this spring...I'll just pick up and drive the convertible off that direction in a careless attempt at recreating a David Lynch movie.
One thing Colorado folk and Texans can always agree on: Californians! =)
In Ft Worth and Austin, and likely many, many places...the cities have closed downtown generation plants that have been there for decades instead of refurb and modernizing them, and instead, pay higher rates and add more pollution for transmission losses....oh....but the environmentalists think they are so brilliant to have closed down those "eyesores."
Generate at the load! Generate at the damn load!
BTW, do you guys know each other? Never thought I'd see a conversation between a Chimera and the Dungeon Master!
Hey, I'll talk to just about anybody (except Bellerophon, who'd probably try to kill me)...
Yep. You might already know about it, but I'll Freepmail the name of a place to you.
See #126 about the credits regarding windmills.
It is for the credits it appears.
I wouldn't know about that. I use Motorola.
And if you lived downwind from a coal plant, you would get more radiation. Nuclear plants are not allowed to release radiation outside containment, but coal plants can belch all they want.
We could generate the most energy by regulating generating facilities in the same way we do aircraft - by type. If you could prove that your solar cell or nuclear reactor met the established standards for its type, you should be able to build as many as you want.
Actually this was not as bad a decision as has been painted. Nuclear recycling is costly, given the present state of technology. France and japan do it because they have no uranium of their own, and so safe place to store waste. The US, with plenty of both, is better off storing waste until recycling technology gets cheaper. Today's nuclear waste will then become tomorrow's low-cost fuel that requires no mining.
hmmm, bump for later reading about NIMBYism
I did enjoy my time in the desert. Being an Easterner and just finishing three years in lush Hawaii I found it refreshingly different. I generally followed I-10, and swear I didn’t see more than small patches of green between the pepper fields around El Paso and when I came to Houston. If I saw an exit sign with an interesting name I went for it. One “town” consisted of a dinner/bar/gas station across from the post office/general store and one trailer. A 5,000 gallon water tanker supplied the towns water needs.
The immense size was different too. I parked the Harley in the middle of the highway for close to an hour and didn’t see a single vehicle, building or telephone pole. Not what I was used to.
LOL Actually DMs get way too involved with their monsters and take it out on the players.
I'm not finding any information quantifying emissions trading. I've been reading about it for years in my windmill magazines though. We have 12 gw worth of windmills in this country which means they produce nearly 30,000,000 mwhr/year of power. The wholesale value of that power is about 1 to 1.5 billion dollars per year. I doube that emission trading is of equal value. At least not in this country yet. The think about emission trading is that there are a lot of people telling their politicians they want to pay more for electricity if it is from a clean source.
I don't buy into global warming though.
The only way around that is to have a reliable, intense energy source available that has a lot of stored energy. On those counts, nuclear is pretty hard to beat.
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