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
There is quite a difference between an isolated windmill on someone's "backwoods home" location, and a gigantic wind-farm occupying huge swaths of landscape. What is acceptable in the first case is not in the second.
But this is a distinction that escapes you, obviously.
Of course people might decide to settle this outside the courtroom. It's never a good idea to piss off all of your neighbors.
I think telling people what is acceptable on their private property is the issue here. It is not the landowners legal responsibility to provide a scenic view at great expense to himself.
That was a very informative and valuable posting. It is amazing what we could be doing! One note of pessimism, though. Your suggestion about making the canisters recoverable is correct, but we have a society that cannot think beyond next week's meaningless reality show, let alone 700 years.
Exactly. Recycle the nuke fuel, as France and Japan do.
Guess why we can't?
Because our fast breeder reactor project was killed by whom?
President Clinton, 1994. To "prevent nuclear proliferation" according to the anti-nuke nitwits who lobbied his administration.
I'd say that they turned out to be wrong on both the energy issue and the proliferation issue.
That is the Achilles' Heel of many of these schemes. People just assume that when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining, they can just tap back into the grid and draw energy from it at the same cost with the same reliability as they always had before. Well, if they do, they'll probably be paying a heckuva lot more per unit than they are used to, and, worst case, it may not be there at all.
Wind farms have not been great because of the cost of high maintenance of the damage done from the environments they are in. Until that is improved, wind farms are just a fun thought and not logical.
Exactly.
1 nuclear power plant will cleanly replace 10,000 windmills. So are royalties only 30% of $12,000?
Pray for W and Our Troops
If ANYTHING becomes a big enough nuisance, be it visual or otherwise, to impact a significant number of people, they can vote to over-rule his "property right". This is settled law, and has been for quite a long time. Wind farms are ugly as hell. Put'em offshore, make hydrogen, and pipeline it onshore.
But "We're destroying so much scenery [outside of Abilene] for so little power;" has to be one of the ironic statements of the week. As Rush commented once, "You have to be going to Abilene...you don't go by it on the way to anywhere!" LOL.
This guy, if you read the article -IS NOT- a Texan, nor is he a 'rancher', IMHO.
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..
Horses are rich mans' toys. I suspect that this guy is a businessman that got rich and bought a bunch of land out in the boonies to get away from it all, and is now trying to tell his neighbors what to do.
Wind power is ridiculous compared to nukes, but $12k/year might pay the property taxes indefinitely and allow you to actually "own" the land once again, even in today's socialist state. This idiot is going to condemn his neighbors to have to move away from him.
And even West Texas will eventually run out of places to run away to!!!
I've been to the area around Livermore and Altemont Pass in California where there are lots of (useless) windmills, and they are visually overpowering and just plain UGLY.
Yeah, I agree. But Abilene and West Texas ain't no Livermore California to start with, either!
GE, Siemens, BP, Westinghouse and a lot of other multi billion dollar corporations sure don't believe that.
It looks like in the long term, the way around this will be to use hydrogen for grid balancing of wind power. In periods when there is surplus wind energy, excess power will be used for generating hydrogen by electrolysis - this hydrogen can then be converted to power when there is less wind.
I know of one installation in Norway that's doing this now, and I've heard it discussed in the media coverage of the offshore wind project in Massachusetts.
Having been through all of those places, I prefer West Texas to California.
How perfect-ly awful!
Ha!
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