G.E. Invests $180 Million in Nolan County Wind Projects
Published Mar 18, 2008
Wind farms along Highway 351 between Abilene and Albany
In the Texas Midwest, wind is the new oil.
Nolan County is Wind Central: Three of the largest wind projects in the nation are based there. Sweetwater alone has 20 different wind projects, according to Mayor Greg Wortham, who also is executive director of the West Texas Wind Energy Consortium.
One project got a big boost in May 2007 when GE Energy Financial Services agreed to invest $180 million in Phase 4 of wind projects in Nolan County. The energy generated will be sold to CPS Energy, a municipally owned company that provides natural gas and electric service to San Antonio.
In announcing the investment, Kevin Walsh, GE’s managing director, estimated that the clean power in those two projects alone will avoid 730,000 tons a year in greenhouse gases and serve the equivalent of 90,000 homes.
“Texas is very hospitable in embracing wind energy and we are going to lead the way,” says Al Tryon, GE’s director of the Wind Energy Service Center at Sweetwater.
In 2006, Texas passed California as the nation’s largest wind producer, now harnessing enough wind to power more than 600,000 average homes.
The American Wind Energy Association ranks Texas second only to North Dakota in terms of its potential for wind power and says two-thirds of predicted growth in the United States will take place in Texas.
“There is just good wind in Texas,” Tryon says.
Wind is a renewable natural resource that can’t be seen by the human eye, but the benefits quickly become apparent: jobs, a tax base for schools and counties, and royalty income for landowners.
In West Texas, wind energy represents “$6 billion worth of investment, hundreds of high-paying jobs, new schools,” Wortham says, adding the industry is a clean one that doesn’t use water.
As more turbines dot the landscape, companies like GE will need more workers. Texas State Technical College West in Sweetwater stepped up in January 2007 with a five-semester wind technician associate degree program and has a 12-month certificate program in the works.
“There is such a demand that we aren’t the only school doing this,” says Doug King, program director, citing similar initiatives at colleges in Illinois, Connecticut and New Mexico.
For GE, the Wind Energy Service Center at Sweetwater is the first of its kind for the company.
Instead of having a standard day shift, the center is staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week, providing better service for the companies and communities buying wind power.
“If we have a turbine that goes down in the middle of the night, we now have technicians who can go down and fix it at night,” Tryon says.
Such projects have put West Texas on the energy map – the region leads the Western Hemisphere in wind energy production and more growth is on the way, Wortham says.
If Nolan County were a country, it would have been the seventh-largest wind energy producer in 2007.
In 2008, Wortham says, it will be the fifth largest.
Story by Pamela Coyle
Photo by staff
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