Seen from the ground, the horizon across the open land in the big sky country of West Texas seems impossibly far away. From atop one of the more than 1,500 modern wind turbines that now tower over Nolan and Taylor counties, you would swear you can see farther than a full tank of gas could get you in a day.

“There’s nothing like the feeling of sitting on a giant like this,” says Texas State Technical College representative Braid Sharp Blanks. Perched on the generator portion of the Dewind windmill, owned by the school, we are 260 feet in the air. An enormous, gleaming white rotor blade looms another 120 feet overhead.

You experience an overwhelming awe in its size—like it must feel to see the Titanic up close. You can sense the incredible power it can generate. When the blades gracefully lumber around with a deep, rushing whoosh, it’s easy to see how these two-megawatt monsters can provide power for nearly 600 homes.

Texas State Technical College is training a new work force to build and maintain this army of pinwheel megaliths that have changed the landscape south of Interstate 20 near Sweetwater, Texas. Skilled jobs in windmill construction and maintenance are in high demand.  There are new opportunities, a new economy and a whole new attitude in a part of the state that never fully recovered when oil went bust in the 1980s.

“The windmills are powerful and majestic, but what’s really inspiring is to know that we have this technology here in West Texas and that it is creating such an economic boom,” Sharp says.

The relentless West Texas wind was once a nuisance to farmers and ranchers. It blew away topsoil, dried out rain-starved crops and stirred up dust storms so thick that sunny skies turned dark and city streetlights glowed in a brown, gritty haze. The wind was an enemy. There are still plenty of dust storms, but now the wind brings with it the future of Texas energy production.

The Horse Hollow wind farm in and around Nolan, Texas, is the largest wind turbine field in the world and because of it and other nearby wind farms, Texas is leading the nation in wind power production. Texas Governor Rick Perry says it is a distinction that is making a difference.
“This growing industry is creating thousands of jobs for Texans and generating millions of dollars in royalty income for landowners,” Perry says. “Expanding our state’s energy portfolio with clean, renewal energy sources like wind is not only good for business, it’s good for Texans.”

“This is huge,” says West Texas Wind Consortium president Greg Wortham. “The railroad came here in the 1800s, the rural electrification, in the 1930s. This is the next biggest thing. Oil has been steady all along, but this is an economic shot that has turned things around in just a couple of years.” Pointing out to the forest of windmills on the southern edge of the Horse Hollow wind farm, Wortham reiterates the enormity of the West Texas wind projects. “People think of Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire as “green” states, but I can see more windmills from this one spot than all of those states have combined,” he says.

Wortham talks about the windmills with proud excitement, explaining that the energy being created here in West Texas provides electricity to Houston, Dallas and Austin. But it is the small cities such as Sweetwater, where he serves as mayor, and tiny towns such as Blackwell and Trent and Wingate that reap the rewards. Cafes closed for years have opened their doors again. Schools are modernizing and expanding. There’s a sense of pride not seen in these parts since West Texas Crude was the black gold that drove the economies of entire towns.

Brad Butler, president of the Trent school board, has seen firsthand how wind power can change a town. One year ago, 118 students from grades K through 12 attended a school built in the 1960s, and their six-man football team played on a pitiful, scorpion-infested, sticker patch that doubled as a football field. This fall, attendance will reach 188 in a new, modern school building, and the Trent Gorillas will welcome visitors to play ball on the only artificial turf, six-man football field in America.

“The windmills have been it for Trent—period,” Butler says. “Being able to build a new school is amazing. Everything we have now is all due to windmills.”

Words like largest and tallest are thrown around a lot out here when it comes to windmills. What is largest or tallest today might not be tomorrow. Recently, billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens announced his plan to build a wind farm in the Texas panhandle that he promises will be the largest in the world—proof that wind really is the “new oil” and that this industry is just getting started.

As with any new venture that changes the way things used to be, the windmill boom is not without its detractors. A few say the windmills ruin the “look of the land,” others say it is a big waste of time and money, that the windmills are just a drop in the bucket toward solving the state’s energy problems and that foreign companies are the ones making the most financial gains.

Greg Wortham counters with a reminder of what the wind project is actually designed to do.
“People said the same thing about oil derricks, but they got used to them,” he says. “Then people say this will not make all the difference. Well, it’s not supposed to make all the difference. It’s a piece of the puzzle. We can’t be all wind, all solar or all oil, but all these things together is the solution.” He adds that “as for foreign interests, I tell people, ‘Those windmills built that school in Trent, and that café that re-opened is right here in Nolan.’”

The old familiar windmill that used to pump water to feed the cattle has come of age. iTechnology and a free, clean, natural resource are propelling several fortunate West Texas counties into the forefront of green energy and pumping green dollars into tiny towns that, if not for the new towering, modern windmills, might not have continued to be towns at all.

Ranchers who feared the loss of their family farms have new income. People who moved away for better jobs in the big cities are coming home. West Texas is riding the winds of change back from the edge of oblivion.