Jan 27 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - Elliott Blackburn Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, Texas


Texas developers added more than twice as much wind power as any other state last year, according to the latest industry report.

Farms with a capacity of more than 2,290 megawatts of wind power began production last year, easily besting the 905 megawatts added in Indiana, the next closest competitor, according to the American Wind Energy Association.

That left the state keeping a sizeable lead in the nation for wind production, despite concerns heading into the year that the industry would struggle, according to the report.

Texas had a total 9,410 megawatts of wind production, according to the report. It takes roughly 500 megawatts to power the entire city of Lubbock, by comparison.

 The numbers were a bit of a surprise, considering an economy that made finding credit difficult and an electric grid taking almost more power than it can handle for the next few years, said Michael Giberson, an energy economist at Texas Tech's Rawls College of Business.

"I thought, surely, that was going to stop things," Giberson said. "Maybe there will be a little bit of a lull now as projects that were in the pipeline finish."

But any lull should be just a hiccup, he added, as transmission lines built to handle the large and unpredictable wind energy market begin to cross the state over the next few years.

"It is very clear that the transmission constraint will have a larger and larger impact on the annual development in Texas," said Elizabeth Salerno, with the association's Industry Data and Analysis department.

The state's massive project to install transmission lines feeding Panhandle wind power to the rest of Texas would need to come online to keep encouraging wind energy development, she said.

The year's biggest listed project stood far from the Panhandle -- a 283-megawatt farm along the Texas Coast. Valero added to a farm in Sunray, northeast of Dumas, and a 197-megawatt farm sprang up outside Big Spring.

To comment on this story:

elliott.blackburn@lubbockonline.com l 766-8722

'

I thought, surely, that was going to stop things.

'

Michael Gilberson

Texas Tech energy economist

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