Wind Energy

Texas wind power grows even without Pickens By Chris Madison (AWEA)

Back in the summer of 2008 T. Boone Pickens became the nation’s biggest booster of wind energy. He spent a fortune on advertising, carried his whiteboard wherever he went, and promised to build the biggest wind farm ever, in Texas. Then the credit market seized, and natural gas boomed, and the wind part of the Pickens Plan went flat.

But the Pickens Pullback has not kept Texas from continuing to grow its wind power capacity. Texas continues to lead the U.S. in installed wind capacity, with 9000 MW.

Wind turbines accounted for 6 percent of the electricity produced in Texas last year, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), up from 4.6 percent in 2008 and well above an estimated 2 percent nationwide.

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A move by billionaire oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens to cut his order for wind turbines and to postpone construction of a huge wind farm in Texas isn’t a sign that the appetite for wind electricity in the state has diminished, a wind advocate said on Friday.

Pickens said last summer he would delay a plan to build the world’s largest wind farm in the Texas Panhandle and this week further retreated from an ambitious wind effort by cutting his order for General Electric (GE.N) wind turbines by half.

Texas, the No. 1 U.S. state in terms of wind, has about 9,000 megawatts of installed capacity, more than twice as much as the next state, according to the American Wind Energy Association.

Wind accounted for 6 percent of the electricity produced last year, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), up from 4.6 percent in 2008 and well above an estimated 2 percent nationwide.

"Wind in Texas has a remarkably strong future," said Paul Sadler, executive director of the Wind Coalition, based in Austin, Texas.

"We are taking unprecedented action to build (transmission) lines," Sadler said. "It will allow us to double our capacity when the lines get in place."

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