Wind power fuels Texas farmer's dreams

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.scrippsnews.com/node/27238

Wind power fuels Texas farmer's dreams

By PERRY FLIPPIN
Scripps Howard News Service
Tuesday, October 02, 2007

High atop a rocky ridge where his great-great-grandfather's cattle once grazed, Greg McDonald can see the future.

It's blowing in the wind.

The 38-year-old financial adviser, who runs a stock brokerage in San Angelo, Texas, is capitalizing on the unlimited energy that's spinning 25 giant electrical turbines and stands ready to deposit about $300,000 a year into his family's bank account.

Like his forebears, McDonald is a pioneer of sorts - this time using new technology to harness nature on the 15,000-acre spread that sprawls across parts of three counties.

McDonald symbolizes hundreds of landowners across West Texas - and thousands across the nation - who are scrambling to capitalize on the unprecedented rush to create wind farms. Such enterprises, like wildcatting for oil, are capital intensive, subject to congressional whims, slower than a glacier's pace in their development and far from being financial bonanzas.

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The 138-kilovolt TXU Energy line running from San Angelo to Colorado City, Texas and then to Dallas-Fort Worth, had room for the new power.

"Today, there is no more capacity on those lines," Woodson said, adding that West Texas wind power hits a major bottleneck at Graham, 91 miles northwest of Fort Worth.

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