Love ’Em or Hate ’Em, Wind Turbines Have Altered the Landscape Across Vast Swaths of Texas

One of the great pleasures of roaming Texas roads is driving our scenic trails. Travel the Texas Brazos Trail, Forest Trail, Forts Trail, Hill Country Trail, Independence Trail, Lakes Trail—don’t forget the Mountain, Pecos, Plains, and Tropical trails—and you’ll see a whole lot of natural beauty. I would like to nominate a new trail, or set of trails, for Texas highway wanderers to blaze for a different kind of beauty. Let’s call it “The Great Texas Wind Turbine Trail.” The presence of thousands of wind turbines—on average 300 feet tall but as tall as almost 600 feet, with three propeller blades of at least 115 feet in length—has radically transformed much of the state’s landscape over the past 20 years, especially in the wide-open western half. Wind turbines are so huge that they render Lilliputian all of their surroundings, even gigantic structures like cell phone and water towers.

Driving through a dense concentration of wind turbines conveys the sensation of being on another planet, where humans are reduced to ants.

There is a lot of land in Texas and, therefore, a lot of wind. The prospect of converting this natural resource into energy—aided by incentives like the Renewable Electricity and Production Tax Credit and legislation including the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009—has created a wind boom. Today, Texas is the top producer of wind power in the United States, churning out three times the renewable wind energy as the runner-up, Oklahoma. Love ’em or hate ’em, the influx of wind turbines on Texas land is inescapable. They’re utilitarian landscape architecture, sometimes arranged in perfect lines, sometimes rolling with the topography, always flexing their muscles. The Roscoe and Horse Hollow wind farms—the former around the town of Roscoe and the latter in Taylor and Nolan counties—cover 100,000 acres and 35,000 acres, respectively, with wind turbines. Three to four of the 10 largest wind turbine farms on Earth are located in Texas, according to various sources that monitor the industry. Driving through a dense concentration of turbines conveys the sensation of being on another planet, where humans are reduced to ants, skittering past these giant pinwheel behemoths that dominate minimalistic landscapes. Eyeball several turbines in a line, so all you see is one single tower, along with multiple spinning props, and it’s like watching a Busby Berkeley musical with dancers waving their arms and legs in synchronized movements.

My own wind-turbine epiphany happened about 10 years ago. I was driving south from Lubbock to Austin through Sweetwater on State Highway 70. Near Sweetwater, turbines began to appear on both sides of the road. They grew in number for the next 10 miles, until turning east and south onto State Highway 153 toward Wingate. I felt like I was in a dense forest, only the trees were white towers with steadily whirling blades, perched on a vast, grassy ridge top. I stopped and got out of my car to get a better look. Wind turbines spun as far as the eye could see, some hovering right above the roadside. The constantly rotating props mesmerized me. These weren’t static objects but huge metal instruments that were working, moving, doing something. After staring long enough, the turbines, part of the Horse Hollow wind farm, started reminding me of a marching band, all symmetry, precision, and synchronicity, with the propeller blades acting as the twirlers leading the band. “They’re kind of like doing cartwheels in the sky,” says Mark Morgan of Guthrie Oil Company, who routinely drives through the part of west-central Texas where turbines are in great number. But what some perceive as enchanting, others consider an eyesore. Environmentalists see wind turbines as infringements of epic proportions on otherwise mostly pristine land. Other complaints are more complicated. Wind turbines’ behemoth size requires permanent foundation pads that fragment the land, not to mention the turbines come with flashing warning lights at night. Also, their blades produce an irritating whooshing noise and are responsible for roughly a quarter of a million airborne animal deaths per year in North America, according to studies cited by the National Audubon Society. Moreover, their profits and future growth seem to be largely dependent on government subsidies. When I place a call to the Abilene Convention and Visitors Bureau, near where I had my epiphany, the nice lady who answers the phone sums up wind-turbine ambivalence, offering her opinion that the machines “are butt ugly up close, and destructive. A lot of concrete goes into those pads. Birds and bats fly into them.” She pauses, then adds: “But from a distance, they’re like dancers on the horizon.”