Lubbock Left

The Amarillo Globe-News ran a story yesterday about a new wind farm planned in Briscoe County (registation required) that could generate around 3,000 megawatts. We’re talking about a project on the order of 1,500 or so wind turbines that could power about 3/4 million homes. This will absolutely dwarf the current “world’s largest wind farm” near Abilene, which puts out about 735 megawatts. The big players involved are ShellEnergy and Luminant (a TXU company).

What was interesting to me about this news is why TXU says they got involved. They claim that they currently purchase 705 megawatts of wind power to deliver to their customers and are about to purchase 209 megawatts more. That means that consumers can put pressure on energy companies to pursue green sources of energy. Check out tools like carbonfund.org/, which you can use to offset your non-green power consumption by purchasing green blocks of power. If consumers everywhere demand that a reasonable portion of their power come from green sources, it just might happen.

The Amarillo Globe-News article mentions an interesting twist to this whole project: a silver lining for our depleting Ogallala Aquifer. The turbines could be used to pump air underground, which will compress it. From the article:

The compressed air is then released to turn generators, producing power when the wind is not blowing or demand is too great for the wind to keep up with.

With major wind energy projects popping up in every direction, Lubbock will have to make serious progress on wind energy just to catch up. We need to get on the ERCOT grid ASAP and get our (many, many) local developers on board with investing in wind farms. It’s a guaranteed winning investment!