ORN#6 World's Largest Wind Farm

This is one of my favorite interviews from our cross-country eco-video
project, when we met Cliff Etheridge in Roscoe, Texas, home of the
world’s largest wind farm.



The way Cliff explained, the rural town of Roscoe was dying out, and
once the Dairy Queen left town they knew they were in trouble. Cliff
had just retired as a cotton farmer and knew about the wind farms in
nearby Abilene and Sweetwater, and was interested to find out if
Roscoe could have a wind farm too. There is both plenty of wind and
plenty of open space in Roscoe. He brought in wind experts to assess
whether or not a wind farm would work there, and then got the support
of the townspeople for the idea.

A few years later, the world’s largest wind farm now stands in Roscoe,
Texas with 631 wind turbines producing enough electricity for 250,000
homes. Farmers and landowners are paid by the company who owns the
wind turbines for leasing their land, and they continue to farm around
the turbines. In a rural farming community, that extra money really
helps keep the local economy going. As we saw in so many places,
there are a variety of reasons to support renewable energy: the
environment, the economy, national security, etc. In fact, the week
before we arrived in Roscoe, Cliff won ‘Environmentalist of the Year’
from the state of Texas!

Standing in a field of 631 massive wind turbines was an amazing
experience. It was actually very quiet - just the noise of the wind
blowing. It made me wish that everyone who opposes wind farms could
stand where I was to experience it for themselves. They are quite
majestic, in my opinion. Our local newspaper just featured an article
on building wind turbines here in central Massachusetts, speaking of
the several that have been built in the last two years, and others
that are on the way. I read the online version of the article and it
was of course followed by comments on the website about how wind
turbines are noisy, kill birds, are a bad investment, etc. People may
not like how they look, and that's their opinion of course. I've
heard some complaints about wind turbines being noisy but I've never
experienced that myself with the turbines I've been close to. I know
the smaller residential wind turbines are are noisier. Many studies
have been done about bird mortality with wind turbines and it's
generally found that wind turbines kill about 2 birds per year. Cats,
windshields, and plate glass windows are a far greater menace to bird
populations than wind turbines. As far as wind turbines being a bad
investment, our first video in the ORN series features the wind
turbine at Holy Name High School which has a 7-year payback and then
free heat/electricity for years afterward. The Roscoe wind farm was a
business decision, to boost the economy of a rural town that was
dying. People can argue the numbers all day but in the meantime that
doesn't stop people from investing in renewable energy and
experiencing the very real benefits. If you hear or see these
arguments I encourage you to help counter them and try to correct some
of the misinformation out there.

Enjoy!
Colin
--
Our Renewable Nation, A Cross-Country Eco-Video Adventure
www.OurRenewableNation.org

Wind Farms and Earthships

Hi friends,

Greetings from Albuquerque, New Mexico! We got here this afternoon and gave a presentation tonight at the UU church here in the city. It's beautiful landscape here, so much different from back home - the surroundings didn't really look TOO different until we got down to Louisiana, and since then we've crossed through long plains with less and less vegetation through Texas, then into New Mexico through beautiful mountains and deserts, driving alongside the Rio Grande. The houses have also changed a lot, with a lot more ranch houses, and in New Mexico a lot of adobe buildings (we even passed an adobe-front Wal-Mart).

So since we left Austin we've stopped at two more project locations that were just amazing and inspiring.

We left Austin Monday morning and traveled up to Roscoe, Texas, a small town west of Abilene that is hard to find on the map! Carrick interviewed Cliff Etheridge, who rallied the small town to bring in investors for a large wind farm, and when the project is finished over the next two years it will be the largest wind farm in the world. Just to stand in the field of turbines and turn 360 degrees surrounded by them everywhere was an amazing sight. Mr. Etheridge's story is so inspiring - he is a hero, one individual who has accomplished something amazing, though he is humble as it gets. I can't wait to get to work on the Roscoe video when we return. Just a quick tidbit, standing in a field of several hundred wind turbines, they barely make a whisper, and I didn't see any dead birds on the ground!

We went on from there to Lubbock, Texas where we gave a presentation at the UU church after a great vegan potluck!

Tuesday we arrived in Taos, a small city in northern New Mexico, where we stayed overnight in an earthship. A what? Earthships are self-sustaining houses made from different renewable and waste materials: most prominently 3 of the 4 walls are made from used tires filled and rammed with dirt, and the walls are covered with adobe and cement. These are truly amazing and beautiful houses, and it makes our house in Massachusetts seem so unnatural and designed against nature instead of with it. I'll have to upload some pics we took of the earthships we visited so you can see what I mean. They rent them out for overnight stays so we got to experience living in an earthship and this morning we got a tour of an earthship that was recently built, all on video. There are so many unique elements it will be hard to edit the video down to 5 minutes - I may have to stretch that one out a bit... Carrick and I have toured zero-energy homes at the Solar Decathlon that rely heavily on technology to be off-grid and self-sustaining, but earthships are a different, more natural approach.

Car trouble strikes! Well, not that dramatic really, but I noticed for the last two days the Beetle had hesitation starting and I wanted to get it fixed before we ended up stranded somewhere (out here you can REALLY get stranded, no joke) plus we needed an oil change, so we stopped by the VW dealer here in Albuquerque who of course found other problems too. $800 later we got the car back, a lot more than I was expecting, but left unchecked we could have found ourselves in big trouble. Ugh. I'm grateful at least that they were able to fit us in on same-day notice so we can be on our way tomorrow.

READER QUESTION:
As you ride around and visit all these facilities, does it seem more likely or less likely to you that we could get all our energy from renewables?
Well, we still have the majority of renewable energy sites yet to visit, and I've been a big proponent of being able to produce all the electricity we need from renewables. I do wish people could have stood where I was in Roscoe to experience the wind farm first-hand, and I think if people saw how they looked (graceful and majestic) and heard how quiet they were (right in the middle of hundreds of turbines), there would be far fewer people who are opposed to them. There are just so few chances for people to personally experience that in this country. Although we didn't get to see the wave power buoy off the New Jersey coast, the stats from the Ocean Power Technolgies website show that harnessing wave power in select areas around the world could provide twice as much electricity as the world consumes. I hope that our eco-video series will show people the solutions that exist, and get more people asking 'why can't we do that more?' because the answer is usually that we can if people learn more about it and start making it happen.

Be well,
Colin
www.OurRenewableNation.org