Day Five: San Patricio County, TX

 Wind Development in Texas

 

Today we drove three and a half hours to visit Midway Wind, a wind farm under construction in Corpus Christi, Texas. We left the city of Houston and its skyline, and traveled through expansive, empty farm fields, stripped of their cotton after the harvest season. Matt Biediger, the Architectural and Civil Inspector for Midway Wind, told us he grew up an hour’s drive north, and that the area is not as nice as it used to be due to “urban planning,” essentially meaning development.

The wind farm appeared in the distance, the white turbines slowly taking shape against the sky. As we neared the site, we began to see half-built towers, giant turbine blades lying in trios, and in several cases, enormous cranes next to towers with one or two blades. Today they were “stabbing” blades, i.e. attaching the blades to the hub of the turbine. The working turbines we saw were part of an older project, and the unfinished turbines are the Midway project.

Wind energy is a rapidly expanding part of the energy portfolio. On its best days, it can account for up to 50% of Texas’s electricity production. Midway, as well as other wind farms on the Gulf Coast, are evening-peaking systems due to the temperature differential between the land and the ocean as the sun sets. This is complemented by the wind farms in West Texas that are night-peaking systems, a distribution that allows wind to cover a large portion of Texas’s electricity needs over the course of a day.

We learned a lot about the process of implementing a wind farm from Matt. To determine where a wind farm will be built, Apex Clean Energy, the company that manages the Midway project, does wind assessments using weather data to determine where it would be feasible and useful to build a wind farm. This study also includes any migratory bird paths with which a wind farm may interfere. One of the biggest challenges is finding viable locations where wind power can be connected to the electrical grid. Upon completion of the study, Apex looks at a variety of setback laws and uses that information to figure out where the individual turbines could be built. Then Apex works to obtain leases for the land on which they plan to build, often farmland. Sometimes it can take up to seven years to get land owners to agree to have a turbine on their property. Land owners are paid for the use of their land, as well as for any crop damage that occurs during the construction of turbines and the wind farm.

Construction requires 16-foot gravel access roads, often with a concrete base, that must be built specially for transport trucks with large turning radiuses. These roads will remain after construction is completed. The parts of one turbine come on eight separate enormous trucks and are brought from countries across the world, including Spain and Mexico. Each turbine consists of several large parts, all constructed from steel. These include four tower sections that are assembled into an 84-meter-tall tower, three blades, each roughly 65 meters long, and a nacelle, about the size of a school bus, that is analogous to what’s beneath the hood of a car. The concrete base that goes underground is roughly 70 meters wide and requires almost 60 truckloads of concrete. The energy and resources required for building a single wind farm are immense.

We struggled to reconcile the fact that wind energy is a clean source of electricity, but creating the infrastructure has a very significant and often overlooked environmental impact. I’m interested in engineering, so I might work on designing renewable energy technology. I recognize now that while the production of electricity from wind is much cleaner than that from the oil and gas industry that we’ve been learning about the past few days, renewable energy isn’t the perfect solution that I imagined it to be.

Within view of the Midway wind farm is a petrochemical plant and land that could be used to expand the wind farm. Matt reminded us that turbines require energy, often from oil and gas, to begin turning the blades before the wind takes over, so the two aspects of the industry are inherently linked. It was a profound reminder that the energy industry is intersectional.

There’s not a zero-impact solution to our energy problem, and based on the current trends we’re seeing, we’re not going to be able to meet our goals to reduce carbon in the atmosphere and global warming as much and as quickly as we would like. Over the course of our trip so far, we’ve heard many different ideas of what the future might look like, and ultimately, we don’t, and can’t, know. What we saw today demonstrated that wind is a viable and expanding source of energy, but that doesn’t mean that it’s our entire energy future. We must recognize that our energy sourcing is multifold, thus our improvements to energy technology should be as well. As we continue to learn and make changes to our energy portfolio, our technology continues to evolve rapidly, so should we wait until our technology is more efficient and environmentally friendly? Or do we act now and do the best we can, recognizing that we can’t be perfect? We have a responsibility to do what we can. Being distressed about the state of our Earth, about the present and looming impacts of climate change and environmental destruction does nothing to help our world. We are part of the generation on the cusp of this change, and as people privileged enough to have this opportunity to learn so much, it is our job to use our knowledge, our connections, and our passions to make the best changes possible.

--Sarah Hutchinson '22