In DC, Texas Tech chancellor cites plans for big wind farm near campus
Updated: Chancellor Kent Hance’s name was misspelled in places as Hence in an earlier version of this piece. -ML
WASHINGTON — The changing climate in Texas is bringing both disaster and business opportunity. That’s rarely made as clear as it has been made in West Texas, where there’s far too little water and a twister’s worth of untapped wind power, the chancellor of Texas Tech University said in an interview Wednesday.
Chancellor Kent Hance was in Washington for meetings with the Department of Energy and others. He said during an hour-long chat with The Dallas Morning News that pioneering wind-power research in Lubbock is bringing dollars, brain power and a path toward climate resilience rural Texas badly needs.
Already home to the nation’s only wind-engineering Ph.D. program, Hance said the university will soon break ground on a large new commercial wind farm on land the university owns at the former Reese Air Force Base, just west of Lubbock. Details about its private partners won’t be announced for another couple of months, Hance said. But the Texas Tech campus is in talks to build 60 or so giant wind turbines that together will generate as much as 80 megawatts of energy — enough, by some estimates, to generate one-sixth of the power needs in the entire city of Lubbock.
Hance is a former Texas senator, railroad commissioner and the ex-congressman who won his seat by handing George W. Bush the only loss he ever had at the polls, 36 years ago. He said the university began years ago by creating the first bachelor’s degree in wind engineering and now offers doctorates in the field. That brain power has lured scientists, the federal government and businesses to the campus as the interest in wind power has grown.
Texas produces more energy from wind than any other state, and more than all but five nations, Hance said, adding that two-thirds of that is generated within about 100 miles of campus. Last month, colleague James Osborne reported that wind provided 38 percent of all energy consumed in Texas the morning of March 27, a record day.
Wind farms have proven controversial in places, including in New England where residents have complained about the windmills’ impact on coastal scenery and in California, where some have caused the death of massive numbers of birds.
But Hance said the reaction to wind power in the wide-open spaces of West Texas has been more positive, in part because landowners there tend to own enough land to place the now prevalent windmills well away from neighbors.
Payments to the landowners help, too, he said. “How you feel about the turbines is directly correlated to whether you are being paid. The more you are paid (in rents) the prettier they look.”
An Democratic ally of Ronald Reagan in the House, Hance switched to the Republican Party after losing a nomination fight for the U.S. Senate, and has been chancellor since 2006. He is slated to retire in June, and resume his law practice in Austin.
But if the West Texas wind turbines showcase the opportunities a push for a more climate-conscious world have created, there is plenty of reminders of the more worrying consequences of worsening environmental conditions, he said.
Across the western part of the state, lakes, rivers and reservoirs are drying up. Some argue that’s because of irreversible climate change, and others see the drought as more cyclical. In Washington, that dispute often takes the shape as fights over the proper reach of the EPA and its regulation of greenhouse gas emissions.
That dispute, said Hance, can bog down policymakers who should deal with immediate problems. In West Texas, he said, that means a drought that has rivaled the dry years of the 1950s.
“Everyone is caught up on the question of what the cause is,” he said. “Well, the drought is there no matter what your view is. It’s here. And you still have to address it.”
