Texans Love Their Wind Power, Even If Trump Doesn’t

The Republicans have done the unthinkable. Wind power has resurrected many farms and ranches and their communities in Texas, but all-hail-the-king, Trump-kissing Texas lawmakers have supported bills in the Republican-held legislature that, if passed, would undo years of work that raised Texas to the level of clean energy stardom.

There is even a Republican legislative movement afoot to screw with private property rights by limiting a landowner’s ability to host wind and solar farms.

One bill has already passed the Texas Senate. SB819 calls for the “police power of the state” to drastically limit new wind and solar projects by requiring permits for renewables not needed for gas, coal, or nuclear plants. A wind turbine would have to be 3,000 feet from a neighbor’s property line, for example, compared with just 467 feet for an oil well.

Texas generated 169,442 gigawatt-hours from wind, utility-scale solar, and small-scale solar in 2024. Those numbers will surpass California’s high numbers, which generated 92,316 gigawatt-hours as the second highest renewable energy producer in the nation.

Yes, it’s true that Texas continues to build a variety of new power generation assets with plans for new natural gas and potentially new nuclear and geothermal facilities. Yet wind and solar projects constitute most of the new power plants recently built in Texas, and that capacity is expected to continue to grow. Projections indicate that, during 2025, Texas will be the site of a third of all new renewable and storage projects in the US.

Why Republican legislators want to suppress the state’s vibrant renewable energy sector is quite strange, as most of their constituents want renewables. You see, renewables are a large and growing source of tax payments and revenue for landowners across Texas.

They’ve engaged in an “assault upon an increasingly vital lifeline to many rural, conservative areas of the US – clean energy development,” concludes a Reuters expose.

Why Is Wind Power Weaponized By The Trump Administration?

What’s evident is that some powerful people do not want renewables in Texas. Texas elected officials did an about-face after renewable energy got so big that it threatened coal- and gas-fueled power in the country’s biggest oil and gas state. Here are a couple of formidable anti-renewable advocacy groups that are making it difficult for wind power and other renewables to hold their ground.

• The Texas Public Policy Foundation: This think tank says it promotes “liberty, personal responsibility, and free enterprise in Texas.” One of its advocacy positions is to push Texas to require all electric generators to guarantee a certain amount of power to the grid during periods of high demand. This is a stab at renewables, whose intermittency is generally augmented by battery storage. Craig McDonald, director of Texans for Public Justice, told the Texas Observer, “Most think tanks work for their funders and TPPF’s donors are a Who’s Who of Texas polluters, giant utilities, and big insurance companies. TPPF is thinking the way its donors want it to think.”
• The Stewards of Texas: This group describes itself in contradictory terms: it wants to safeguard Texas’ “ecological and cultural identity,” yet it supports efforts to restrict renewable energy development contained in SB 819. The group has ties to Dan Friedkin, a billionaire and the executive producer of the Paramount show Landman. 

The Republicans’ failure to protect their own people is also a reflection of Trump’s distaste for wind power. (The genesis for Trump’s negative stance on wind power is a long-seated fear that views would be obstructed due to a wind farm project near his Scottish golf course.) Trump has called wind turbines “horrible” and said they “kill the birds.” Recently, he vilified wind turbines as the cause for whale deaths, even though all evidence points to fishing gear entanglements and strikes from fast-moving vessels as the cause of whale injuries and deaths.

“The wind blows, and then it doesn’t blow. And the things cost a fortune. They’re made in China… and they’re horrible,” Trump muttered. “We don’t want windmills in this country. If you have a house and your vision of a windmill, your house is worth half. It’s a disaster, and nobody wants them,” he repeated, falsely claiming that wind power is “the most expensive energy of any kind.”

Rebranding Texas As An Energy State — Not The Home Of Oil & Gas State Exclusively

When we think of Texas, one of the first images that comes to mind is oil pump jacks — those long arms that rotate in a vertical motion as part of a downhole oil pump. Texas oil production began in earnest in the early 20th century and flourished until 2010, when a failed blowout preventer on a BP deepwater rig in the Gulf of Mexico caused an explosion. The result was the largest release of oil into marine waters ever recorded. In the 15 years since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Trustee Implementation Groups have approved 368 different activities, including plans and projects to restore injured Gulf of Mexico resources. The combined allocated cost of restoration projects so far is $3.28 billion.

Oil and gas production is still the leader in Texas, but, as the state produces and consumes more energy than any other state, it also regularly has more than 50% of its grid running on renewables.

“We are an energy state,” Joshua Rhodes, an energy expert at the University of Texas, summarized.

And it’s clear that renewables have been a boost for financially struggling rural areas. Schools, roads, and hospitals have benefited, and so have landowners who lease their properties — to the tune of another $15 billion.

“It’s a hard life out here, there’s rocks, mesquite and coyotes and not a lot else – if there’s anything to make life easier, do it,” rancher John Davis told the Guardian. He stood on his property under the whooshing blades of a wind turbine, which is part of a zigzag of turbines that make up the Cactus Flats wind project. Each turbine is mounted on top of an 80-meter-tall tower and has a 116-meter, three-blade rotor connected to a generator. Multiple wind turbines are electrically connected in parallel to the main power transformer where the energy is converted from 34.5kV to 115kV for interconnection.

What if Texas iconography was closely identified with the wind turbines that are nearly ubiquitous these days? How different the state’s identity would look.

The Texas legislative session ended on June 2, so the bills to eviscerate renewables are on hold. Many ranchers hope the bills get lost in the paperwork mill.

In the next part to this series that examines Republicans’ disconnect with their constituents over clean energy, we’ll look at the Inflation Reduction Act and how it’s benefited disparate geographic regions of the US — many of which voted for Trump in 2024.