West Texas Town Recasts Itself as Wind-Power Hub

By ANGEL GONZALEZ
ROSCOE, Texas -- The dust has barely settled since this month's completion of the world's largest wind farm here, but the shoots of a "green" economy are already emerging among the cotton fields that have long been the staple of this West Texas rural community.
Wind-energy-service companies now sit on the same street as the old grocery store, and so does the headquarters warehouse of E.On Climate & Renewables, a unit of Germany-based E.On AG that owns the Roscoe wind farm. The project has 627 turbines -- one for every two inhabitants of Roscoe -- and employs about 70 technicians, including contractors and staffers. It has enough capacity to power 230,000 homes, most of them in the more populated eastern parts of the state.
"It's helped the city kind of reinvent itself," said city manager Cody Thompson, who on a recent day was putting the finishing touches on the third annual West Texas Wind Harvest Festival, a local celebration featuring live music from high-school bands and helicopter tours of the 100,000-acre project.
Roscoe is in Nolan County, which has about 17,000 people and nearly 10% of U.S. wind-power-generating capacity -- built at breakneck speed over the past decade. The financial crisis and bottlenecks in transmission capacity have slowed the proliferation of wind turbines, but the area has become a powerhouse for an emerging technology that advocates say would help reduce U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases.
Greg Wortham, the mayor of Sweetwater -- the county seat and economic hub -- said wind-power development in the region could be a model for revitalizing rural America, if the windy Great Plains are linked to the power-hungry East and West coasts. Already, local businesses and construction crews that cut their teeth in this area's pioneering wind farms are working in emerging wind-power hubs like Iowa.
Mr. Wortham said 20% of Nolan County's jobs are related to the wind-development rush here -- as many as those in oil and gas. He said many of these new jobs come with a base pay of about $50,000, nearly double the average per-job wage in 2007. In September, the county's unemployment rate was 6.4% -- lower than Texas's 8.3%. More than a decade ago, unemployment in the county was well above the state's rate.
"This is the microcosm of what's going to happen," Mr. Wortham said.
The area around Sweetwater, which is best known for its annual Rattlesnake Roundup festival, attracted wind developers because of its open spaces, constant winds and the availability of enough transmission capacity to get the power to Dallas-Fort Worth, some 200 miles away. Now there is congestion in that capacity -- meaning construction jobs have dipped -- but once more transmission lines are built here and across the country, other centers could emerge. "There's huge unexploited potential" in the U.S., said Kenneth Westrick, chief executive of 3Tier, a renewable-energy forecasting company.
At the peak of its building, the Roscoe wind project employed 600 people, said Patrick Woodson, chief development officer for E.On Climate & Renewables. Now the project employs about 10 permanent staffers. The company also employs about 60 contractors who perform maintenance on turbines made by Siemens AG, Mitsubishi Corp. and General Electric Co.'s energy unit.
Not everyone is sold on the wind-power idea. Susan Combs, Texas's state comptroller, said clean-technology jobs will replace a small fraction of the jobs she believes will be lost if Congress passes a climate-change bill penalizing refineries for emitting carbon. "I don't know where the new jobs are going to come from," said Ms. Combs, a Republican. "They're not going to come from wind."
Then there are the people who just don't like the turbines' aesthetics. "Some call wind energy eye pollution: They don't like the looks of it," said Ken Becker, executive director of the Sweetwater Enterprise for Economic Development. But Mr. Becker added that the industry's development has made the area's tax base expand to $2.3 billion from $500 million in 1998.
To monitor and service the hundreds of GE turbines in the vicinity, GE set up its first U.S. wind-energy service center at a former Coca-Cola distribution plant. The center employs about 120 technicians, many of them former utility workers, mechanics and even firefighters, said Tracy Chapman, the center's lead operations manager. Some were retired military from nearby bases looking for a new start -- "a very well paying start," Ms. Chapman said.
Royalties from turbines also are making some landowners wax poetic. Maz Webb a local grocer and rancher, has allowed California-based Third Planet Windpower to install a single turbine on her land.
"I love my turbine," she said. "We only have one, but it's the prettiest one out there."
Write to Angel Gonzalez at angel.gonzalez@dowjones.com