HOUSTON – Today’s cover photo arrived on Click2pins yesterday with fog engulfing those wind turbines down in Mathis, Texas. If you don’t know where Mathis exactly is, just take Highway 59 south to I-37 and turn left -- it’s a few miles from Corpus. And while fog down there won’t surprise you, perhaps all those wind turbines will!
I always think of California or the fields of Iowa as having all the wind turbines in this country but they aren’t even close to what we have in Texas.
In fact, the largest wind farm in the country is the Roscoe Wind Farm out near Abilene -- I’ve circled them both for easy reference:
Texas leads the way in this country for wind farms and, thus, wind energy with enough to power 3.5 million households.
Occasionally, we create so much wind energy we can’t use it all and ERCOT has to throttle back on production!
You can see below that we are way ahead of second-place Iowa and even California comes in 3rd.
All this puts Texas in a World Class given that the United States is in second place only to be outdone by China, which generates almost three times the wind turbine energy that the U.S. does.
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Of course, the reason Texas is so far ahead is pretty obvious -- we have a lot of land and lot of wind with a pretty good tax-structure incentive. Turbines can create wind at only 6 mph speeds and we get plenty of that!
While most of the wind farms are in the Hill Country and West Texas or south toward the Valley, get ready for more wind projects including one near Galveston, which we reported on last year.
You may also note that Texas is second in SOLAR Energy falling only behind California.
To that end, expect a lot of sunshine in the forecast through the weekend and into next week and with an approaching front tomorrow, it’s going to get a bit breezy! More power to us!
RELATED: TODAY’S WEATHER REPORT
Frank
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