- [host Joe Hanson] Is this a Spaghetti Western I hear?
Or the sound of untapped kinetic energy?
We're in Texas.
It's my home state.
It's a place most folks associate with these guys.
But Texas is quickly becoming a national leader
in wind energy.
- If Texas were a country, and believe me
some people think that it is,
it would be fifth in the world for wind energy generation.
- [Joe] How we get our energy is changing fast.
But what's really behind this shift
from buried fossils to harnessing power from a breeze?
- And how do we make sure that there's always power
on the other end of this?
- [Joe] You can't grow up here
and not be aware of the oil story.
- Stuff like Spindletop and the Gusher Age,
they passed into lore,
almost like the Alamo story or something like that.
- [Joe] Oil, the real lifeblood of the state
- [Varun] For the last century or more
the identity of Texas has been intertwined with energy.
- [Joe] This is Dr. Varun Rai.
He's an expert in energy policy
at the University of Texas at Austin.
- Last two decades really has been the story of renewals.
[pensive music]
- [Joe] 2020 was the year that wind overtook coal in Texas
which was previously the second biggest energy producer
in the state behind natural gas.
In 2020, Texas clocks 29,407 megawatts
of installed wind power capacity.
Those wind projects combined
could power nearly six million homes,
and that's great news for our warming climates.
As global demand for energy is increased,
so are the emissions caused
by traditional sources of energy production.
Electricity production is actually
the second largest contributor
to greenhouse gas emissions behind transportation.
- [Varun] Burning fossil fuels
generates greenhouse gas emissions
and that contributes to climate change.
So that's an important issue.
How do you mitigate that?
- [Joe] Wind energy is on the rise across the country
and increasingly it's corporate and residential customers
that are pushing for that change.
- [Varun] The customer has become an active participant.
And increasingly that discussion has taken the shape
of where do we take the resources and technologies we have
to bring more resilience to the system
and do that in an environmentally sustainable way.
- [Joe] But wind energy also just makes sense
and dollars for the folks who have invested in it.
The cost of installing and running a wind farm
has decreased significantly in the past decade.
One study showed the cost of wind energy
went down by almost 70% since 2010.
Generally, the more wind power,
the less expensive it gets.
That's because the infrastructure
that brings the power to homes
and businesses across the state is getting beefed up.
- [Varun] As you produce more,
you learn to do things better.
In academic language, this is known as learning by doing.
- [Joe] Most energy consumers are likely not aware
of what is powering their lives.
Power arrives at our homes
and places of work seemingly by magic.
We don't have to consider where it came from
or what went into bringing it to us.
So let's get into that for a second.
There's been a long trend of burn thing,
make heat, use heat to do work.
Gas, biomass, or coal is burned
to heat up water to create steam.
And that steam spins a turbine which powers a generator
that then feeds energy into the grid.
- Wind energy is a kinetic source of energy.
It's energy in motion.
And it's also a form of solar energy.
Now wind occurs for a bunch of different reasons
and they all come back to the sun.
- [Joe] Wind is the result of the sun
heating up parts of the earth and atmosphere differently,
and the rotation of the planet itself.
People figured out how to convert
that kinetic energy from the wind
into mechanical energy centuries ago.
The windmill has been around
since at least the ninth century
but the technology has come a long way,
even in the last couple of decades.
For one thing, modern turbines are 15 times the size
of a traditional windmill.
- It feels huge to be able to see
the expanse of it across the mesas.
- [Joe] That's Jeff Hill,
and he's out at High Lonesome Wind Farm in West Texas.
- [Jeff] This is a wind farm of 164 300 foot tall
fully autonomous robots who track the wind,
determine the most efficient way to capture the energy
from the wind and transform that
into a power that we can use as a people.
- [Joe] The property is about 200 square miles.
That's like just under nine Manhattans.
- [Jeff] This land is mostly used
for ranching, sheep, cattle.
The farmers are able to continue their same lifestyle
that they always have.
- [Joe] The turbines take up less
than 5% of the total property
but clearly they're an impressive part of the landscape.
- [Jeff] The swept diameter is anywhere
from 116 meters
to 132 meters.
- [Joe] Did you catch that?
That's longer than a football field.
The blades spin a shaft,
which turns about 12 to 18 revolutions per minute.
Then that rotor shaft spins a series
of other gears in the turbine
which ramp that RPM to about 1,200
to 1,500 revolutions per minute.
A generator inside the turbine
can then start to make electricity.
- [Jeff] The electricity is sent down tower
usually to some sort of transformer
and then sent out through a collection system,
which all converges on a substation.
The substation then collects it all
and puts it uniformly into a larger transformer.
That larger transformer then sends that out to the grid.
High Lonesome has a total capacity of 500 megawatts,
enough to power 173,000 homes
for the entire year.
- [Joe] But it's not just homes that these farms are powering.
High Lonesome's owner, Enel Green Power
made headlines in 2019 when a partnership
it had formed with a pretty big beer producer
resulted in this ad at the 2019 Superbowl.
Anheuser-Busch partnered with the company
to generate 15 years worth of power
out of one of their Oklahoma wind farms.
- [Varun] Communities, and increasingly companies,
are going directly to production facilities
and signing up what are known
as long-term power purchase agreements, or PPAs,
where the production from the farm,
all of it or part of it, is directly assigned or credited
to these communities or to the companies.
Having power purchase agreements
really helps wind farms or solar farms
access capital to fund the projects.
- [Joe] Enel has PPAs with more than 20 different brands,
including one that helped make High Lonesome possible
by guaranteeing that a chunk of the energy
from some of their turbines would be purchased exclusively
for that company's operations.
- [Varun] PPAs are, at bottom up, change without any policy
or regulation at the federal or state level.
- [Joe] It's exactly this kind of creativity
and innovation that are going to help push us
into a new future in energy.
A future that includes an ever expanding need for energy
paired with an increasing imperative to reduce emissions.
- [Varun] Diversity is a very powerful thing.
Wind and solar energy are intermittent sources.
You will not have wind generation
when the wind is not blowing.
You will not have solar generation
when it is cloudy or dark.
So how do you create a portfolio
of technologies and infrastructure
including thermal generation that is able to supply
reliable power to our masses and for our economy
in an environmentally responsible manner?
I'm very optimistic that Texas, with its manpower,
with its technology, with its history,
with its to-do and will-do, can-do approach.
This will be a very, very important part
of the future of energy system in the world.
- You know, being a Texan is a certain kind of identity
but that identity has never meant just one thing.
And it's important to remember
just how quickly things can change,
hopefully for the better.
[gentle music]
[Joe] Hey guys, thanks for watching the latest episode
of "Overview" here on PBS Terra.
Make sure you hit that subscribe button
so you don't miss our next video,
and leave us a comment and let us know
where we should take our drones next.
[soft pensive music]
♪