Cliff Etheredge - The Switch Interview

- [Scott] All right, it's a beautiful morning. - [Cliff] Yes, sunshine finally. - [Scott] Yeah. You were born and raised in this community. - [Cliff] Yeah, I've lived here all my life. - It wasn't very long ago there weren't any turbines out here. You're a pioneer. - I don't want to take all the blame, now. I was always curious about these things. They really fascinated me. And there's some windmills put up south of Big Spring about 15 years ago, and I never did get up close to 'em, but I could see 'em and I could see how big they were and how magnificent they were to me. Then when they begin building wind farms south of Sweetwater it really got my attention. And the more I studied it, the more I learned that we had a world-class wind resource here. And there was no reason why we shouldn't be able to develop this flat farmland. - Yeah. - [Cliff] I believe we've got 631 windmills in this wind park. - [Scott] And you say they're getting bigger. What are you up to now? What are some of your larger ones? - Well, 30 miles north of here there's a wind farm that has 21 three-megawatt windmills. Trend is larger all the time. There's some offshore windmills that are in the seven and a half to 10 megawatt range. - Huge, tall towers. - Yes. Look at the rows, the lines - [Scott] Yeah. - Those things are just spectacular. - I mean, I'm sure there's becoming some empirical science to the spacing. What's the distance between them laterally, and then between rows? - Rule of thumb, and it depends on the topography, is three to five rotor diameters, that's the swept area of the rotors, between windmills. - [Scott] Okay. - And then between rows of windmills is 10 to 15 rotor diameters. - Okay. - So it's all determined by the size of the windmill, the swept area of the blades. - Okay. 'Cause you got wind coming through here, and if I take a little fan out and blow wind through it, there's the turbulence behind that. - Yes. - So you need some kind of air that's not disturbed on that next row. - To have clean air for the next row, that's exactly right. - So clean air takes on a little different meaning in your business. - Yes it does. - You can farm and ranch underneath these. They don't take much of the land. - 3-5% of the land is all that's taken. It does interrupt the efficiency of the farming because those roads sometimes cross the rows of crops. - So you've got to go around them with your plows and your harvesters and your combine. - The only common farming practice that can't be done with windmills is aerial application of pesticides, herbicides, whatever. - [Scott] Oh, gotcha. So the crop dusters can't get out here. - That's right. So the farmers do it with ground rigs. - Interesting. I mean the landowners benefit here, right kind of royalty are they getting? - This industry is so new that there's really not a standard arrangement yet. But here in the Roscoe Wind Farm, and it's, I believe, becoming more common is a $100 an acre per year. Now that's from the generation of electricity, that's royalty payment. - Right. So more than twice what they're getting farming. - [Cliff] Yes. - We're looking at a row of four turbines here. They're tall. I mean, just give me a quick feel for... - The blades are 100 feet long. These are Mitsubishi one megawatts, about the smallest ones still being installed commercially today. And a 60 meter tower on these. These'll be the shortest ones we'll see today. - [Scott] Okay. - At full capacity, it'll generate one megawatt per hour. And that's enough electricity to power about 300 to 350 average-sized homes. - Okay. - Roscoe Wind Farm, 780 megawatts in it, will power about 265,000 homes. That's the nameplate capacity. That would be the actual output at maximum generation capacity if we didn't have curtailment. Curtailment on the transmission lines means they can't produce at full capacity because we don't have the transmission lines to carry all of the electricity generated. - Okay. - ERCOT, Energy Reliability Council of Texas, is the organization that's responsible for the distribution of electricity in Texas. And it's their job to keep the lights on everywhere. They continue to improve the system, but they play fair with everybody. It doesn't matter how long you been on transmission line or how long you been generating, you're curtailed if there's overproduction just like everybody else is. - So this transmission grid is a very important component of this. And it's getting, sounds like, smarter and smarter. - Yes. The plan has come together and it's working and the developers are setting, waiting, ready to build wind farms to overload the next set of transmission lines, so... - [Scott] You've got over 780 megawatts here in Roscoe. That's the biggest in the world. But a lot more than that in this broad area. - [Cliff] Nolan county has three of the four largest wind farms in the world, - [Scott] In the world. - [Cliff] Are headedquartered in this county. - How many megawatts are you talking about in this region? - Oh, in Nolan, well, within 100 miles of here, there's probably five or six gigawatts. - So 5,000 to 6,000 megawatts. - Yes, yes. - That's more than any other state total. - If Nolan County was a state in the United States, it'd be ranked 2nd in the nation behind the rest of Texas. - One county. - Yeah, one county! - We are surrounded by wind turbines. I cannot look in any direction and not see 'em. You really lead this thing in many ways, and I know you're a modest person, but four or five years ago, if I was standing right here with you, we'd be looking at farmland, right? - That's right. That's right, that's right. - What'd it take to put that together, really? - I had no concept of how it'd be done. If one company could do it or if it'd take a bunch of 'em. But organizing the landowners, and then getting a project put together that might be acceptable to a developer was the easy part. - Yeah. - The hard part was finding a developer. - Okay. - In October, I went to a-- - Of '04? - Of '04 I went to a finance and investment workshop in New York City. Took these presentations and passed 'em out and tried to meet people and talk to 'em and sure enough I found a banker in Philadelphia that referred me to a new company in Chicago from Dublin. - Okay. - And I called 'em, Airtricity was their name. Sure enough, they were interested. After sending 'em all the information I could gather up about this thing they came down and looked and the whole system came together. The whole plan came together. They recognized the potential here and this first 7,000 acres they wanted to expand to the 32,000 acres which we did for 'em. - [Scott] And this is a community that's welcoming this with open arms. - Yes. It's turned our communities around. We've got for the first time ever, these landlords have an opportunity to receive a regular paycheck. - Steady. - Our school has sat there with about 300, 310 enrollment for 50 years. - Okay. - Since the wind farm was built, the last two years, the enrollment at Roscoe has increased 40 students. The first increase ever - Yeah. - in our enrollment to school. To me, that's the best indicator of the benefits of the wind farm other than the actual dollars that's being pumped into our community. That's the first and the greatest benefit."