Welcome to my second attempt at a weekly series devoted to Americans who are making a difference. With all of the bad news I read, a weekly diary featuring one ordinary person whose endeavors go relatively unnoticed but deserve notice would be a good reminder of that American spirit.
The first half of the title of this series comes from the first week, Outstanding in the Field: from Ephemeral Art to Food Awareness. This series will attempt to cover Americans who are outstanding in their fields.
This week’s focus is on a one armed cotton farmer from Roscoe, Texas. A man named Cliff Etheredge.
"We used to cuss the wind. Killed our crops, carried our moisture away, dried out our land. But because of the advent of the wind farms, we've had a complete 180-degree attitude change. Now, we love the wind."
I don’t know if Cliff Etheredge is a Democrat or Republican. That really doesn’t seem to matter in this story.
As a matter of fact when his efforts were mentioned on All Things Considered, his motives didn’t seem inspired by the ecological movement. It just made good business sense to him.
A few years ago, Etheredge noticed wind towers sprouting up near his cotton farm and wondered if Roscoe could cash in on the great West Texas wind boom. So he read up on wind energy, took his own wind speed measurements, organized landowners and went hunting for investors.
He hit the jackpot. A company called Airtricity, out of Dublin, Ireland, is spending more than $1 billion installing as many as 640 huge windmills around Roscoe. Together, they'll generate 800 megawatts, enough to power 265,000 homes. That once-cursed wind that blows across the Big Country may ultimately pay royalties to as many as 400 property owners.
Now Texas, the state that leads the nation in emissions of global warming gases has bragging rights to something else. Texas has surpassed California in Wind Power. Come on Arnold. Are you going to let those Texas lawmakers pass you up? Besides the enthusiasm of Cliff Etheredge, Texas legislature played a part. Laws were written eight years ago requiring utilities to buy renewable power.
So this one armed West Texas cotton farmer who organized his community to cash in on that average 17 m.p.h. wind in the Big Country is seeing positive aspects that just keep coming.
Roscoe, a once dying farm town with a population of just 1,300 by generating enough power for 265,000 homes is rapidly becoming Wind City U.S.A. This town has even become the host of a West Texas Wind Festival and there are plans for a Wind Energy Visitors Center.
That is the best news in this story, All Things Considered described a town that is being reborn;
All of this came just in time for Roscoe, where the trains don't stop anymore. Worse, the Dairy Queen closed three years ago. Cliff Etheredge says that in West Texas, that means your town is really in trouble.
"When I was a kid, all the traffic from Fort Worth to El Paso came right through town," he says. "Well the interstate bypassed town, and that's when it began to just dry up. All these stores began to close and no one reopened them. And no one came back home from college or school, none of the young people did, or very few of them. So mainly we've got a lot of old folks in this town. That's about it."
Now, there are new signs of life. Walking along Broadway Street, Etheredge points with his good arm — he lost the other one to a cotton harvester — to the cafe that's just expanded and the new Mexican restaurant.
"Hopefully, we'll see Roscoe reborn here," he says.
Roscoe has broken the trend that so many other slowly dying rural enclaves can’t. One of the biggest wind farms in the nation and the world will offer between $5,000-10,000 per turbine per year and since some farmers are getting 10 to 20 towers it will make a much cleaner farm subsidy. With these benefit going to many property owners, Roscoe residents have a very different view of a wind turbine landscape.
Business is picking up for Roscoe and the community is growing stronger.
This may be good news but it is not new news. All Things Considered aired this segment on November 27, 2007. You can check out the narrated slide show. It's worth a listen but of course it ends with the skeptics. Ther are still lots of those.