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Texas Is Now One-Quarter Wind Powered

Plenty about Texas is backwards. Just not its energy future.

A lot of hot, powerful wind blows through Texas. Obviously, a lot of bad puns can be made at that wind’s expense, given the Lone Star state’s surplus of good ol’ boy governors and tongue-speaking preachers. But today, let us ignore the Rick Perry’s of the world and simply and peacefully celebrate that wind. See, that wind just enabled the state to get 26% of all of its power by pushing around some turbines.

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When it comes to wind power, almost nobody does it better. The state just broke the record for the amount of wind power ever generated there.

Silvio Marcacci explains at CleanTechnica:

Earlier this month, Texas set a new record for the percentage of electricity generated by wind power … Wind turbines generated 8,521 megawatts (MW) of electricity just after 10:00 a.m. on November 10. More than 7,000 MW came from wind farms in West Texas, with around 1,100 MW coming from installations along the Gulf of Mexico coast. This mark beat the previous record by more than 150 MW, was enough to power 4.3 million average Texas homes, and represented 85% of the state’s optimal wind generation output, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT). Wind has represented around 9% of ERCOT’s supply for much of 2011, but that share is growing.

That, it should be said, is rather impressive. That the right-leaning oil capital of the nation is doing more to develop wind power than almost anywhere else. That this month, one-fourth of Texas’s 25 million residents were charging gadgets, running microwaves, and watching TVs all with clean non-planet-destroying energy.

Texas, for once, is the future.