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In Texas, Wind Power Means Jobs - Duration: 5:21.
When you see them on the horizon, they do look small.
But whenever you finally get up there,
you're looking straight up in the air,
just straight up at the sky,
and it's just incredible.
You're face to face with this machine. It's 300 feet tall.
And your goal is to get to the top of the turbine.
And so you make your climb.
You get through. You open the hatch.
You step out on top.
And you've got that wind, and you can feel it.
Nothing blocks your view.
You just feel like you're like on top of the world.
Looking at these wind turbines,
I see them out there they're spinning 24/7.
And that's work.
That's a paycheck, every day, every year.
The wind never stops blowing. It's always blowing.
Sweetwater had been known for cotton, cows, oil and gas.
It used to be really flat here.
And now it's really flat with a lot of turbines.
So wind power came to Sweetwater, Texas, back in 2001.
Sweetwater is a really conservative area
in the very conservative state of Texas.
Governor Rick Perry was at the helm.
And yet, energy independence was in the air,
and making money was in the air.
If you go back to 1999, which we'll call pre-wind,
the whole county taxable evaluation in Nolan County
was about 500 million dollars.
Well by 2008, we were up to 2.8 billion dollars of evaluation.
So it really made a big impact on the income side of our county
and our hospital districts and so on.
It's changed Sweetwater, dramatically, from whenever I was a kid.
Our schools have been remodeled, and skyline has changed,
just the businesses in Sweetwater have changed.
We didn't have a Walmart until wind was here.
If Texas were actually its own country,
it would be the sixth largest energy wind producer in the world.
This has been an area that's been
traditionally ranching and agricultural
and oil and gas lands.
All of those have an element of boom and bust to them.
I only worked in the oil industry a year before I got laid off.
And I'm talking to guys who've been laid off two or three times.
This happens every four to five years.
I didn't want that.
So 2008 is when the wind energy and wind turbine technician program
started here at Texas State Technical College.
James Beall is one of the senior instructors
who has been here for four or five years now.
His dad worked in oil and gas.
The day that I turned 18, he sat me down
and made me promise him that I wouldn't go into the oil field
because he didn't want to see me get hurt.
Be sure everybody does a buddy check.
I ended up going into the electrical field.
My kid's mother at the time was making more money as a waitress
at the local steakhouse with all the wind technicians coming in and
spending their money than I did as an electrician.
So I got online, looked for schools that taught wind energy
and just so happened here in Sweetwater,
TSTC had a wind program.
I see the wind industry going forward.
It's creating a major impact, I believe.
Coal, oil and gas have always been top dogs.
And now they've got somebody
giving them a run for their money
and they're doing it cleanly.
I'm hearing so many people talking about the pride
that they have about producing energy without polluting the environment.
There's there's all sorts of varying opinions
about climate change, specifically,
but there's no question that wind energy
and creating clean, renewable energy here
has been a benefit to this community.
I don't think that fossil fuels
are the main reason of climate change in the area.
But I do think that with renewable energy,
we can work together towards the same goal of trying
to help the Earth by less pollution in the atmosphere.
I don't see why we need to be dependent
on anybody else for our energy needs.
I think we could bring a stability to our energy markets,
which in the future, would employ lots of people.
People are not against oil and gas here in Sweetwater.
They are open very much to the "all of the above" strategy.
Whatever works, whatever will get them a job,
and whatever job will be stable.
And that stability seems to be the key thing
that wind has over oil and gas.
Oil, it's going to jump up and down.
So are the jobs. Gas is almost the same way.
But with wind, you're always going to have a job,
you're always going to be able to harvest the wind out there.
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