Texas To Bring Lots Of Wind Power To Its Cities [UPDATED]

While I may currently live in Miami, my family and a rather large chunk of my heart live in Texas, and every once in a while the Lone Star State gives something to be damn proud of:

Texas officials gave the go-ahead Thursday to the nation's largest wind-power project, a plan to build billions of dollars worth of new transmission lines to bring pollution-free energy from gusty West Texas to urban areas.

The $5 billion project will build power transmission lines to bring the power over from the huge wind farms out in the plains of West Texas (where there's nothing but wind turbines, oil derricks, and the occasional tumble weed - no joke) to the urban centres out in East Texas (Austin, San Antonio, Dallas, Houston.)

"We will add more wind [power] than the 14 states following Texas combined," said [Public Utility] Commissioner Paul Hudson.

That's a lot of wind power, folks.

The project will add around $4/month to my family's (and any other recipient of this clean energy) electricity bill in order to cover the cost of the project, but a move to make the current $0.02/kilowatt-hour clean energy tax credit permanent will help offset some of that cost.

Bravo, Texas. I'm going take a celebratory shot of JD while singing The Yellow Rose of Texas in your honour.

UPDATE: Tom Gray, the Director of Communications for the American Wind Energy Association, wrote in to us to give a little more information on the costs of this programme to Texas residents:

By the way, the $4 a month you mentioned won't hit people's bills until around 2014. Also, it will be outweighed by savings due to the wind-generated electricity displacing power from natural gas. Those savings are estimated at 3x the cost of the transmission lines.

Thanks, Tom!

Texas gives green light to lots more wind power [MSNBC]