Wind farm could be built off SPI

The Texas General Land Office’s ambitions for wind power could land an offshore site near South Padre Island.

On Oct. 2, the GLO will seek bids for the nation’s first competitive lease sale for rights to develop offshore wind farms — including the rights to develop 19,628 acres northeast of the town of South Padre Island.

The southern end of the lease would start approximately 8 miles northeast of the SPI Convention Centre and about 5 miles east of Park Road 100. The lease would then stretch northward to include approximately 30.6 square miles, nearly the size of Harlingen’s approximately 34 square miles.

Once constructed, the wind farm may be visible from parts of South Padre Island.

“That’s possible,” GLO press secretary Jim Suydam said. “It depends on how tall the developers were to build the turbines.”

The lease will not have restrictions on turbine height or density, he said.

The South Padre Island tract will be the second largest of four Texas offshore wind farm leases offered during the GLO sale. Other sites are off of Calhoun, Brazoria and Jefferson Counties.

Combined, the four sites total more than 73,000 acres.

Developers who win the competitive bid for the leases would next need state and federal permits before constructing the turbines.

Leases for the four sites were requested by Wind Energy Systems Technologies, a corporation that is developing the state’s first offshore wind farm near Galveston, Suydam said.

WEST is testing its Galveston wind farm for optimal wind speeds and expects to have the first turbines erected there by 2009, Suydam said.

“(WEST) said they would like the rights to build wind farms on these four tracts,” Suydam said, adding they paid the GLO $12,000 to nominate the sites for sale.

Rather than direct negotiations with WEST, the GLO will offer the leases through a competitive bidding process similar to the protocol used for the sale of oil and natural gas leases, Suydam said.

“The future of our nation’s offshore wind industry is off the Texas Gulf Coast,” GLO Commissioner Jerry Patterson said. “There’s international interest in these tracts, and this will be the first time the market will be able to place a value on what I think is a very valuable asset.”

Money from the leases will add money to public education through Texas’ Permanent School Fund, Suydam said.

“All of the money the state earns off energy leases goes directly to the Permanent School Fund, and that’s a $26 billion trust fund that the State Legislature votes each year to decide how much to take out,” Suydam said. “They take out about $800 million each year, and our job is to put money into that fund.”

The GLO could not provide financial projections for income that might come through the offshore leases. However, GLO bidding instructions stated that the minimum annual fee would be $20,000 per lease tract until the production commencement date. And the GLO would take a minimum of 3.5 percent of gross revenue from the tracts for the first eight years.

Those percentages would increase in later years.

“It will be more money than we’re earning now, because we’re not making any off that land,” Suydam said.

Developing offshore wind farms is a “major initiative” of Patterson, Suydam said.

“Oil and gas are resources that can be depleted,” Suydam said. “Commissioner Patterson thinks it’s important that we began now to develop renewable revenue resources for the Permanent School Fund.”

Texas has approximately 367 miles of Gulf coast with sovereignty to 10 miles offshore, Suydam said.

“We have always leased oil and gas on every bit of that,” Suydam said. “We intend to utilize that resource for energy, not just oil and gas.”

In the future, the GLO would consider additional wind farm leases — even directly offshore from coastal communities such as South Padre Island.

“We have the whole coast,” Suydam said. “People live along the entire coast.”

Environmental advocates said they had some concerns about a large-scale wind farm springing up off the South Padre Island coastline, but said it was too soon to know how great the impact would be.

“We always have concern about anything that would affect birds,” said John Wallace, manager of the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge, which owns 23,000 acres of protected land on South Padre Island. “But it’s hard to know without a design … we don’t know if (the farm) would be in the flyway.”

Wallace said that several species of birds flock to the refuge land on South Padre Island, which lies north of the town’s developed areas. Peregrine falcons stop there while migrating, and tropical birds rely on the island as a “fallout area” on their long migration from South and Central America, he said.

“It’s the first bit of land they see, and so they drop out of the sky and land until they can catch their breath there,” Wallace said.

The bigger worry for some environmental advocates is a proposed wind farm in Kenedy County, rather than a possible offshore farm off of Cameron County, they said.

“We don’t know precisely where it will be located, so we’re not nearly as concerned as we are about Kenedy County, where we know the farm is in the migratory flyway,” said Walt Kittelberger, president of the Lower Laguna Madre Foundation. “We’ll have to see where it would be.”

Despite the call for bids, Kittelberger said he doubts that an offshore wind project will be coming to Cameron County anytime soon.

“Offshore farms tend to have such high maintenance costs that companies decide not to build them anyway,” he said. “Maybe it will happen somewhere down the road.”

In 2006, the GLO announced plans for the biggest offshore wind farm in U.S. history to be built off the coast of Padre Island National Seashore in Willacy County. The company that bought that lease, Superior Renewable Energy, was later bought by Australian corporation Babcock & Brown. Suydam said the acquisition ended plans to develop that offshore wind farm.

A company spokesman said in June that they nixed plans for construction of the wind farm near Padre Island because the project was too expensive.

“(The construction of wind farms) is certainly worth it. All the actual scientific studies that we have seen show that bird impact from large wind turbines is minimal,” Suydam said. “House cats, power lines, tall buildings, all of these things kill huge numbers of birds compared to the number killed by turbines.”