(3BL Media/Justmeans) — Check out any old western movie and you’re bound to see tumbleweeds rolling across the open prairie. One thing we learned from those old films that beside cowboys and Indians, outlaws and sheriffs, two other things that Texas had, and still has a lot of, is open space and wind.

The open space gave rise to a booming cattle ranching industry long ago, though it has been suffering recently from a drought that has cost farmers and ranchers billions. The move to exploit the state’s abundant wind resource came more recently.

They did that through the construction of massive wind farms. We tend to associate renewable power with liberals and environmentalists, not something you’d expect to see a lot of in oil and gas-rich Texas. But it happened anyway. It didn’t just happen, of course. There were strong state government incentives that somehow survived administration changes that went from the liberal Ann Richards, to conservatives like George W. Bush and Rick Perry. It’s a model that few other states have followed, though many more could benefit from.

In fact, it’s the drought, which scientists agree is at least indirectly caused by climate change (since warmer temperatures increase the likelihood of drought), that, having brought those farmers and ranchers to the brink of disaster, has also led to their enthusiastic embrace of wind power. Many farmers now say it's the only way they've been able to hold onto their land.

“We rarely talked about the environment,” recalls Michael Osborne, co-founder of the Texas Renewable Energy Industries Alliance (TREIA) and developer of the state’s first wind farm in the early 1990s. “We talked about farmers and ranchers getting rich on windmills.”

The regular income generated by wind turbines keeps the lights on in ranchers’ homes, regardless of how their herds might be faring.  Annual land lease payments last year, which went mostly to farmers and ranchers were in excess of $60 million.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Association (EIA), Texas has six of the ten largest wind farms in the nation. The largest is the Roscoe Wind Farm, some 220 miles west of Dallas which also happens to be the largest in the world. It consists of 627 turbines, spread across 100,000 acres that produce 781.5 MW. That’s enough electricity to power 265,000 homes.

But Roscoe is one of many wind farms. Altogether, there are 11,592 wind turbines currently installed (likely more by the time you read this) in Texas with a combined capacity of 20,321 MW. In the year ending last October, wind power was responsible for 12.68% of the total electricity production in the state. That’s a new record.