SAN ANTONIO – Nearly 40,000 homes in San Antonio are receiving part of their electricity from a newly repowered wind farm located almost 150 miles south of the city.
The Cedro Hill wind farm, operated by Clearway Energy in Webb County, announced last Wednesday that it had repowered the farm with “new, more efficient equipment that increased the wind farm’s capacity to 160 MW,” according to a press release from the company.
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San Antonio’s city-owned utility, CPS Energy, is purchasing 100% of the site’s capacity until 2045, said Barry Matchett, director of external affairs for Clearway’s Midwest and Gulf region.
Matchett said the 40,000 figure is used as a sort of “power equivalency” to gauge how much electricity the site can actually generate.
“The electricity generated from Cedro Hill interconnects directly to the local grid and flows wherever there is real-time demand within that grid system,” he said.
By comparison, CPS Energy receives 925 megawatts of wind power from five sites around Texas. Cedro Hill and two others are located in far South Texas, while the others are in Central and West Texas.
See those sites in the map below:
The Cedro Hill wind farm was originally built and commissioned in 2010. Some of the new equipment included replacing the blades and nacelles, which house the turbine’s generator.
“Repowerings can range from full turbine replacements to only partial equipment upgrades, which is what occurred at Cedro Hill,” Matchett said.
The effort offers a $269 million investment in South Texas while extending landowner payment and property taxes in Webb County, which extends to the Texas-Mexico border near Laredo.
“Our Cedro Hill repowering means more efficient delivery of clean, affordable energy to thousands of Texas homes and businesses every year,” said John Martinez, Senior Vice President of Operations at Clearway Energy Group.
An increase in wind infrastructure capacity in Texas makes sense, especially as the state leads the nation in wind generation, according to Peter Girard, vice president of communications at Climate Central.
“Now that wind and sunlight are the cheapest sources of electricity in the U.S., it makes economic sense to keep building capacity,” he said.
Against the wind
Wind, one of several renewables, was singled out in an executive order from President Donald Trump in his first days in office.
While some of the orders particularly focus on offshore wind leasing in federal waters, permits, approvals and loans for onshore wind projects are paused.
The Trump administration signaled what it called a national energy emergency through the order, which emphasized the proliferation of fossil fuel production, often long considered by experts as drivers of human-caused climate change.
Newly appointed Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright talked of innovation around technology during his testimony, even acknowledging the growth of renewables in the United States.
Yet, despite Trump’s calls to limit wind capacity projects across the United States, how this could impact generation in Texas remains unclear.
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