In 1999, a rancher walked into a Sweetwater, Texas law office with a 50-page wind lease from landmen in South Dakota. The lawyer, an oil and gas attorney named Rod Wetsel, told him to throw it in the trash. The rancher insisted he take another look.
That lease became the first of an estimated 10,000 that Wetsel and his firm would negotiate across Texas. At one point, the line of landowners waiting to get into his office stretched two blocks down the street.
Wetsel is a founding partner at Wetsel & Lederle, co-author of the first treatise on Texas wind law, and a recipient of the Ernest E. Smith Lifetime Achievement Award from the Texas Journal of Oil, Gas and Energy Law. He teaches wind law at Texas Tech University. On this episode of the Energy Capital Podcast, Wetsel talks with host Joshua Rhodes about how wind, solar, and data center development changed Nolan County and the surrounding region.
In Nolan County, where Sweetwater is located in West Texas, the tax base grew from around $500million in 1999 to $2.7 billion in 2024. County commissioners who once debated whether they could afford to cut the grass now fund new schools with turf football stadiums. Young people are moving back to towns that had been losing working-age residents for generations.
Wetsel explains what makes a lease work for landowners, how townhall-style group negotiations give ranchers bargaining power against developers, and what data center companies are paying for land. He describes how electricity transmission lines, built more than a decade ago, added 18,000 megawatts of power generation capacity and enabled a wave of new energy projects across the region. And he shows why the Permian Reliability Project — a new transmission initiative that’s now in the siting phase — is poised to do the same for solar in far West Texas.
Timestamps
00:00 - Introduction and Rod Wetzel
00:52 - How an Oil and Gas Lawyer Found Wind
03:08 - The First Wind Lease vs. an Oil and Gas Lease
04:47 - Ten Thousand Leases and the Town Hall Model
07:20 - What Landowners Fear About Wind Development
08:24 - What a Wind Turbine Actually Pays a Rancher
11:50 - Solar, Storage, and Data Center Leases
12:33 - What Makes a Good Lease
14:36 - Hybrid Projects and Triple Landowner Income
17:42 - When Lease Negotiations Break Down
19:24 - How the CREZ Lines Transformed West Texas
22:57 - Who Wants Development and Who Doesn’t
27:29 - Tax Base, Schools, and Rural Revitalization
31:17 - The Bar and the Workforce Boom
34:30 - What This Industry Looks Like in Ten Years
37:13 - Australia, Global Parallels, and Closing
Resources
People & Organizations
Joshua Rhodes (LinkedIn)
Texas Energy & Power (Substack)
Rod Wetsel (Firm Bio)
Wetsel & Lederle, LLP (Website)
Texas Tech University School of Law (Website)
RWE (Americas Website)
ERCOT (Website)
Company & Industry News
Texas OKs Permian Basin Reliability Plan, Option for State’s First 765-kV Transmission Lines
AEP Texas Set to Construct One of the First 765-kV Transmission Lines in Texas
Texas CREZ Lines: How Stakeholders Shape Major Energy Infrastructure Projects
Books & Articles Discussed
Transcript
Joshua Rhodes (00:05.646)
Hey everyone. I’m really excited today to have Rod Wetzel on the podcast to talk about the work he does as a clean energy lawyer. Rod is a founding partner of the law firm Wetzel & Wetterly and based in Sweetwater, Texas, where he’s practiced law for over 36 years. He’s received the Ernest E. Smith Lifetime Achievement Award in Energy Law. He got his BA in JD from UT Austin and he’s previously taught law at the University of Texas at Austin and he currently teaches law at Texas Tech.
Joshua Rhodes (00:34.454)
In 2011, Mr. Wetzel co-authored the first treatise on Texas wind law and really has been someone who has helped write the legal playbook for how wind has developed in the state. Rod Wetzel, welcome to the Energy Capital Podcast.
Rod Wetsel (00:49.422)
Thank you very much. I appreciate you having me today.
Joshua Rhodes (00:52.408)
I just really wanted to kind of start off talking about, I’m not a lawyer, but I know in Texas, like a lot of laws based around energy law and particularly oil and gas law. So how did you get pulled into being basically the go-to lawyer for wind law in this state?
Rod Wetsel (01:09.294)
Well, that’s actually a pretty interesting story. I had practiced all kinds of law because we were in a general practice here in Sweetwater. But primarily for the 25 years before wind came along in about 1999, I had primarily been an oil and gas lawyer. And I’d heard rumors about wind farms. In fact, once upon a time, I had a girlfriend in California and I went out to Palm Springs and
Rod Wetsel (01:39.79)
I saw the wind turbines out there and of course at that time they looked more like windmills. They were lattice towers, very small. It me at the time that that looked more like Disneyland than anything that would ever happen in Texas until about December of 1999, a rancher client of mine, a longtime friend of the family came in with a very thick sheet of papers and said he had
Rod Wetsel (02:08.694)
a proposed wind lease on his property. And that was the very first wind lease that I did. And that sort of kicked off an avalanche of wind leases and projects in our area west, right out from here all over Texas. Even at the time when he came in, I was a skeptic that he was the kind of guy that was always looking for a new way to make some money, know, cut mesquite wood and sell it to aunts or
Rod Wetsel (02:39.092)
any kind of innovative idea. He told me he a wind lease from some landmen in South Dakota about erecting wind turbines on his land. I said, I think I would just pass on that one. He said, no, I want you to look over the lease and see if it doesn’t have some viability and be as hard on them as you can. Just don’t kill the deal. Cause I think they might actually be onto something. So that’s what I did.
Joshua Rhodes (03:07.95)
When you were looking over that wind lease, how different was it from the oil and gas leases and everything else that you had been looking over?
Rod Wetsel (03:15.438)
Rod Wetsel (03:15.938)
Well, it was similar in some respects. In one respect, it was all energy biased. There weren’t really any provisions in favor of the landowner. was more like the old producers’ 88 oil and gas leases. But those are two pages long. This was like a 50 piece. Yeah. And he asked me to look it over and after a few days he came back said, what do you think? said, I’d throw it in the trash.
Rod Wetsel (03:44.94)
because it’s really completely in favor of the wind company and those people are going to tear your place up and you’ll never make any money. And that’s when he urged me to go ahead and try to make a deal with them, which after a number of months, we were able to do that. And the company was actually out of California. It was GE wind, which at the time was part of Enron, as you know, had its own stigma involved.
Rod Wetsel (04:14.958)
We managed to get it done and the good news about him, the guy’s name was W.A. Oatman, we were able to get the lease negotiated. That was the very first lease I did. It’s on the Double Heart Ranch, is, it’s up on the Callahan Divide. It’s a ridge just south of Sweetwater where the elevation goes up about 500 feet. Wind really blows up there. And he was able to eventually get
Rod Wetsel (04:42.848)
about 33 turbines built on his property, so.
Joshua Rhodes (04:46.89)
How many win leases have you done since that first one, you reckon?
Rod Wetsel (04:50.926)
It would be hard to calculate. I would say probably somewhere in the 10,000 range maybe. Some of these projects would have as many as three or 400 landowners that we would all represent. And that made it really a challenge for lawyers and that how do you meet with 300 people at the same time? You have to find a convention center or a church or a barn or whatever.
Rod Wetsel (05:20.362)
And that began the concept of having sort of a town hall meeting of landowners to negotiate wind leases, which turned out to be a very efficient way of doing it because everybody got the same terms and we had more bargaining power with the wind company.
Joshua Rhodes (05:37.198)
After that first lease kind of showed up and you worked through it, when did you do the next one? How did that part of your business grow?
Rod Wetsel (05:43.342)
Well, the good news about a small county like Nolan County, which is only about 15,000 people, they had approached many of the landowners in that area. A lot of it had been clients of mine already for years. Okay. Once the word got around that Wetzel had worked out a wind lease for the Oldman family and they got paid some money and looked like it might be a real deal.
Rod Wetsel (06:10.742)
No joke. This is a fact. One day I looked out, the secretary said, what are we going to do with all these people? Because I went downstairs and there was a line of people that went about two blocks down the street waiting to try to get into my office. So that’s a real good problem for a lawyer to have. Yeah. And, you know, it just exploded from there in that we were the only firm around for a good while.
Rod Wetsel (06:38.06)
that were representing landowners and wind leases and so when the word spread we didn’t need to set up a billboard, they just came.
Joshua Rhodes (06:47.5)
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I that’d be interesting to have folks lined up around the corner. be like if you were selling the newest iPhone or something.
Rod Wetsel (06:55.758)
No, exactly. It was a fun time for sure and it just spread like wildfire. mean, that was the first wind project in Sweetwater. And after that, many other companies started coming here and setting up projects. And then at one point in time, we had the three largest wind projects here in Nolan County in the world.
Joshua Rhodes (07:19.66)
Yeah, I know it’s something like added billions of dollars to like the tax base and things out there and just Nolan County alone. But then there’s a lot of other counties in Texas that are also doing wind deals. When someone comes to you with a wind lease from a developer, like what’s the biggest misunderstanding do you think that landowners have whenever they’re first confronted with the possibility of having a wind farm?
Rod Wetsel (07:39.778)
Well, I think what all landowners are concerned about is the life change. Yeah. And that when you have wind turbines installed on your property, it’s never going to look the same. You know, the topography is going to be different. You’re to have to work around the turbines being placed there. And you’re concerned about the location. If you live on the property, you’re going to have to look out and see the turbines.
Rod Wetsel (08:09.074)
whether or not they were noisy, workmen being on the property, all those sort of issues that landowners that were used to living way out in the country had to deal with it they had never dealt with before.
Joshua Rhodes (08:24.002)
Yeah, but I guess the flip side of that is they’re generally getting compensated for having those wind turbines on their property though, yeah?
Rod Wetsel (08:29.72)
That was the driving force. The fact that the money was good, or at least had the promise of being really good, they actually arrived at the right time because about the nine, 2000 period of time, hadn’t rained here for about seven years. The cattle market was bad. We’re located on the Eastern shelf of the Permian Basin, most of the oil production.
Rod Wetsel (08:59.308)
was at a low ebb. And so people were faced with the dilemma that if they passed away, their property would probably have to be sold because their children had moved away to the big cities and could no longer afford to keep the ranch in operation so they had no income.
Joshua Rhodes (09:20.246)
Yeah. guess your wind turbines make a difference, right? Can you give a feel for kind of what type of income a wind turbine could provide a rancher these days?
Rod Wetsel (09:28.238)
Well, actually that’s gone up a lot. One of my best stories I always tell my class is, had a high school friend. I’ve grown up here. I was born here in Sweetwater and father did, my grandfather did. So we’ve been here for a long time. But my friend came in, he owns a really large ranch south of Sweetwater and area of a lot of this development. His father had passed away and he said, mom and I decided that
Rod Wetsel (09:57.58)
We just don’t want those wind turbines cluttering up our land. We’ve got a big cattle operation. We don’t want any interference. We don’t want them there. So don’t even ask me about it. So I said, okay. Well, in about six months he came back and he said, well, mama said that if we’re going to have to look at them, we might as well take the money. each at the time, the size of those wind turbines were about
Rod Wetsel (10:25.294)
met one and a half megawatts to about 1.7. They kicked off about eight to $12,000 a year per turbine income for the landowner. Today, turbines are now being repowered. Almost all of those have been repowered with turbines as large as anywhere from three and a half to six megawatts. Oh, wow. With corresponding
Rod Wetsel (10:53.55)
much more money for the landowner. I mean, as much as probably $25,000 a turbine per landowner.
Joshua Rhodes (11:02.508)
Wow, that could be pretty significant. I guess you have to look at them, but you don’t have to water them or do anything else to them,
Rod Wetsel (11:08.974)
That’s right. One of the famous quotes from this same gentleman was when we were interviewed by a foreign news service, they asked him, they said, when you hear all those turbines turning on your property, what does it make you think of? And he said, a cash register. that’s a pretty good answer because they’ve made a substantial, in fact, saved their ranch.
Joshua Rhodes (11:30.978)
Hahaha!
Rod Wetsel (11:38.926)
from bail or partition because their income from wind really was greatly out of distance to wind income from any other use of the property.
Joshua Rhodes (11:50.68)
Gotcha. know, wind was one of the first ones that you’ve gotten into, but I imagine you’re also doing solar leases and energy storage leases these days.
Rod Wetsel (11:58.89)
Exactly. About three to one on solar now. Solar is really a wind just from the standpoint that they don’t require as much acreage. You can deal with a lot fewer landowners. They’re cheaper to build, they’re quicker to build. And those and then all kinds of new technology like data centers and battery storage facility.
Rod Wetsel (12:27.094)
have really put a shot in the arm of the industry for anybody that’s in that field.
Joshua Rhodes (12:32.814)
When someone comes to you with a lease or whenever you’re negotiating a lease, wind or solar, storage or data center lease, what makes it good in your view?
Rod Wetsel (12:40.974)
the landowner is going to say is how much money am I going to get? And so the compensation is probably the number one issue. And that’s driven in the case of wind turbines by the number of megawatts that’ll be installed on the property. Okay. Because you don’t want to lease and have two turbines put on it and make no money. Yeah. You get paid by the acre. So you’re going to want to get
Rod Wetsel (13:08.236)
the majority of the acreage that you can to get paid more. Or if it’s a data center, generally you’re going to sell the property, but you want to get the very highest price, which lately has been astronomical. I mean, almost unbelievable the amount of money that companies are paying for what we would call a small tract of land, like 1200 acres. It’s not unusual.
Rod Wetsel (13:37.166)
for the starting price on 1,200 acres to be $50,000 an acre or above. We’ve seen as high as 100 or highest I’ve seen is $350,000 an acre, which is when you add it up on 1,200 acres, that’s fantastic sum of money.
Joshua Rhodes (13:56.408)
Wow, and that’s for a data center you’re talking about?
Rod Wetsel (13:59.234)
Yes, for a data center. So that’s sort of the new thing. We still have wind, we’re still doing a lot of wind leases, but like say more solar than wind. But now data centers have come on the scene and we’re doing a lot of those. You know, the great thing for our firm is that we started out doing wind leases here and now we’re pretty much nationwide. We do
Rod Wetsel (14:27.374)
A lot of work in different states, including Texas. So it’s really been a good deal for us and the legal community as a whole.
Joshua Rhodes (14:36.45)
Gotcha. That makes a lot of sense. I’m glad you brought up data centers because I feel like I can’t talk about energy these days without talking about data centers. And so I guess that probably makes sense that you’re seeing the same thing. Are you seeing any hybrid projects like people wanting to build wind farms with solar and plus data centers and other types of things like that? Are you seeing any of these hybrid projects that people keep kicking around?
Rod Wetsel (14:59.63)
Absolutely, we’re seeing those all the time. You have developers that come in and say, we want to build, for example, I have one client where they’re going to build a really large solar farm about 600 acres or 600 megawatts, that is, it’s on a large number of acres, 600 megawatts of solar, a data center that will use all the power from that solar farm. We’ve had other
Rod Wetsel (15:28.866)
data center projects where they build both wind and solar projects to furnish the power for the data centers. So the landowner then gets triple the income. They get the income from the solar, they get the income data center, and then from the wind project as well. So some of these have been extremely lucrative for landowners that
Rod Wetsel (15:54.838)
really have hard scrabble property that’s worth a lot more than it used to be, but the income is just staggering in comparison to any other uses like cattle ranching or farming.
Joshua Rhodes (16:08.406)
Yeah, but their acreage fees are better than dry land cotton and scrubbage fees.
Rod Wetsel (16:12.608)
I can assure you that’s the case. We’ve had occasion where people get really proactive. They have some pretty good looking property. They have it in the area of transmission or a good area that might be suitable for a data center or wind and solar. And they actually go out and try to market the property. And we’ve been successful in doing that.
Rod Wetsel (16:39.326)
Early on, one of the projects, the Roscoe Wind Farm, which is about 781 megawatts, it’s a really large wind farm. It’s in the top 10 in the world. One time, I think it was the largest wind farm in the world. No developer wanted to build there because it wasn’t located on the elevated land. It was on farmland that’s north of Sweetwater toward Lubbock.
Rod Wetsel (17:08.493)
And there were lots and lots of landowner small farmers and they just didn’t want to deal with it. And those people got banded together and managed to find a developer that ended up selling out to a larger developer. It’s now owned by RWE, which is big German company and it’s a huge wind farm. So that all came about on behalf of the landowners who
Rod Wetsel (17:37.198)
to the vision to go out and try to find somebody to build the project and they did.
Joshua Rhodes (17:42.414)
That’s really interesting that it’s kind of coming from both sides. We’ve talked a bit about what’s a good lease and what types of lease and things are going on. Have you been in any situations where negotiations break down? Where does that happen typically?
Rod Wetsel (17:55.822)
Unfortunately, that does happen. mean, there are cases where the parties simply can’t get together on the money. Most often, it’s where a landowner sets a bar that’s just simply too high for the developer to meet. For example, a landowner may say, I’m not going to encumber my property with wind turbines unless you build.
Rod Wetsel (18:21.774)
60 megawatts or you build 100 megawatts of wind on my property and the developer just says, we can’t guarantee that and the negotiations break down. Or if, you know, the parties can’t get together on other essential terms of the lease. But that’s fairly rare. It’s typically a win-win situation. It’s pretty rare that projects don’t get consummated.
Rod Wetsel (18:50.968)
But it does happen, unfortunately, from time to time. It’s just like any other business, some deals work and some don’t. We’re in the early stage of this business, as opposed to the oil company. The oil business has been around for 130 years. Wynn’s only been really around about 25 years. And so we’re still in sort of the honeymoon stage where usually it’s a win-win deal.
Rod Wetsel (19:19.966)
Everybody’s happy to get it done and looking forward to getting the money.
Joshua Rhodes (19:24.684)
Yeah, speaking over kind of that 25 years, you’re talking about still being kind of in the early stages, but Texas wind is in particular has gone through a couple of phases. In particular, about a decade ago or so, we kind of are a little bit more than a decade now. We finished the competitive renewable energy zone lines or the CREZ lines. How did the CREZ lines change what was possible to do out in West Texas in terms of energy development?
Rod Wetsel (19:48.11)
Actually, the change was really monumental. You know, at the time, we began to run into the issue of having curtailment and not being able to build additional projects because the transmission had been filled up or the existing transmission was filled up. And that added an extra 18,000 megawatts of transmission so a lot more projects could be built.
Rod Wetsel (20:15.95)
Plus, it allowed for projects to be built in the panhandle area, which is in a different grid system. The grid system from Lubbock South in our area is a totally state-owned grid system, Aircott. Whereas north of that, up into Oklahoma, the panhandle and so forth of Texas, is the Southwest Power Pool, where the prices weren’t nearly as good.
Rod Wetsel (20:46.488)
Well, the CREZ system allowed that power to be brought back into aircott without first jurisdiction, without the federal jurisdiction, and really sort of gave a huge shot in the arm to the wind business. Kind of in the same shape now, most of the CREZ lines are getting filled up. So probably gonna need another CREZ or some upgrade system before too long.
Rod Wetsel (21:15.096)
to upgrade the transmission to accommodate all the new developments.
Joshua Rhodes (21:19.074)
Yeah, I was going to ask about if you’re keeping an eye on the Permian Reliability Project, those big 765 KV lines that are going to run through the region and further out into the Permian and Delaware basins. I mean, when I look at maps, the solar resource and other types of things, I mean, the solar just gets better the further west you move because they’re building these lines nominally to move power out to electrify oil and gas operations. But when I see them, I just see us pushing further into solar territory. Are you seeing the same thing?
Rod Wetsel (21:48.014)
Exactly. Yeah, just today. I mean, I’m having landowners come in. mean, it’s a double deal for us because we’re representing landowners on that are in the path of the huge transmission line project. And as you know, these transmission lines are twice as big as any existing power line we have at the moment. So these are going to be gigantic lines that are going to be erected.
Rod Wetsel (22:18.38)
sometime in the next few years, but they’re locating those lines now. So you have a lot of landowners who either want the lines or they don’t want the lines and they want to hire a lawyer to deal with that issue. And then you have the fact of those transmission lines in the future is opening up all kinds of new areas. As you say, particularly for solar in far west Texas, which prior to now would have been a
Rod Wetsel (22:47.988)
inaccessible because of lack of transmission or distance from the Metroplex or Metropolitan Load Centers.
Joshua Rhodes (22:57.388)
Yeah, you mentioned some landowners wanted them and some might not. What’s usually the divide there?
Rod Wetsel (23:02.946)
Well, the divide usually is scenic area. mean, they’re around here. Most everybody, I’d say in central West Texas, it’s hard to find somebody that doesn’t want to winter solar farm or data center. But if you go down in the hill country or you go to, there’s certain areas are just completely off limits. You go down to Fredericksburg, you’re going to get run out of town or you go to certain really touristy areas.
Rod Wetsel (23:32.364)
you’re going to have difficulty, particularly with wind turbines, because they don’t want you to affect the scenic beauty of the area and have lots of visitors and recreation and so forth. And they just don’t want the development. And then there are other areas that are a mystery to me, like the Brownwood area, barely much like Sweetwater, it’s sort of dividing line, but you know, the central west Texas and the hill country.
Rod Wetsel (24:02.17)
and they have signs up saying no wind turbines here. So I’m not sure, but a lot of it just depends upon the area. And then there are other areas, Abilene is a good example. They have other industries or air bases or something there and they don’t want those to be interfered with. Abilene in particular has Dias Air Force Base. They’re fixing to do a
Rod Wetsel (24:31.918)
$26 billion renovation of that military installation to put in the new large bombers to be, you know, they already have the B1s, they’re going to put in the B2s. And they really don’t want a lot of turbines up close where it’s going to bother the low-flying airplanes and so forth. Some areas just aren’t conducive, others more.
Rod Wetsel (24:59.884)
and particularly the really rural areas are the areas that really want the development the most.
Joshua Rhodes (25:08.076)
Yeah, one of the things like in my observation and maybe you can tell me if this is right or not. It seems like for a lot of landowners, if you’re trying to make money off of the land, if you’ve got a ranch and you’re trying to feed your family, your kids to school, like off of what you can make off of the land, you’re generally more in favor of this type of development. But if you made all your money in the city and you’ve bought something that you just want to look at, like it’s generally going to be opposed to these types of things.
Joshua Rhodes (25:36.278)
Am I oversimplifying that too much or?
Rod Wetsel (25:38.83)
I don’t think so. I think if you’re a doctor in Dallas and you want to get as far away from Dallas as you could and you come out to Sweetwater and you buy an area and you want to have it for a hunting preserve, the last thing you want to have is a bunch of wind turbines on it, unless they’re going to pay you enough money. Then the adage is, well, if I get enough money, I’ll just buy a different place. But those are folks that sometimes are opposed. We’ve had folks on the other side of the coin.
Rod Wetsel (26:08.802)
that have said, have this really beautiful place here, we don’t want any wind turbines on our property, we have plenty of money. But for your average folks who are worried about having money to get by, they can’t make money from the land anymore like they used to, farming and ranching is much more difficult way of making a living than it was. We have a lot of folks in agricultural here that are really embracing
Rod Wetsel (26:37.95)
all things renewable and oil and gas as well because as they say the one thing that Texan wants is an oil well and a wind turbine or a solar panel, you know, to make as much money as possible from their property.
Joshua Rhodes (26:53.934)
Yeah, like you said, I think you mentioned some scene. I’ve heard of folks making money above, on top and below their property, right? Whether they got wind and maybe some solar and I guess maybe now data centers and then below with oil and gas. Doesn’t seem too bad if you got it. Yeah, so you mentioned, you know, you work in Texas, you work in other places. You advise counties and landowners in dozens of jurisdictions. I mean, in general, do you think you can sum up like what drives most local support or opposition now?
Rod Wetsel (27:08.002)
Not true.
Joshua Rhodes (27:23.19)
If that’s changed in the 25 or 30 years you’ve been doing this, what drives local opposition or support now?
Rod Wetsel (27:29.622)
Well, that’s changed somewhat. In the beginning, a lot of the counties, especially in our area of West Texas, were so economically deprived that actually the county commissioners around here argued if there was enough money to cut the grass. I mean, they didn’t have any money to spare. They needed money for road repair. Schools were becoming dilapidated.
Rod Wetsel (27:58.24)
At the time, you could get money for both abatements on schools and governmental entities. And so they were very much in favor at the first factor, always bidding wars about who gave the best to get the wind companies to be attracted to that area. Now with lots of development, you know, there is some opposition and some people that are on these county commissions are figuring we’ve got
Rod Wetsel (28:27.896)
plenty of development in the county. We’re not gonna be quite as generous as we were in the past. But that’s not always the case. I think most of them are still, they wanna get a better deal for the county, but I think they’re still in favor of trying to make a deal. You mentioned before Sweetwater, just to give a really good example that I always talk about. Sweetwater’s tax base and
Rod Wetsel (28:55.79)
1999 was about 435 million. Today it’s about 3.5 billion. So you take a look at that and now we actually have remnants of civilization in our part of the country. Hotels, restaurants, liquor by the drink, you whatever. You’ve got all kinds of things that you normally wouldn’t have except in the big city have all come to
Rod Wetsel (29:22.862)
the rural areas and that’s because of wind. Plus, for the time that existed up to 2022, the tax abatement on schools for a while there was pretty relaxed and they were able to put a lot of money into schools, rural schools. You drive around areas of rural West Texas and you drive through a little bitty town in the middle of nowhere and it has a brand new high school with a football stadium that has Astroturf.
Rod Wetsel (29:53.238)
you know, that afforded without the wind business. So that’s kind of neat and that we’ve been able to really revitalize the area. And one other deal I’ll mention that I think is really important is we really had a declining age population in West and lots of areas of West Texas and other states as well in rural areas where in the past when there were lots of family businesses, the young people would
Rod Wetsel (30:22.552)
graduate from college and come back and take over the family business. Well, after the Walmarts and the K-Marts and the big conglomerates came in, they ran all the small shopkeepers out of business pretty much. And the young people didn’t have any jobs unless they were professionals to come back to small town. And so you had an, you your average age in a lot of rural areas was 65 or above.
Rod Wetsel (30:52.302)
Well, today, with jobs in the wind industry, solar, all these data centers and so on, you’re having a lot more young people either live off the income and find things to do around here. So we have a lot more, a younger population base than we’ve ever had. In many years, I’d say since I was in high school.
Joshua Rhodes (31:17.098)
Is one of those things that folks find to do is now is to go to your bar?
Rod Wetsel (31:21.166)
Well, I guess you could say that’s a spinoff of the wind business as well. There were a lot of workers hanging around that needed a place to go after hours and no place existed. So we had a half of our building was vacant and we decided to, we’re first going to put in a coffee and a bookshop. And when I found out that only
Rod Wetsel (31:48.216)
probably last about six months before went broke. Somebody suggested maybe ought to put in a wine and beer bar and you’ll make money and it’s worked out. We did that. So there are lots of workers from these wind farms that stop ends and they stay at the hotels, you know, and a good example right now is, as you know, they’re building a really large data complex in Abilene and I’m told there’s not one single place
Rod Wetsel (32:17.678)
hotel anywhere in Abilene to stay now. They’re all filled with workers. There are 1,500 workers on that project. There are no hotels, there are no rent houses, there are no houses to speak of at all. And even the outlying communities, people are living as close as 35 miles away in Sweetwater driving over to work. So that’s a big plus too.
Joshua Rhodes (32:44.514)
Yeah, that reminds me when the fracking business was just getting off or just getting started. And there was a lot of folks that were coming into West Texas when back when you needed like 12 Roughnecks per well, I think they’ve economized that down where you don’t need as many necessarily. It just reminds me of that time when basically couldn’t find a hotel room and the liquor store would run out of beer on a Friday, right?
Rod Wetsel (33:05.132)
Exactly
Joshua Rhodes (33:06.826)
One of the things that I’ve heard on that project, particularly the data center project in Abilene, that electricians are making the equivalent of like three, $400,000 per year working double overtime or whatever it is, just because they just need so many of them right now. Have you heard that too?
Rod Wetsel (33:24.302)
I’ve heard that too, and what I’ve heard is those poor guys are working like, I heard they’re working like two weeks on and a couple of days off full time, and they’re planning on being there for couple of years. And that’s where it was here. First, we’re building all these projects. One of the requirements in the tax abatements that were granted by the county was that they use local
Rod Wetsel (33:53.026)
goods and services if they were comparable in price. And therefore all the dirt contractors, all the local electricians, everybody was just swamped. And you had that trickle down theory where they made money and they went out and spent money and bought more clothes here, did more things here, more businesses opened up. And it’s just been good all the way around.
Rod Wetsel (34:22.606)
It’s made life a lot more comfortable in rural areas than it’s ever been in my lifetime.
Joshua Rhodes (34:30.156)
Gotcha. If you can imagine Texas 10 years from now, kind of what does this industry look like?
Rod Wetsel (34:35.564)
Well, the good news, and this is another thing I tell my students, you know, because I have a lot of people always wonder if I’m an easy grader or if they really are interested in the subject matter. But I teach a course on wind and solar law, and I usually have about 50 students in there. And, you know, amazingly, at the beginning of the semester, they know absolutely nothing about what the course is about. They just heard it was fun.
Rod Wetsel (35:03.892)
And by the end of the semester, they’re saying, hey, I really want to go into this area. And what I tell those people is the good news is as maybe wind and solar are still there, but de-emphasized, now we’ve got green hydrogen plants, we’ve got data centers, we’ve got battery storage facilities.
Rod Wetsel (35:29.102)
Who knows what we’re going to have in the future, probably small nuclear plants. We’re have all kinds of things and there’s always something new. So I’ve been doing this now for going on 26, 27 years. Consistently, that’s basically all we do. We do some oil and gas as well, but we’re hiring more and more lawyers because it’s just too much work. And I tell people in the class,
Rod Wetsel (35:59.686)
out there and get those jobs because they’re not still after 25, 26 years are not enough persons who are trained in this industry, either in the legal aspects or the other aspects to get the job done. So people are paying really good salaries. The salaries at the industrial part, the developers paying are comparable with a really large
Rod Wetsel (36:26.102)
law firms in the big cities, which is sort of amazing to me.
Joshua Rhodes (36:29.996)
Yeah, no, absolutely. I think I shared the sentiment that Texas is the energy state and renewables, wind, solar, storage, small modular nuclear, new stuff. It’s all just other forms of energy that we’re gonna use as a state. Wetso, I really appreciate you coming on the Energy Capital Podcast today.
Rod Wetsel (36:49.752)
Well, thank you. It’s been a real pleasure. And I can tell you, as you know, our trip to Australia, we’re not the only place in the world that is really looking at renewables for the future. I think it has a great future. I don’t think anybody can go wrong about getting in this area of law or industry, either one. I think it’s going to be here for many, many years to come.
Joshua Rhodes (37:13.72)
We first connected over some work that I was doing on landowner payments and taxes and things like that associated around wind and solar and now storage across Texas. But I don’t think we ever actually met in person until we met in Australia. And I’m pretty sure it was at a bar or maybe it like a beer house or something like that.
Rod Wetsel (37:32.334)
That’s a fact. The one thing about this industry is so many of the folks that you deal with, you deal with remotely. So you know them on video or on the telephone, but you never meet them in person. And it’s always great to say, well, that’s what that person really looks like, you know, and then you get to have a visit. And so I think our trip to Australia was a really fun one, but just very indicative of there’s so many areas in the world.
Rod Wetsel (38:02.218)
including Australia, South Africa for one, that would really be benefited by all the benefits that we’ve had. So I’m really happy to be on.
Joshua Rhodes (38:13.752)
Yeah, I think one of the things in particular and you know, we...
Joshua Rhodes (38:18.946)
The building out of the transmission that the state does from time to time, whether that’s the CREZ lines or the Permian Reliability Project, like really acting as an economic enabler for the rest of the state, whether that’s new forms of energy or allowing us to have cheaper forms of energy to support other industries and things like that. And yeah, we think we’re doing the same thing in Queensland, Australia. They’re trying to figure out if they can do that kind of thing. I think it’s a good model. It’s fun to be here. I’m pretty sure you feel the same way.
Rod Wetsel (38:45.902)
Yeah, you know, it’s great to go to an area where it’s like going back in time. You take a look at that area and they’re where we were 25 years ago. And so you think, wow, wouldn’t it be fun just all over again? So I think there are many areas of the world that they’re still where we were 25 years ago. And that’s great. That leaves it a big opportunity for folks to go there and help those people do what we did and have the benefits we have.
Joshua Rhodes (39:15.255)
Absolutely.
Joshua Rhodes (39:18.702)
Thanks for listening to the Energy Capital Podcast. If today’s conversation helped you make better sense of how the energy system actually works, share the episode with a colleague and hit follow on your podcast app. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all the usual platforms. For deeper analysis and context each week, subscribe to the Texas Energy and Power at texasenergyempower.com. That’s where you’ll find every episode, every article, and our latest updates. We’re also on LinkedIn, X, and YouTube.
Joshua Rhodes (39:48.046)
where we share clips, insights, and ongoing commentary on energy policy, markets, and the grid. Before we go, a quick note. The views expressed on this podcast are my own and do not represent the official positions of the University of Texas, Ideas Miss, Austin Energy, or Columbia University. A big thanks to Nate PD, our producer. I’m Joshua Rhodes. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
