Cattle prices swing, goat prices swing, and the drought comes whether or not the ranch can afford it. For a fifth-generation West Texas operation, the search for income that holds steady through all of it comes from an unexpected source: the wind.
A wind lease pays the same in a dry year as a wet one, creating a floor under an operation otherwise exposed to weather and commodity prices. When neighbors saw the turbines going up, the reaction was not opposition. It was a question about how to get their own.
On this week’s Energy Capital Podcast, Joshua Rhodes talks with John E. Davis, a fifth-generation rancher and former Texas state representative who chaired the House Economic and Small Business Development Committee. They talk about the seven turbines Davis hosts from the Cactus Flats project in Concho County. Davis, a conservative Republican, argues that a landowner’s right to host wind or solar is the conservative position, and the politics of renewables have drifted from the economics that drive rural Texas.
Davis says the income is what allows the ranch to keep producing food and fiber, and he calls it “a lifeline for us.”
In the episode, Rhodes and Davis get into:
The property rights argument, why Davis reads hosting wind or solar as a conservative right, not a Green New Deal one.
Behind-the-meter power and local storage, how rural West Texas could host data centers that bring their own generation, with batteries as community backup when the grid goes down.
The Queensland parallel, what a trip to rural Australia showed him about moving power from where it’s generated to where people live
How Texas resolves the gap between the power it wants and the wind it is slowing will shape what rural landowners can build and what keeps their ranches running.
Timestamps
00:00 – Introduction
02:48 – How Wind Came to the Ranch
06:20 – The Jane Davis Check
08:35 – Running Sheep and Goats Under the Turbines
09:43 – What Landowners Should Know Going In
11:44 – What Changed After the Build
13:31 – Sheep Royalty and the Committee Chair
14:39 – Neighbors, Suburbia, and the Politics
16:13 – The Queensland Parallel
21:23 – Data Centers, Behind-the-Meter Power, and Storage
24:37 – A Recovering Politician's Views
27:09 – The AI Race and Stopping Wind
31:12 – The Elon Musk Story
36:05 – The Menard Station Buildout
Resources
People & Organizations
Joshua Rhodes (LinkedIn)
John E. Davis, fifth-generation rancher and former Texas State Representative (HD-129), former chair of the House Economic and Small Business Development Committee
Joe Straus, former Speaker of the Texas House (Texas Legislature)
Energy Capital (LinkedIn - Spotify - Apple Podcasts)
Company & Industry News
Cactus Flats Wind Facility, the 148 MW, 43-turbine project in Concho County where Davis hosts turbines. Developed and built by RES, sold to Southern Power (a Southern Company subsidiary) in 2017 (RES - Southern Power)
Johanna Wilhelm, the “Sheep Queen of Texas” and Davis’s great-great-grandmother, who ran a large Menard County sheep operation (Heritage Park San Angelo)
SpaceX, whose founder Elon Musk visited Davis’s committee during a 2013 SpaceX incentives bill (SpaceX)
The Menard station, Davis’s two-acre development on a former Exxon site (EV charging, a beer garden with Wagyu franks, a farm stand, and a book exchange), funded with wind income
