Roscoe, Texas

For most of its history Roscoe was a cotton town on the Nolan County flatlands, the kind of West Texas settlement where the wind is constant and the horizon unbroken. Then a one-armed sixty-five-year-old cotton farmer named Cliff Etheredge decided to do something about the wind.

Etheredge began persuading neighboring landowners to lease their acreage for turbines, and construction of what became the Roscoe Wind Complex began in two thousand seven. When it reached full capacity in two thousand nine, the project encompassed six hundred twenty-seven turbines spread across one hundred thousand acres of cotton and ranch land in four counties. Its combined capacity of roughly seven hundred eighty megawatts made it the largest wind farm in the world when it was completed. The farm is owned by a German energy company, but the vision behind it belonged to a local farmer who looked at the same wind that dried out his cotton fields and decided it was worth something.