By Sherry Robinson
All She Wrote
© 2026 New Mexico News Services
As rancher Jim Berlier told it, he was in the Roundhouse representing his soil and water conservation district when he met wind-farm developers who were seeking the state’s permission to build. Talk to ranchers, he told them: We always say yes, and we don’t have to be re-elected every two years.
Two years ago, I was part of a tour group on Berlier’s historic San Pablo Ranch in Torrance County, home to cattle, people and 53 wind turbines. A woman asked him how he slept with the constant whooshing sound outside.
“I sleep like a baby,” he said.
Wind farms, which lease land from the state and private land owners, have been a blessing to the state’s ranchers. Now that Pattern Energy Group’s massive SunZia Wind Project began commercial operations in June, many more ranchers will sleep well.
The $11 billion SunZia is the nation’s biggest wind project by far with 916 turbines spinning in Lincoln, Torrance and San Miguel counties. They generate 3,650 megawatts of electricity, enough for millions of homes, that will reach Arizona and California over 550 miles of new transmission lines.
The project’s epicenter was Corona, which has boomed since Pattern arrived. A few miles away at Clines Corners, the tourist stop’s RV park has been packed with workers. Pattern said the project created more than 2,000 jobs at its peak and more than 100 permanent jobs in operations. The economic impact on New Mexico and Arizona will be $20 billion, including $1.3 billion in payments to local governments and private landowners.
Let’s take a moment to celebrate New Mexico’s huge win – and it’s not just in wind turbines, it’s transmission too. I’ve written for years that if New Mexico expected to grow and prosper, we needed more electric transmission. Pattern Energy accomplished the near impossible by building both.
Which is why it took 18 years – three for construction and 15 for red tape. Pattern persevered. Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., who worked hard to ease roadblocks, recently called for regulatory reform, saying that if we want more projects like this “we need a permitting system that gets to yes — or no — faster while maintaining strong environmental standards and meaningful community engagement.”
A shout-out here to former reporter Kevin Robinson-Avila (no relation) who for years carefully chronicled Pattern’s ups and downs for the Albuquerque Journal.
By 2009, he wrote, the transmission line was embroiled in disputes over potential environmental impacts along with U. S. Defense Department concerns about its effect on operations at White Sands Missile Range. The developers moved a segment north to avoid White Sands but still faced an environmental storm over its crossing on the Rio Grande. Pattern negotiated mitigation measures to protect birds and other wildlife, financed wildlife conservation studies, and bought land to create avian safe havens in New Mexico and Arizona.
What I see is a company that chose to negotiate in good faith rather than fight at every obstacle. Pattern has also been a good corporate neighbor that’s invested generously in the communities where it operates.
Pattern has a big footprint in the state. Its Western Spirit project — four wind farms in Guadalupe, Lincoln and Torrance counties plus an associated transmission line – has operated since 2022. Two older projects are in Curry County.
New Mexico now has 31 utility-scale wind farms producing more than 8,000 MW, according to the marketing intelligence firm Cleanview. This includes Avangrid Renewables’ Torrance County operation that serves PNM and supplies Facebook’s data center in Los Lunas.
That means you can dial down the scary stories you’ve heard about data centers and their voracious energy needs that will somehow cost all of us. There is plenty of wind and plenty of power.
Here’s what else you can dial down – the president’s assertion that wind is “unreliable” and his belief that coal is somehow coming back. Even though his administration is phasing out tax credits and federal permits have slowed, experts say it won’t change anything. Wind turbines outcompete coal, and they’ve proliferated across the landscape, accounting for 63% of the growth in electricity production since 2019. In New Mexico wind now accounts for 45% of New Mexico’s power, while solar and natural gas are neck and neck at 19%, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The coal train has left the station.
My husband and I recently had the experience of driving south at night toward Winslow, Arizona, and wondering about the necklace of red blinking lights across the horizon. An airport?
Powerlines? Military installation? No, it was AES Corp.’s Chevalon Butte Wind Farm, two years old and replacing coal for Arizona Public Service.
Welcome to the future.
