Blue Canyon Wind Farm is currently Oklahoma’s largest (Blue Canyon Wind Farm)

Okies have a love it/hate it relationship to wind-it’s either a plains-sweeping source of joy or a horrific life-destroying avatar of chaos. But in a world increasingly concerned about climate change, taming Oklahoma’s famously strong winds for power is increasingly viewed as both virtuous and lucrative.

Wind turbines are an impressive sight-towering pillars of starkly painted steel and concrete, blades as long as airliners whooshing in lazy circles. But if you live in the more urban areas of Oklahoma, it’s easy to forget about them-even major farms like the massive Blue Canyon Wind Farm with 250 of these mammoth machines tend to be little more than distant spiky figures off a stretch of highway. But as forgettable as they are, they are responsible for nothing less than a revolution in how the former Oil Capital of the World gets its power.

The internal workings of a wind turbine (Department of Energy)

If ever a state existed where renewable power would seem like a non-starter, it’s definitely Oklahoma. After all, Oklahoma has vast reserves of natural gas-37 trillion cubic feet, and is #4 in the USA in production at 2.7 trillion cubic feet per year as of 2018. The situation with oil is similarly strong-over 2 billion barrels of reserves and yearly production of roughly 200 million barrels. With such abundant sources of energy and many years of institutional development and lobbying from these entrenched fossil fuel interests,you would expect any nascent challenger to their dominance of the energy sector to face strong push-back. Oklahoma is also one of the most conservative states in USA, handing anthropogenic climate change denier Donald Trump a more than 2 to 1 victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016. The deck seems stacked against renewable energy to an almost comical degree.

But none of these obstacles ultimately mattered in the face of the opportunity that awaited wind entrepreneurs in the state- Oklahoma has some of the finest locations for wind farms in the United States. Huge tracts of land in both the Panhandle and south-western areas of Oklahoma have the strong, consistent wind flow that helps wind turbines operate most efficiently, as the image below from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory clearly shows.