http://www.star-telegram.com/business/story/261792.htmlFor years, Trinity Industries welded together steel rail cars and tanks at its Fort Worth facility on 28th Street.
The plant is still buzzing, but it has been converted to produce a different product: huge towers, up to 250 feet tall and 14 feet in diameter and weighing more than 100 tons, to support the big wind turbines sprouting up across West Texas and other parts of the country.
Trinity Structural Towers, which has two other U.S. locations, expects revenue of as much as $250 million in 2007, or more than triple its 2005 revenue. It is just one of several Texas companies that are getting a piece of the growing wind power manufacturing market. Last year, Texas became No. 1 in wind turbine installations, but the state is increasingly helping build wind turbines, not just erect them.
How many Texans work in the wind power business?
"It's certainly in the thousands," but nobody has done a recent count, said Mike Sloan, who represents the West Texas Wind Energy Consortium in Austin. The last time a count was done, in 2001, an estimated 2,500 Texans were employed in wind power, he said, and that was based on 900 megawatts of installed wind capacity. The state now has four times that.
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