http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070507/parentiTerry Hudgens is a classic oilman: thick drawl, square jaw, engineering degree from the University of Houston, twenty-five years with Texaco in the oil patch, which ended with his running the company's $5 billion-a-year natural gas business.
These days Hudgens lives in Portland, Oregon, epicenter of organic coffee and politically correct unshavenness. To hear him talk, you could think he is wearing Birkenstocks: Instead of the good-old-boy discourse of the petroleum industry, Hudgens now speaks about "the power of the wind" and the future of clean energy.
But this is not the story of a midlife crisis, a businessman gone groovy at age 55. Instead, Hudgens has brought his hard-nosed oil-patch logic to the frontiers of renewable energy. He is now CEO of PPM Energy, a subsidiary of ScottishPower and America's second-largest and possibly fastest-growing wind power company. He got into wind for the same reason he got into oil--it's a good way to make money.
"This is wind power on a grand scale," says Hudgens. He is talking about projects like Maple Ridge Wind Farm, the biggest power plant of any sort built in New York during 2006. The farm's 195 huge white wind turbines, with blades as long as jet wings perched atop tall steel towers, are spread across miles of ridgeline in Tug Hill, New York, catching steady airflow off the Great Lakes. On a good day this farm will produce 321 megawatts of power, as much as a midsize coal- or gas-fired plant.
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