In 1999, a rancher walked into a Sweetwater, Texas law office with a 50-page wind lease from landmen in South Dakota. The lawyer, an oil and gas attorney named Rod Wetsel, told him to throw it in the trash. The rancher insisted he take another look.

That lease became the first of an estimated 10,000 that Wetsel and his firm would negotiate across Texas. At one point, the line of landowners waiting to get into his office stretched two blocks down the street.

Wetsel is a founding partner at Wetsel & Lederle, co-author of the first treatise on Texas wind law, and a recipient of the Ernest E. Smith Lifetime Achievement Award from the Texas Journal of Oil, Gas and Energy Law. He teaches wind law at Texas Tech University. On this episode of the Energy Capital Podcast, Wetsel talks with host Joshua Rhodes about how wind, solar, and data center development changed Nolan County and the surrounding region.

In Nolan County, where Sweetwater is located in West Texas, the tax base grew from around $500million in 1999 to $2.7 billion in 2024. County commissioners who once debated whether they could afford to cut the grass now fund new schools with turf football stadiums. Young people are moving back to towns that had been losing working-age residents for generations.

Wetsel explains what makes a lease work for landowners, how townhall-style group negotiations give ranchers bargaining power against developers, and what data center companies are paying for land. He describes how electricity transmission lines, built more than a decade ago, added 18,000 megawatts of power generation capacity and enabled a wave of new energy projects across the region. And he shows why the Permian Reliability Project — a new transmission initiative that’s now in the siting phase — is poised to do the same for solar in far West Texas.

Energy Capital Podcast is produced by ClarityForge Studios.

Timestamps

* 00:00 - Introduction and Rod Wetzel

* 00:52 - How an Oil and Gas Lawyer Found Wind

* 03:08 - The First Wind Lease vs. an Oil and Gas Lease

* 04:47 - Ten Thousand Leases and the Town Hall Model

* 07:20 - What Landowners Fear About Wind Development

* 08:24 - What a Wind Turbine Actually Pays a Rancher

* 11:50 - Solar, Storage, and Data Center Leases

* 12:33 - What Makes a Good Lease

* 14:36 - Hybrid Projects and Triple Landowner Income

* 17:42 - When Lease Negotiations Break Down

* 19:24 - How the CREZ Lines Transformed West Texas

* 22:57 - Who Wants Development and Who Doesn’t

* 27:29 - Tax Base, Schools, and Rural Revitalization

* 31:17 - The Bar and the Workforce Boom

* 34:30 - What This Industry Looks Like in Ten Years

* 37:13 - Australia, Global Parallels, and Closing

Resources

People & Organizations

* Joshua Rhodes (LinkedIn)

* Webber Energy Group (Website)

* IdeaSmiths (Website)

* Energy Capital (Website - LinkedIn - YouTube)

* Texas Energy & Power (Substack)

* Rod Wetsel (Firm Bio)

* Wetsel & Lederle, LLP (Website)

* Texas Tech University School of Law (Website)

* RWE (Americas Website)

* ERCOT (Website)

Company & Industry News

* Texas OKs Permian Basin Reliability Plan, Option for State’s First 765-kV Transmission Lines

* AEP Texas Set to Construct One of the First 765-kV Transmission Lines in Texas

* Texas CREZ Lines: How Stakeholders Shape Major Energy Infrastructure Projects

Books & Articles Discussed

* Wind and Solar Law by Roderick E. Wetsel and Becky H. Diffen

Transcript

Joshua Rhodes (00:05.646)

Hey everyone. I’m really excited today to have Rod Wetzel on the podcast to talk about the work he does as a clean energy lawyer. Rod is a founding partner of the law firm Wetzel & Wetterly and based in Sweetwater, Texas, where he’s practiced law for over 36 years. He’s received the Ernest E. Smith Lifetime Achievement Award in Energy Law. He got his BA in JD from UT Austin and he’s previously taught law at the University of Texas at Austin and he currently teaches law at Texas Tech.

Joshua Rhodes (00:34.454)

In 2011, Mr. Wetzel co-authored the first treatise on Texas wind law and really has been someone who has helped write the legal playbook for how wind has developed in the state. Rod Wetzel, welcome to the Energy Capital Podcast.

Rod Wetsel (00:49.422)

Thank you very much. I appreciate you having me today.

Joshua Rhodes (00:52.408)

I just really wanted to kind of start off talking about, I’m not a lawyer, but I know in Texas, like a lot of laws based around energy law and particularly oil and gas law. So how did you get pulled into being basically the go-to lawyer for wind law in this state?

Rod Wetsel (01:09.294)

Well, that’s actually a pretty interesting story. I had practiced all kinds of law because we were in a general practice here in Sweetwater. But primarily for the 25 years before wind came along in about 1999, I had primarily been an oil and gas lawyer. And I’d heard rumors about wind farms. In fact, once upon a time, I had a girlfriend in California and I went out to Palm Springs and

Rod Wetsel (01:39.79)

I saw the wind turbines out there and of course at that time they looked more like windmills. They were lattice towers, very small. It me at the time that that looked more like Disneyland than anything that would ever happen in Texas until about December of 1999, a rancher client of mine, a longtime friend of the family came in with a very thick sheet of papers and said he had

Rod Wetsel (02:08.694)

a proposed wind lease on his property. And that was the very first wind lease that I did. And that sort of kicked off an avalanche of wind leases and projects in our area west, right out from here all over Texas. Even at the time when he came in, I was a skeptic that he was the kind of guy that was always looking for a new way to make some money, know, cut mesquite wood and sell it to aunts or

Rod Wetsel (02:39.092)

any kind of innovative idea. He told me he a wind lease from some landmen in South Dakota about erecting wind turbines on his land. I said, I think I would just pass on that one. He said, no, I want you to look over the lease and see if it doesn’t have some viability and be as hard on them as you can. Just don’t kill the deal. Cause I think they might actually be onto something. So that’s what I did.

Joshua Rhodes (03:07.95)

When you were looking over that wind lease, how different was it from the oil and gas leases and everything else that you had been looking over?

Rod Wetsel (03:15.438)

Rod Wetsel (03:15.938)

Well, it was similar in some respects. In one respect, it was all energy biased. There weren’t really any provisions in favor of the landowner. was more like the old producers’ 88 oil and gas leases. But those are two pages long. This was like a 50 piece. Yeah. And he asked me to look it over and after a few days he came back said, what do you think? said, I’d throw it in the trash.

Rod Wetsel (03:44.94)

because it’s really completely in favor of the wind company and those people are going to tear your place up and you’ll never make any money. And that’s when he urged me to go ahead and try to make a deal with them, which after a number of months, we were able to do that. And the company was actually out of California. It was GE wind, which at the time was part of Enron, as you know, had its own stigma involved.

Rod Wetsel (04:14.958)

We managed to get it done and the good news about him, the guy’s name was W.A. Oatman, we were able to get the lease negotiated. That was the very first lease I did. It’s on the Double Heart Ranch, is, it’s up on the Callahan Divide. It’s a ridge just south of Sweetwater where the elevation goes up about 500 feet. Wind really blows up there. And he was able to eventually get

Rod Wetsel (04:42.848)

about 33 turbines built on his property, so.

Joshua Rhodes (04:46.89)

How many win leases have you done since that first one, you reckon?

Rod Wetsel (04:50.926)

It would be hard to calculate. I would...