As she sat at a small sunlit table by her apartment window, near the wheelchair and oxygen tank in the corner, Leona Morgan ticked off her monthly spending list. Rent: $550. Groceries: $300. Medicine for anemia, a heart condition and other ailments: $50 beyond what's covered by government health programs. Electric bill: $93.87 in August. "My income just barely covers what I have to spend," said Morgan, a sprightly, bone-thin 86-year-old, contemplating the possibility of soaring electric bills.

Universities and businesses across Texas are expecting to spend millions in the next few years honing the blades, gearboxes and generators that make up turbines designed to harness power from the wind. The work, including studies slated for a new University of Houston research park as well as at a massive, 22-acre testing operation planned near Corpus Christi, all has a common goal: developing a new generation of efficient and reliable wind turbines.

General Electric has sued Mitsubishi Heavy Industry in federal court over three wind energy patents. Two South Texas wind projects use Mitsubishi turbines. GE says Mitsubishi used protected technology that allows a wind turbine to provide a constant, steady stream of electricity to the electrical grid when wind speed changes.

When it comes to the biggest decision facing CPS - how to meet the energy shortage looming in the next decade or so - utility officials are adamant that renewable resources like solar and wind are not yet ready to shoulder the lion's share of the load. The proposed solution instead is to add two nuclear reactors to the South Texas Project. Utility officials insist the proposed $5.2 billion investment is cheaper and more reliable than solar or wind. The situation has the local anti-nuclear coalition Energia Mia and statewide renewable energy proponents outraged.

Iberdrola SA and E.ON AG's turbine dreams for the windswept Texas Panhandle may be stymied by the mating rituals of the lesser prairie chicken. Wind-power developers such as E.ON are scouring sagebrush and grasslands for the presence of ground-dwelling chickens that could impede turbine construction plans. Once plentiful in the southern high plains, the bird has a high priority for listing under the Endangered Species Act, which would put at risk where as much as $11 billion in turbines that are part of the U.S.'s renewable-energy push can be built.

About 40 minutes after the start of a public meeting Tuesday on proposed routes for wind energy power lines, about 50 people still stood outside the Region 16 Service Center, waiting to get in line with more than 100 people inside. Sharyland Utilities, which will build the 250- to 300-mile transmission line, and several consulting companies had representatives there to talk to landowners and others.

To satisfy San Antonio's demand for power with two plants out on hotter-than-normal June days, CPS had to buy power - very expensive power - from the operator of the Texas grid. Customers saw those higher prices reflected in their bills this summer. It's a scenario CPS doesn't want to repeat. The city-owned utility wants to have power available that can satisfy the city's demands for electricity, with a safety cushion above that.

John Hearn hopes someday to sell some of his 650 acres bordering the King Ranch for development. Maybe not in his lifetime, but probably in his children's. But Hearn worries of another kind of development, one that he fears will devalue his property: a large wind farm in the Chapman Ranch area. Local farmers have told him that a company has been signing leases. But it has been difficult to determine what, if anything, will be built.

Lightning that struck a wind turbine tower Wednesday near U.S. Highway 87 between Sterling City and Big Spring sent four men to a nearby hospital, a General Electric Co. official said. The four employees drove themselves to the hospital and were checked out as a precaution, GE spokeswoman Melissa Rocker said.

Jennifer Harris, Laughlin Air Force Base chief of asset optimization, told members of the City of Del Rio-Val Verde County Joint Airport Zoning Board during a meeting Wednesday, “Laughlin Air Force Base is concerned that the proposed wind farm in the Anacacho Mountain Range (in Kinney County) may have a significant negative impact on its core flying mission.” Harris told Joint Airport Zoning Board members that Laughlin does not oppose the development of wind farms and other sources of renewable energy sources “that do not adversely impact military readiness or training of U.S. armed forces.”

As the wind-energy industry continues to grow, state officials are developing guidelines to help wildlife and wind turbines coexist on the High Plains, a first step that may serve as a blueprint for the rest of Texas. "We're trying to get Panhandle-specific guidelines that would include the lesser-prairie chicken," said Kathy Boydston, program leader for wildlife habitat assessment at the state Parks & Wildlife Department.

The Hill Country's natural beauty is under assault, some say, all in the name of supplying power to the masses. Last week, Rep. Harvey Hilderbran asked the Texas Public Utility Commission to consider routing new transmission lines down U.S. 277 and east along Interstate 10 to the lift station in Comfort to minimize the impact to private property owners. ..."I understand the need to distribute power efficiently and effectively to all areas of Texas," Hilderbran said in a letter to the PUC. "But not at the expense of diminishing property values and the pristine views of the Hill County."

Should the lesser prairie chicken become listed as threatened or endangered - and it's close now - there would be significant restrictions on companies hoping to plant towering turbines across a five-state region believed to have some of the nation's best wind energy potential. "We've never seen the likes of this," said Texas Parks and Wildlife Department wildlife biologist Heather Whitlaw, who is part of conservation efforts with the other states and believes the bird could be listed within two years. "Anybody who puts anything on our landscape would be evaluated in one form or another."

The equation changed in the winter, when layoffs hit the wind industry hard, Shamblin said. Unemployment for June was 6.7 percent, still below the state average but the highest in Nolan County since at least 2000. Rainey would hear again from his former employees around March, after the completion of some wind construction projects. "When it all shut down, all four of them came back looking for a job. By then, it'd slowed down for us, too," Rainey said.

The answer to North Carolina's green energy challenge is blowing in the wind-swept mesas of Texas. With the first deadlines fast approaching for North Carolina's renewable energy targets, power companies in this state are snapping up green certificates from out-of-state wind farms. The certificates don't buy electricity, but pay for credits needed to meet state targets.

San Patricio County Commissioner Jim Price, a private pilot, contends that because 19 of roughly 100 turbines planned by E.ON Climate & Renewables North America Inc. fall within four miles of the T.P. McCampbell Airport, they jeopardize the approach to a runway.

Members from DKR Wind, the company looking to build a windmill farm near Oilton, approached Commissioner's Court on how much tax abatement they are requesting. They are looking for a $280 thousand abatement over a ten year period.

Between the windy flats of West Texas, where wind farms have sprouted like bluebonnets, and the population centers of the central and eastern parts of the state, where electricity is consumed at a growing rate, sits the rolling land of the Hill Country. Landowners there are banding together in the face of a state plan to ship wind power across the area on transmission lines built and operated by the Lower Colorado River Authority.

Austin Energy, Austin's municipal power utility, was the first in the nation to give consumers the option of buying green-powered electricity. And as recently as last year the city's green power program, called GreenChoice, was number one in the nation, in terms of sales. This year, 99% of the city's allotment of green power remains unsold, even after seven months on the market, according to the Austin Statesman.

Similar to transformations brought by oil and agricultural industries in past decades, the [wind] industry's impact is more than skin deep. Some researchers have found going green through a new generation of windmills may not be what's best for the environment. "There's almost no understanding of the environmental impact of these wind turbines," said Ronald Kendall, director of Texas Tech's Institute of Environmental and Human Health. "I'm all for alternative energy, but I'm for getting it right."