Wind power in Texas was mostly a curiosity in 2000 when the state first opened its wholesale electric markets to competition. About 300 turbines were spinning away in rural West Texas, creating a mere 200 megawatts of power.

Today the state has 5,300 megawatts on line, 25 times more than in 2000 and enough power to light more than 1.5 million homes.

Texas topped ecofriendly California as the largest wind producer in the U.S. in 2006 and is on track to pass some countries in installed wind generation in the coming years, including giants China and India. With another 44,000 megawatts in wind projects on the drawing board, the forecast is for continued growth for years.

But challenges, both economic and environmental, may be looming.

The capacity to move power from West Texas’ growing fleet of wind turbines to the state’s energy-hungry cities is tapped out, leaving many turbines idle.

Solving the problem will require spending billions of dollars to build hundreds of miles of new transmission lines, the costs of which will be shared by all Texas electric customers.

And two projects under construction along the Texas coast south of Corpus Christi may test the green credentials of Texas wind.

Because the projects are along major migratory bird routes, some groups worry the projects could lead to massive bird kills when the turbines begin to spin late this year.

Others, however, including some environmentalists, say the two companies have studied the problem extensively and appropriately.

“Delivering electricity is a very complex system, and wind adds another level of complexity,” said Jone-Ling Wang, managing director of global power for Cambridge Energy Research Associates. “In Texas, the success of wind means the challenges will be great, too.”

1999 law The wind boom was sparked by a 1999 law obligating Texas utilities to offer renewable power to customers. It’s been sustained by improvements in wind turbine technology, the profit potential of the state’s wholesale market and growing public clamor for clean power sources.

“It’s a clean, infinite power source that has brought new life to many West Texas communities,” said Vanessa Kellogg, director of project development for Horizon Wind Energy, a Houston-based wind developer owned by Portuguese utility Energias de Portugal.

But wind power has two major drawbacks that continue to make it more costly than fossil-fuel-burning alternatives: reliability and location.

First, the wind doesn’t blow continuously, particularly during the hottest part of the day in the summer, when electricity demand is at its peak.

That means a grid operator can’t count on a 100-megawatt wind farm the same way it can depend on a 100-megawatt natural-gas-fired plant.

Pairing wind projects with fossil-fuel plants is a way around the problem, but it’s not cheap. To reliably meet 1 megawatt of power demand with wind requires 1 megawatt of wind-generation capacity and as much as .89 megawatt of natural-gas capacity, according to a recent Cambridge Energy Research Associates report.

Second, the best wind locations are usually far from the cities that need the power, adding costs for transmission lines.

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