CEDARVALE

Look out from this Torrance County ghost town largely abandoned during the Great Depression, and there they are — a city of turbines fanning out across the arid landscape of mesquite, cholla cactus and scrub brush.

They tower over the graveyards of ancient ranching equipment.

The walls of a long-neglected New Deal-era schoolhouse in Cedarvale, an unincorporated community along N.M. 42, are sunken and sun-stained. It is a dizzying contrast — the sky-high presence of wind turbines, with their long shadows, just beyond the ruins of the old school.

The turbines are part of San Francisco-based Pattern Energy’s massive SunZia Wind and Transmission project under development in Central New Mexico, often described as the largest renewable energy project in the Western Hemisphere, with

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