A senior Texas Senator has called on the Pentagon to close down a large wind farm connected to a Chinese billionaire, citing significant national security concerns.
Senator John Cornyn expressed worries that Sun Guangxin, a former People’s Liberation Army captain, could potentially use dozens of 700-foot tall wind turbines to conduct surveillance on a nearby Air Force base at the direction of the Chinese government.
In a letter dated July 10 addressed to Steve Sample, the Department of Defense (DoD) executive director, Senator Cornyn urged for the project to be halted until a comprehensive Senate investigation into its threat to U.S. military interests could be conducted.
Sun Guangxin’s acquisition of approximately 130,000 acres of land in Val Verde County, Texas, between 2016 and 2018, including a 15,000-acre ranch earmarked for 46 towering wind turbines located 30 miles from Laughlin Air Force Base, has drawn significant criticism from local ranchers and politicians alike.
The wind farm project has raised espionage concerns, with former intelligence officials highlighting Sun’s close ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Initially blocked by the Texas electric grid in 2022 under a state law aimed at preventing entities controlled by adversarial nations from accessing critical infrastructure, Sun’s U.S. subsidiary GH America eventually sold development rights to the Blue Hills Wind Farm to Spanish energy firm Greenalia in June of the previous year for a reported $15 million, clearing the way for the project’s continuation.
However, Senator Cornyn’s letter to the DoD underscores persistent suspicions that Chinese involvement in the project may persist. He cautioned against allowing the project to proceed without fully understanding any ongoing connections to China, describing such a move as imprudent and short-sighted.
In a privately commissioned report by former intelligence officials in 2019, concerns were raised that Sun’s ties to the CCP could enable Beijing to exploit his business ventures for national security purposes. Sun’s history includes founding a CCP branch within his company during the 1990s and recruiting a party secretary from a state-owned enterprise to lead it, according to Georgetown University professor James Millward’s book “Eurasian Crossings: A History of Xinjiang.”
Senator Cornyn’s intervention follows a lawsuit filed by GH America against the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) last month, alleging that the state’s use of legislation to block the wind farm project was unconstitutional. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, argues that the Lone Star Infrastructure Protection Act violates the U.S. Constitution’s supremacy clause by encroaching on federal jurisdiction over national security threats and foreign commerce regulation.
The concerns surrounding Chinese businesses establishing operations near U.S. military installations have intensified, as evidenced by Grand Forks, North Dakota’s rejection last year of a proposed $700 million corn mill development by Chinese-owned Fufeng Group, following objections from the nearby U.S. Air Force base on national security grounds.
