The blast of frigid air sent temperatures plunging as far south as the Texas panhandle, where balmy 70-degree weather fell into the teens overnight.
Las Cruces, just across the border from the Texas panhandle in New Mexico, is drilling down 1,000ft in search of water.
Yet the state contains five regions, each with distinct characteristics.In the northern panhandle (the bit that sticks up between Ohio and Pennsylvania), steel is or was king: hulks of abandoned steelmills line the Ohio river.
His company, Mesa Power, has already invested $2 billion to build the world's largest wind farm in Pampa, a small town in the Texas panhandle.
JUST across the idyllic upper Potomac river in the West Virginia panhandle, a drenched racetrack sits empty in a mid-Atlantic downpour.
But the fastest-growing part of the state and the most Republican is the eastern panhandle, an exurb of distant Washington, DC, full of rich commuters and fast-rising property values.
Gary Lawrence, who heads the Economic Development Alliance of the city of Lubbock, in the Texas panhandle, explains that one electronics investment he backed cost the city $4.7m in revenue forgone over ten years.
Then the wind industry started to take hold in west Texas and the panhandle.
But Jose Mallea, Mr Gingrich's campaign manager in the state, says momentum and enthusiasm are more valuable than organisation.Mr Gingrich should do well, argues Susan MacManus of the University of South Florida, in the fiercely conservative panhandle in the north of the state.
A clue as to how Florida is going may come an hour earlier, when voting closes in most of the state bar the "panhandle" in the west.
And much more is planned: T. Boone Pickens, a famous local corporate buccaneer, plans eventually to install 4,000MW-worth 4,000MW-worthin the panhandle, and tofbuild his owindmillsinsion line thethe main grid.Wind is inherently variable, so it can never companhandle the cheandand dirto coal that generates half of America's electricity.
