There's something in the air: wind power

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TOUCHET, Walla Walla County - Windmills form a stark white sculpture atop the tawny, melting hills of these arid steppes, turning hypnotically in a steady western wind.

This is blow-your-shirt-off wind, wind that rattles the wheat and ruffles in your ears loud enough to make you shout. Wind steady and strong enough to attract investment from wind-power developers all over the West, prospecting the bare, blasted hills and open range lands of Eastern Washington like wildcatters after oil.

The VansycleWind Project outside Touchet churns out a steady 24 megawatts of power. Up and running since 1998, it has a stark symmetry, with its string of identical, all-white, synchronized Danish wind turbines, each with three, 77-foot-long wings atop steel towers 24 stories tall.

Big as they are, the windmills don't seem to make a sound when they are working hard: The wind itself, and the rattling and thrashing of hundreds of acres of wheat, drown them out.

Stand directly under one, and the sound is like sails billowing, with a steady, pulsing background hum as juice churns from the wings of the rotor into a generator in the heart of the tower.

The nearby hills swarm with more than 200 workers putting up 450 more wind turbines. They'll be part of the new Stateline Wind Project - which, when complete, will include turbines built over 50 square miles: 22 long strings of turbines across wind-swept ridges running east to west along the Oregon-Washington border.

Seattle City Light is negotiating to buy one-third of the 300 megawatts the Stateline Wind Project expects to produce by the end of this year. Developed by FPL Energy, Stateline is the largest wind farm in the world under a single ownership.

Worldwide boom

The Northwest is at the forefront of a worldwide boom in wind power. Wind farms that could generate more than 1,747 megawatts of electricity are being planned or are under construction from Washington to Wyoming. That's enough to provide all the electricity consumed by a city of more than 330,000 people, and represents a potential 25 percent increase in the nation's total wind-power capacity.

Most of the new wind farms are being built to satisfy the demand of a single, large planned purchase by the Bonneville Power Administration, which committed Friday to going ahead with proposals to develop 830 more megawatts of wind power.

Wind has been the fastest-growing form of power generation in the world for a decade, with Europe leading the trend, said Randall Swisher, executive director of the American Wind Energy Association, in Washington, D.C.

But it still provides just a fraction of the region's power.

Hydropower provides about 63 percent of the power used in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and part of Wyoming. Coal provides about 21 percent, gas 9 percent and nuclear 3 percent. All other sources, including wind, provide less than 3 percent.

Wind alone provides just 0.1 percent of the region's power, according to Jeff King, senior resource analyst at the Northwest Power Planning Council.

That is changing.

The BPA, which supplies about 47 percent of the region's power, has selected seven new wind projects for potential development, by far the largest single solicitation for wind power ever in this country.

They may not all be built. Wind is tricky; it doesn't blow all the time, and has to be supplemented with another source of power. Bonneville wants to improve its ability to know when and how much wind power is available to dispatch to the grid.

The agency sought proposals for wind development in February and received 25 offers from developers eyeing sites in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and Canada.

The seven sites the BPA selected for further study were chosen in part because they are ripe for future expansion. Five are in Washington and two are in Oregon.

Price is pushing the wind boom. The price of wind power has dropped 90 percent over the past 20 years, as the technology improves and economies of scale evolve from the growth of the industry.

"Wind power is no feel-good, boutique resource. It is a prime-time, economically viable power source," said Mark Glyde of the Northwest Energy Coalition of Seattle, which represents consumers, environmentalists and some utilities.

Wind is cost-competitive with gas-fired generation; cheaper to bring on line than a new coal or nuclear plant; and faster to build than any of those. There is no fuel cost or commitment to a fossil-fuel source, with the risk of volatility in price and supply that fuel issues bring.

And wind power doesn't pollute.

But it's not without a down side. Wind turbines can kill birds, although careful siting and technological improvements have helped reduce that risk.

And consider the visual impact: battalions of 20-story wind turbines stitched together with access roads, sub-stations and transmission lines.

"Wind farms are huge industrial complexes, no less," said Dennis White of the Columbia River Gorge chapter of the Audubon Society.

The chapter has argued for years that a comprehensive siting plan should be developed to assess the cumulative effects of wind-farm development.

"The biggest effect probably is not bird-blade interaction, but habitat loss and fragmentation," White said.

The Blue Mountain chapter of the Audubon Society chose to support the Stateline project after developers reduced the risk of bird kills by relocating some of its turbines.

Chris Howard of the Blue Mountain chapter said he mourns the loss of the open sweep of land on the ridge above the Walla Walla valley, but sees it as a trade-off:

"When I look at rolling hills I would rather see just rolling hills. Now it's a bunch of metal things with blades going around," he said. "But I'm glad we are generating electricity in a nonpolluting way. It's the price we have to pay."

The best of locations

The Stateline site is uniquely suited to wind development.

The farm harvests a steady wind from the west as it is sucked through the Columbia River Gorge by the rising, warmer air at the Columbia Basin interior. The region's typical storm track to the southwest also delivers many a good blast.

Turbines are marshaled to harvest the accelerating current of air as it pours over the ridge to the valley floor below, like water over a dam.

The combined result is winds that average 17 miles per hour year round, just what wind prospector Bob Baker was looking for when he discovered the site.

"It's almost like black magic," said Baker, an independent consultant based in the Gorge. "You study the lay of the land, the wind patterns, the shapes of the trees and vegetation if you have any to work with. You talk to the people who have lived there all their lives."

The site also held farm and ranch land. That usually means a lower presence of the rodents that can sustain bird populations, and farmers only too happy to lease land for wind turbines.

Farmers who do that can still use their land for agriculture. And the turbines, unlike crops, provide a reliable cash flow.

Wind, so long a tormentor of farmers, eroding and drying the soil and ruining crops, can finally be an ally.

The math is compelling. Wheat was worth $151 per harvested acre in 1999, state agricultural statistics show, while the lease on a single turbine typically pays from $2,000 to $4,000 per year, with contracts usually signed for 20 years or longer.

Of course, the wind boom could fizzle. Natural-gas prices, which doubled over the past year, are headed down. If they continue down, and then hold stable, the region may lose interest in wind.

"That's a huge fear I have," said George Darr, head of renewable resources for the BPA. "We seem to go in boom-and-bust cycles. When a year and a half from now the time comes to sign these contracts, I fear all the sense of urgency will be gone and we will go back to our old ways."

The key, he believes, is to learn, once and for all, the dangers of relying too heavily on one power source, be it hydropower or natural gas.

"One of the aspects of this power emergency is people saying maybe we need to diversify our power portfolio, the same way people diversify their investment portfolio," Darr said.

Lynda V. Mapes can be reached at 206-464-2736 or lmapes@seattletimes.com.