Wind Energy - Widely Dispersed or for a few Lucky Winners?

By Wilbur Wood For The Billings Outpost - Nov. 17, 2005

The wind cooperated on Friday, Nov. 11, and spun the blades of 12 wind generators at the Hutterite Colony near Martinsdale, in the upper Musselshell River Valley .

About a hundred people were there, off and on through the day, for a windpower workshop at the Colony.

One of those 12 generators -- all 65 kilowatt machines -- is owned by the Colony. It handles one-fourth of the electrical needs of this 125-person community, said the Colony¹s Peter Wipf, and it saved $6000 in its first year of operation and probably will save $9000 in electrical bills from NorthWestern Energy this second year.

Some of those power bills will be paid by income the Colony earns by leasing the land where the other 11 generators stand. These machines are owned by Two Dot Wind, LLC, a company founded by windpower entrepreneur -- and Billings doctor -- David Healow.

Healow was there to talk about the obstacles and opportunities faced by intermediate scale windpower developers as they try to work with utilities -- and also rural electric cooperatives -- in Montana.

More than anyone else in the state, Healow has direct knowledge about this. He owns those three 65 kilowatt wind generators that have stood on a hill southeast of Livingston since the 1980s. Seven other 65 kilowatt machines that he owns stand on private ranch land near Two Dot, ten miles east of the Martinsdale Colony.

It¹s all about "monetizing wind," said Healow, by "using a wing to turn wind into torque, and selling the torque." The wing is the blade of the wind machine.

Healow commented on the different types of wind at Livingston and in the Upper Musselshell . The winds are strong and steady in both places, but at Livingston you can be facing into a southwest breeze at Livingston and suddenly get blown off your feet by a gust from another direction.

At the Martinsdale and Two Dot sites, the wind fairly reliably comes from 20 degrees south or 20 degrees north of true west, Healow said.

Peter Wipf of the Martinsdale Colony agreed with this, said this site was a "sweet spot" for wind, which flows off the Castle and Little Belt Mountains -- "and we send it on to Judith Gap."

Judith Gap is where Montana¹s first largescale windfarm is about to start feeding electrons into NorthWestern Energy powerlines. November 22 is the projected date, according to John Bacon, a Wibaux, Montana, native who manages the project for Invenergy, the Chicago-based company that owns the windfarm.

Bacon projected power point photos of towers, turbines and controls on a large screen as he cited statistics on the Judith Gap project: 90 towers, steel tubes 260 feet high, march across 8300 acres of private and state land; 90 wind turbines weighing 36 tons each, and each attached to a "cell" shaped like a giant trailer house weighing 56 tons (the cell holds computerized instruments that adjust the pitch and torque of the windmill blades, measure the wind, and so on); each turbine with three blades each 122 feet long, will be capable of producing 1.5 megawatts per machine; 22,000 cubic yards of concrete were poured as foundations for the giant machines; there are 450,000 feet of cable on the site. The entire windfarm will produce 135 megawatts.

General Electric built the machines, and a nine-man GE crew will maintain the site, with Bacon overseeing the project for Invenergy. Asked if there would be opportunities for local people to get maintenance jobs "after the GE warranty runs out," Bacon replied that "GE is hiring locally."

The blades, fiberglass filled with foam, were made in Brazil. The towers came from three manufacturers -- a Canadian company operating out of Fargo , North Dakota; from a shipyard manufacturing plant in China; and from Korea . There is an option to install more machines to generate up 45 more megawatts, for a total of 180. The overall cost of the project to date? Bacon answered, "$162 million, installed."

It would take 23 of the 65 kilowatt wind machines at Two Dot and Martinsdale to generate what just one Judith Gap machine can do. We¹re talking much different scales of windpower here. The Judith Gap Windfarm was developed in response to a "request for proposal" by Northwestern Energy, and it was Montanans who did the groundwork. It was Bob Quinn, Dave Ryan and Wendy Kleinsasser of Windpark Solutions America, based in Big Sandy, who worked up the siting, engineering and environmental studies. But when it came to the point of capitalizing such a huge project, they turned to Invenergy, which develops wind and natural gas power plants nationwide, and sold it to them.

Bob Quinn, who is also an organic grain farmer, has told me he¹s glad that Judith Gap is happening, that it makes windpower credible in Montana, which has the fifth best windpower potential in the U.S. But personally he doesn¹t want to work on that scale again. If the investment capital comes from out of state, the profits flow out of state. Quinn says that he's much more interested in smaller, community scale projects.

This is the scale on which Dave Healow¹s been operating.

At the Martinsdale workshop, another windpower promoter, Russ Doty of Billings , asked Healow about the local economic benefits of smaller scale projects as compared with large ones. Healow replied that large projects may contribute massive amounts of money to local economies, but that even more massive amounts flow to places like China, Brazil, and Chicago.

Smaller projects may contribute far less money, in gross terms, to a local economy, but as much as 90 percent of the money invested in them circulates within local or regional economies. Healow has been buying used wind machines out of California. Once he gets them here, many need rebuilding or repair. If the generators require rewinding, that is done in Billings . Other refurbishing as well as day to day maintenance can be done locally. The Martinsdale Colony contracts to maintain the 12 wind machines on its land and also the seven at Two Dot.

Giant machines, Healow says, are more expensive, but more efficient and require less maintenance. Smaller machines cost much less but require more frequent maintenance -- that¹s money for local workers.

It's two different economies, Healow says, and one is not necessarily better than the other. Less capital intensive, less centralized projects have this advantage, however: they can not only be operated but also be owned locally -- by cooperatives, municipalities or other investor groups. And they can be dispersed among many local economies, not just a few lucky winners.

Note: This workshop was one of four renewable energy tours sponsored by NorthWestern Energy and organized by AERO, Montana's Alternative Energy Resources Organization.