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Lake Benton Web siteSustainable Minnesota's Wind Energy Info
I've emphasized the paragraph we are particularly interested in.
--Prof. Hanson
The world's largest single wind-farm project will be dedicated Saturday in southwestern Minnesota. The $125 million investment features 143 turbines that will provide enough electricity to supply as many as 40,000 residential customers of Northern States Power Co. (NSP) well into the next century.
In addition, the project has been a boon for Lake Benton, a town of 700 people who were mostly skeptical a few years back.
"Some people were of a mind that all of this would not fit into the community," Mayor Marlin Thompson said. "But it's been just the opposite."
Lake Benton is completing a $2.5 million improvement of its streets and infrastructure, Thompson said. New light standards will sport banners with wind-tower replicas, and the town's main intersection will have colored concrete poured in the road in the shape of huge wind-turbine blades.
A new historical society in Lake Benton has begun to develop school materials about wind power for 10,000 Minnesota sixth-graders and is raising money to build a learning center with a working wind generator and other exhibits for students and tour groups.
For NSP, the project is the second phase of a commitment it made in 1994, when the utility agreed as part of a legislative deal to buy or produce 425 megawatts of wind-powered electricity and 125 megawatts of biomass-produced power by 2002.
In exchange, NSP was allowed to store additional nuclear wastes in outdoor metal casks at its Prairie Island nuclear power plant in Red Wing.
"It's the most significant proj ect in terms of wind energy in the U.S. today," said Audrey Zibelman, NSP's director of energy marketing.
Top officials of the U.S. Energy Department also are watching Minnesota closely.
"We're vitally interested in what happens with the turbines in Minnesota," said Dan Reicher, assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy. "They're the first large-scale test of the wind resource in the Upper Midwest."
Reicher said the department will study both how the technology performs and how cost-effective it proves to be. In general, wind-generated electricity looks promising, he said, especially in areas like Minnesota that have "amazing" wind resources. "Almost literally, the sky's the limit," he said.
The newest wind farm will produce 107 megawatts of electricity and is owned and operated by Enron Wind Corp. of California, a subsidiary of Enron Corp., one of the world's largest electricity and natural-gas companies.
The additional power, like the first 25 megawatts that started flowing in mid-1994, comes from turbines stretched along Buffalo Ridge, which rises from the prairies like a backbone and extends about 60 miles from the eastern Dakotas through southwestern Minnesota and into Iowa.
The generators sit atop 168-foot hollow steel towers that are spread across several miles of farmland northwest of Lake Benton. Landowners received lump-sum payments of $5,000 per machine, as well as payments for easements and buffer areas.
Property taxes paid by the utility will benefit Lake Benton Township, the local school district and Lincoln County.
John Dunlop, regional representative for the American Wind Energy Association, said Minnesotans can take pride in the fact that their legislators, reflecting state values for a cleaner environment, required the wind-farm development.
"What the Legislature did in 1994 was not just a horse trade for nuclear-waste storage," Dunlop said. "Members were showing some foresight by developing clean energy technology in the face of compelling new evidence about global warming."
The American Wind Energy Association estimates that the latest wind project will produce as much electricity as burning 157,000 tons of coal annually. Dunlop calculated that because of the 107-megawatt wind farm, NSP will avoid producing 150,000 tons each year of carbon dioxide, the leading greenhouse gas associated with global warming; 800,000 pounds of sulfur dioxide, the major contributor to acid rain, and 850,000 pounds of nitrogen oxides, a precursor to smog.
The next phase of development includes a 103-megawatt wind farm southeast of Lake Benton near Ruthton in Pipestone County. Enron Wind Corp. broke ground on that project a few months ago and is scheduled to complete it next summer.
Northern Alternative Energy of Minneapolis received $32 million in financing earlier this month for two smaller wind farms near Hendricks that will produce almost 23 megawatts of electricity to sell to NSP.
The author of the Prairie Island legislation said development of wind farms has virtually stopped everywhere in the country except in Minnesota, because utilities are unsure whether wind-generated electricity will be competitive, especially as the electric power industry becomes less regulated.
"The bottom line is that this [wind] is going to stick and hold and permanently change the economy of the energy landscape only if it's cost-competitive," said state Sen. Steve Novak, DFL-New Brighton. "We've given Minnesota the best chance of anybody to help that happen."
Novak criticized environmentalist leaders and wind-power advocates, who he said are effective at giving speeches about alternative energy, but need to "grow up" if they think wind machines can replace coal-fired and nuclear power plants.
NSP's Zibelman said that after the 425 megawatts of wind-generated power are included in the system by 2002, it will represent 2 to 3 percent of the utility's total capacity.
"Wind has its place in our system, but it cannot replace things like coal and nuclear that you need to preserve the reliability that we must have," she said.
Bill Grant, director of the Izaak Walton League's Midwest office, said environmental groups are keenly aware of energy economics and have watched the cost of wind power drop by at least half during the past five years.
The wind farm near Lake Benton will allow the public to "kick the tires" and become more educated about wind-generated power, Grant said. But he added that power cooperatives and other utilities have barely begun to appreciate the huge potential of wind in the Dakotas and western Iowa and Minnesota.
"Even when we're celebrating what is in fact the world's largest wind-energy project, it still makes up such a minor and trivial amount of our supply mix," Grant said. "It's difficult to say with a lot of confidence that we're moving forward to any sort of transition away from the traditional, more polluting fuel sources."
-- The city of Lake Benton has a Web site with information about wind power and links to many other sites. It can be found at http://brookings.itctel.com/~lbenton/.
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