http://www.dmregister.com/news/stories/c4789013/15030568.html
Agriculture - Farmers ride winds of change

Power companies have built 259 turbines to generate electricity in northwest
Iowa

By JERRY PERKINS - Register Farm Editor - 06/17/2001
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Alta, Ia. - Farmers here are paid to turn Iowa's most under-utilized natural
resource into electricity.

More than 40 percent of Iowa's 36 million acres is buffeted by winds strong
enough to produce electricity economically, experts say. That opens the
possibility for as many as 36,000 farmers - 40 percent of Iowa's 90,000
farmers - to make money from something that costs them nothing.

Darwin and Lois McConkey were the first in Buena Vista County to sign a
30-year easement to have four wind turbines erected on their farm north of
Alta. Today, there are 259 turbines on 65 area farms.

"It's a good, added income for farmers," Lois McConkey said. "It's just like
a cash crop, and it doesn't cost us anything. Every three months, there's a
check in the mail and I don't have to buy seed, fertilizer or chemicals like
I would if I wanted to plant crops. Each one of the turbines earns us $5.35
a day, and we don't have to do anything except watch the blades turn."

Each wind turbine costs about $750,000 to build.

Each tower removes a quarter of an acre of farmland from row crop
production, but Darwin McConkey doesn't let the land under the 292-foot tall
turbines go to waste. He plants watermelons and musk melons underneath the
towers.

The McConkeys and the 65 other farmers with wind turbines on their land
receive four checks a year that add to about $2,000 for each wind turbine.
Payments include a $750 annual payment for each turbine and royalties that
equal 2 percent of the gross sale of the electricity produced by a wind
turbine.

The U.S. Department of Energy has set a goal of using wind power to supply 5
percent of U.S. electricity needs by 2020. If that goal is achieved, the
windfall from wind for rural landowners will be $1.2 billion during the next
20 years, the energy department estimates.

Lois McConkey said passing cars and trucks make more noise than the
turbine's blades. There is no interference with electrical appliances or
television reception, she said.

Deer often bed down beneath the towers, Darwin McConkey said.

"It's frosting on the cake," said David Rydstrom, 38, who has four wind
turbines on his farm.

"For the little amount of land they take out of production, there's no
comparison" between the income from the acre occupied by the four wind
generators and his income from an acre of corn or soybeans, Rydstrom said.

Chuck Goodman, 73, has three wind turbines on his farm southeast of Alta.

"These wind turbines are really oil wells in the sky," Goodman said. "The
wind is here, just waiting to be harvested, and it replaces itself every
day."

Goodman gives tours and speaks to groups about the wind farm on behalf of
Enron Wind, which developed the wind farm.

"I get a little bit of a fee" for speaking, he said, "but I really do it
because I believe in this. I think it's one of the greatest things that ever
happened."

Angela Chen of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources" energy bureau said
wind power is competitive with energy produced from natural gas.

Existing coal-fired plants can produce energy at lower cost than wind
generators, because the construction costs on the older plants was lower and
the up-front costs have been depreciated. But Chen said a new coal-fired
plant can't compete with wind turbines for cost efficiency.

"After you build the coal-fired plant, you have to buy the coal," Chen said.
"After you build the wind generator, you don't have to pay for the wind."

Wind generation will become more cost-competitive as the price of energy
sources like natural gas rise, Chen said, and energy demands grow.

State tax breaks for wind turbines have helped boost wind power in Iowa.

Another benefit of wind power is that it is environmentally superior to coal
or natural gas because there is no water or air pollution from a wind
generator.

"You might complain if someone wanted to build a coal-fired generating plant
in your backyard, but you wouldn't complain if they put a wind turbine
there," Chen said.

Farmers are thrilled to have wind turbines on their farms, she said.

"We talk with farmers who have wind turbines and they talk about low prices
of corn and soybeans," Chen said. "They say there is no legal crop they can
grow that earns as much as a wind turbine."

What's blowing in the Iowa wind
* Two wind farms operate in Iowa and two more are on the way.

FPL Energy Inc., a subsidiary of FPL Group Inc., of Juno Beach, Fla., owns
the Cerro Gordo County wind farm near Clear Lake and is building another in
Hancock County.

Enron Wind, an affiliate of Enron Corp., owns the Alta wind farm.

Northern Iowa Wind Power is planning to build a fourth Iowa wind farm north
of Mason City in Worth County between Kensett and Joice.

* Iowa is 10th windiest of the 50 states. Iowa winds have the potential to
produce almost five times the energy consumed in the state. Iowa wind
generators could supply more than 5 percent of the energy consumed in the
United States, according to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.

* Iowa ranks third among 22 states where energy is produced by the wind.
Only California and Minnesota produce more energy from wind.

* Iowa's wind power reduces acid rain emissions (sulfur dioxide) and smog
(nitrogen oxides) by about 5.4 million pounds each, the American Wind Energy
Association reports. Global warming emissions of carbon dioxide are cut by
1.3 billion pounds a year.

The amounts are the equivalent of tailpipe emissions from 100,000 sport
utility vehicles or 175,000 passenger cars.

* Iowa gets 87 percent of its electrical power from coal. All of that coal
comes from other states and costs about $300 million.

* Iowa's 350 wind turbines displace 382,100 tons of coal a year, or the
equivalent of a coal train 36 miles long.

It's a breeze
U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, introduced the Bipartisan Renewable,
Efficient Energy with Zero Effluent Act, known as BREEZE, in March. The act
extends for five years a production tax credit for energy generated by wind.
The current tax credit expires Jan. 1, 2002.

BREEZE has been referred to the Senate Finance Committee. Grassley, who lost
his chairmanship of the Finance Committee when Democrats took control of the
Senate, said Congress will have an opportunity to extend the wind tax credit
before the end of the year.

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