In The Northwest: Wind power now a lot more realistic than 'exotic'

Friday, April 5, 2002

By JOEL CONNELLY
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

WALLA WALLA -- Nuclear plant builders at Hanford used to sniff with
condescension at alternative energy sources, referring to solar and wind
power as "exotics" -- as if a solar panel or windmill were a half-clad
Parisian dancer of the 1920s.

Energy production is blowing from a different direction these days. Nearby,
in hills above the Walla Walla River, nearly 400 towers -- each 242 feet
high including giant revolving blades -- are being installed in the largest
wind energy farm of the western United States.

Alternative energy languishes in Washington, D.C. Dick Cheney wants to drill
for oil in caribou calving grounds, build more nuclear plants and clear
regulatory hurdles to refineries and pipelines. The Senate recently voted
down a bid to set a goal of getting 20 percent of America's energy from
solar, wind and other alternative sources by 2020.

We do things differently here.

The cause of wind energy has set sail in lines of whooshing towers along the
Washington-Oregon border. Each generates enough electricity to heat and
light 150 homes.

"We're seeing the world change. Our fossil fuel supplies are going to
diminish. We are beginning to feel the pressures of global warming. Clean
energy is on the cutting edge, just as biotechnology and information
technology were a couple decades back," Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber said this
week as he dedicated the Stateline Wind Project.

Whatever is happening to the world, minds have certainly been changed
hereabouts.

"Wind is right there in the competitive range," said Steve Wright, boss of
the Bonneville Power Administration, the region's federal power marketing
agency

Since 1982, the cost of wind energy has come down from 20 cents to 4 cents
per kilowatt-hour. "It didn't happen without a research and development
program the taxpayers supported," Wright added.

FPL Energy, the clean energy arm of Florida Power & Light, is building the
wind farm. The electricity is marketed by a division of PacifiCorp, the big
private utility that serves much of Oregon as well as counties in southeast
Washington.

Public power is the prime purchaser. Bonneville is getting the biggest chunk
of electricity from the windmills, followed by Seattle City Light -- part of
the city's commitment to meet power load growth with alternative sources.

The wind farm was sited to yield kilowatts. But hills above the Walla Walla
River also provide an unparalleled vantage point to the visions and
nightmares of energy policy in the Northwest.

In the distance are the Columbia and Snake rivers. The rivers were
harnessed, starting in the 1930s, in pursuit of the dream of cheap
hydroelectric power, upstream navigation and making the desert bloom.
Detractors spoke scornfully of watering and electrifying sagebrush.

As Wright points out, the hydro system has made a difference of billions of
dollars in what Northwesterners pay for power vs. the market rate paid by
other parts of the country that are jealous of us.

Gains did not come without pains. The four Snake River dams that made
Lewiston, Idaho, a barge port -- Ice Harbor Dam is visible from the wind
farm -- destroyed once-abundant salmon runs. Environmental groups now want
them breached.

Atomic energy was the dream of the 1970s. Wright's predecessors at BPA
promoted nuclear plants and decried as "prophets of shortage" anyone who
questioned plans for mammoth reactors. Old boy utility leaders grabbed a
multihandled shovel at the 1972 groundbreaking for the Washington Public
Power Supply System's No. 2 nuclear plant.

The dream dissolved in cost overruns and construction chaos. Ratepayers are
still paying the bill. Two abandoned, partially built WPPSS reactors are
visible from the west edge of the wind farm.

Utilities charged headlong into the nuclear fiasco. But with the new
technology, they are putting fingers to the wind.

The Stateline Wind Project will light 60,000 homes at full operation. Still,
it is something of an experiment. "Wind is an intermittent source of energy:
It goes off and on, which requires us to have something to back it up," said
Wright. "We need to know how much we can rely on it. And that is the most
important thing we have to learn up here."

The Columbia River Basin gets much wind this time of year. But that's when
rivers are swollen and dams churn out kilowatts. "We have water coming out
the yin yang in spring," said Bob Royer of Seattle City Light.

In Stateline's first months' operation, southwest winds above the Walla
Walla River are proving surprisingly predictable. "I think we're believing,
in time, that we can schedule with a fair degree of precision," said Carol
Clawson of FPL Energy.

Flying back to Seattle at dusk, I looked down on the WPPSS 2 reactor -- the
Northwest's one operating nuclear plant. It took a dozen years to build, and
a decade more to get operating efficiently.

Like powerful fireflies, lights atop the wind towers twinkled in the
distance. The towers took only a few months to put up, and won't leave
behind wastes that stay radioactive for thousands of years.

Exotic? Realistic is more like it.