Whirlwind Tours

No, they can’t blow smog back to Los Angeles. And they can’t waft a cooling breeze over Palm Springs during the sizzling summers.

But the scores of giant windmills along the San Gorgonio Pass that have long been a curiosity to motorists en route to Palm Springs are now accomplishing something else much prized in these parts.

The high-tech megatowers, engineered in cooperation with NASA and nursed by federal and state subsidies, beacons of hope for an inexhaustible, pollution-free energy source, are the new stars of a 45-minute guided tour. And they are inspiring visitors to spend $18 each to take a look.

It started six weeks ago with a modest sign offering tours of the windmill fields along Interstate 10. Now the tourists come four times a day to cruise in electric golf carts amid the pinwheels in motion that help power the city of Palm Springs.

“About 70,000 people drive by here every day,” said Mike Tyler, a retired dentist and electric bicycle salesman who started the EV Adventures wind farm tour. “There’s no way they can miss the windmills and a lot of people want a closer look.”

The fields of windmills look like surrealist painter Salvador Dali teamed up with the maestro of yellow umbrellas, the artist Christo, for an art project. More than 4,000 kinetic metal sculptures sprout in the barren stretch where the wind comes barreling between the San Jacinto and San Gorgonio mountains.

“I’ve never been out there when someone wasn’t pulled over to the side of the road taking pictures,” said Pam Henry, a spokeswoman for the Palm Springs Desert Resorts Convention Bureau. “And I get requests from film crews all the time. Remember the windmills behind Tom Cruise when he’s driving through here in [the film] ‘Rain Man?’ ”

Many visitors, like 79-year-old Don Plummer, are eager to climb aboard the golf carts (appropriately charged by windmills) for closer inspection.

“I’m skeptical,” said Plummer, a retired aerospace electrical engineer from Manhattan Beach. “I want them to show me whether these things can really work.”

Ten-year-old Marc Sawatzky reluctantly claims a seat. He doesn’t want to be here.

“I don’t like educational stuff. It was my parents’ idea,” said the son of two schoolteachers. “But it might be cool if they’re really big.”

Marc is soon craning his neck to make out the tops of the towering turbines. The latest windmill models, sleek white rockets, stand 150 feet tall. The blades sweep half a football field. The compartments at the top containing the gearbox, hub and generator weigh 30,000 to 45,000 pounds--three times bigger and seven times heavier than a pickup truck.

Smaller windmills--ranging from Eiffel-tower replicas wearing whirlybirds to squat fortresses with twirling boomerangs on top--form a museum for an industry that is less than 17 years old. Just about every windmill ever invented was tried out here.

The new tour winds through the fields of dust and cactus, bringing visitors within earshot of the humming of windmill blades. Often one windmill is spinning furiously, it’s blades reaching the 200-mph optimum, while the one next door sits still.

The tour is supposed to last 45 minutes, but guide Dave Sturges says it often runs more than an hour because people have so many questions.

They all want to know: How much does a windmill cost? How much energy does it produce? Sturges explains that the cost is about $300,000 for a windmill that can produces 300 kilowatts an hour--the amount of electricity used by a typical household in a month.

He also explains that each windmill is hooked to a computer that turns it on or off depending on the conditions--too windy, not windy enough--and whether Southern California Edison has met the quotas of energy the company buys from the windmills. Because there is no way to store wind-generated electricity, a windmill only works when there is a market for its output.

No one is quite as blown away by the popularity of the new tours as Fred Noble, president of Wintec Energy Ltd., which owns the wind farm where the tour company operates.

“I’m amazed,” he said. “We were just going along running our business, paying the bills and then there’s this depth of response to a tour.”

He says the tours have spawned new interest for other ventures.

One group, Noble says, wants to put a “green” mall on the wind farm, full of recycled shoes, organic cotton and other environmental friendly products. Another visionary sees a hardware store selling the likes of energy efficient lightbulbs; and of course there’s a plan afloat for a kite shop.

The tours are attracting more than visitors with disposable cameras tucked into fanny packs. There are also savvy consumers whose wheels are spinning faster than the blades of a windmill in the face of the energy industry’s coming deregulation in 1998.

“You can see that if your name is Bill Harrah and you own a couple of hotels, it might behoove you to buy a windmill and tell your electric company. ‘Listen, I have my own windmill. I’ll call you when the wind’s not blowing,’ ” Sturges said.

Noble notes that not many people would have wanted their own windmills in the early days.

An entire first generation of windmills flunked the test. Built with aerospace technology, they couldn’t withstand the dirt and bugs and buffeting of earthbound existence in a windy desert pass.

While scientists went back to the drawing boards, local mechanics, machinists and welders from nearby Desert Hot Springs and Cathedral City made the windmills work.

“The bottom-up answer came from guys who had grease under their fingernails who came to work at the windmills every day and needed the job,” Noble said. “Fifteen years ago the windmills were a great idea, but the damn things just didn’t work. The biggest breakthrough in windmills came from the guys who figured out how to keep them running.

“Today I wouldn’t have any qualms about selling a windmill to someone risking personal money.”

To Noble, the windmills’ attraction goes deeper than the prospect of tearing up the electric bill.

“They bemuse people. You watch their faces while they watch the windmills and you see them relax. There’s this sense that the windmills are in harmony with nature.”