Green Energy Is Getting Its Second Wind

Run for the hills, Don Quixote.

Sure, there was a time when Fred Noble wished he had never been cajoled into trashing his plans for a trailer park to build a newfangled wind farm. A tax program encouraging investment in “green” energy had ended. Utilities weren’t interested. There were engineering disasters, and his land on the outskirts of Palm Springs seemed destined to become a high-tech junkyard.

“I sure wished I had that trailer park,” Noble said.

No longer.

Fifteen years later, he is the president and majority owner of Wintec Energy Ltd.--one of the companies that operates 20 square miles of windmills that spin incessantly on the edge of the California desert. Suddenly, windmills and other alternative energy sources are making a substantial contribution to California’s power grid.

Old, clunky windmills are being replaced with larger, sleeker ones that generate 10 times the power, harnessing the wind with blades as long as 89 feet and feeding the energy into giant turbines that make electricity. Operators believe the state avoided some blackouts this summer partly because of the contributions made by such renewable energy.

The windmills in the San Gorgonio Pass, one of three large wind farms in California, produced 900 million kilowatt-hours of electricity last year--enough to power 75,000 homes--and expects to top 1 billion kilowatt-hours this year. Wind now provides about 1.5% of California’s electricity, three times what it could provide in the 1980s.

Banking on that momentum, some power officials now predict that alternative energy producers--long considered a novelty act by the industry--will generate more than 10% of the nation’s electricity within 30 years. Though the companies that dominate the market dispute that green energy is ready for prime time, even smaller gains would represent a critical consequence of this summer’s energy crisis.

“All of a sudden renewable energy has gone from an interesting curiosity to something that makes a difference in the system,” said Noble, strolling along a row of windmills. “It’s taken a while to prove that we can make a contribution--and this summer really did that.”

Just as the promise of cheap, environmentally friendly energy was soaring, however, Noble glanced skyward.

“The wind is dying,” he said under his breath, as the silent blades--so promising when there’s a breeze, and so bedeviling when there’s not--began slowing to a halt. It was particularly distressing because the wind change occurred just before noon, when the windmills generate more money because customer demand for electricity is highest.

At times like that, the future of renewable energy remains unclear.

Was this summer a fluke--a unique opportunity for alternative energy created by disaster elsewhere in the industry?

Or did it take a crisis for renewable energy outfits--wind, solar and geothermal companies--to prove that they can carve out a viable niche?

Lars Bergmann is the director of qualifying facilities resources at Southern California Edison--meaning he oversees Edison’s contracts with alternative energy producers. Edison is required by law to buy some of its power from those producers, which generate about 11% of the electricity used in California.

Bergmann agrees that renewable energy can decrease California’s reliance on fossil fuels, making the industry more environmentally palatable. And he agrees that new technology has made wind farms more productive.

But, seated in his Rosemead office, he watched, in real time, the power being produced in the San Gorgonio Pass--and he was not impressed. According to the data rolling across his computer, the wind farm produced no electricity one day last week, though California is still in the grips of summer.

“And that’s a fairly common occurrence,” he said. “On the hottest days, without fail, they are at zero. . . . As far as their ability in the future to help us meet the peak demands, I don’t think it has a lot of promise.”

Despite such skepticism, though, the federal government last week began lobbying local governments to join forces to buy “green” power in bulk. The federal government has already dabbled in such deals. The U.S. Postal Service, for example, decided earlier this year to buy enough alternative-source power to serve more than 1,000 California facilities.

Renewable Energy Generates Safety Net

California is already the country’s largest consumer of alternative energy--and Steven Kelly believes it’s only the beginning.

The policy director at the Independent Energy Producers Assn., a trade group that represents a broad range of power providers, including alternative energy, Kelly believes this summer is an indication that green energy will be a player for years to come.

“The question is how sustainable this is,” he said. “I think this is a very good opportunity for renewable industry to present itself as a very good hedge against volatility. There are a lot of people who are starting to rethink this.”

That wasn’t always true. Alternative energy has stumbled through a tortuous history in California.

Windmills, for example, were critical to westward expansion in the 1800s, because they provided the power that dug the wells that delivered water to steam locomotives. And until Franklin D. Roosevelt spread power lines across rural America, farms throughout the Midwest relied heavily on windmills.

In the 1980s, alternative energy received enormous momentum.

That’s when Noble was preparing to build a trailer park on the west side of Palm Springs--until he got a letter from Southern California Edison. His trailer park was slated for San Gorgonio Pass, the narrow valley between the peaks of Idyllwild and the San Bernardino National Forest.

Edison--required by a new federal law to buy power from independent companies--told Noble that the pass was the only way for ocean breezes that roll across Southern California to get through the mountains. What’s more, the desert heat feeds the wind as it nears the pass, making the area one of the windiest places on the planet. It’s the wind equivalent of Mother Nature’s holding her finger over the end of a hose.

The first windmill was erected in the pass in 1982; thousands more followed.

But the success would not last. The federal government ended a tax credit program that encouraged investment in alternative energy. And, though windmills use little or no fuel, they are considered expensive to build and run. So the power they produced became expensive too, especially as oil and gas prices fell in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Windmills at all three of California’s farms--in the San Gorgonio Pass, in Mojave and in the Altamont Pass, east of San Francisco--began to languish.

But their use has soared again in the last two years, led by new technology that has reduced their costs by as much as 80%. The tax credit program is working again, and has been extended to December 2001. New projects are on the horizon--just last week, officials in Texas announced that they will build a 208-megawatt wind farm next year.

The timing could not have been better.

The 1996 deregulation of California’s power industry was supposed to lower prices by creating competition. But California hasn’t been able to produce enough power to keep pace with growth and the modern economy.

This summer, the bottom fell out. Some electric bills tripled, even as power shortages caused rolling brownouts in the San Francisco area. Lawmakers have called for lowering rates, fast-tracking the construction of new power plants and a federal investigation into the power market.

Experts Predict Shift in Balance of Power

In the meantime, the windmills in the San Gorgonio Pass have been churning away, surrounded by the typically surreal desert hodgepodge of stuff--illegal methamphetamine labs to the north, a seeing-eye dog training center to the west, a gas station that’s out of gas to the east.

The electricity produced there and at other renewable energy plants has been vital during the crisis, said Noble, whose company is privately held.

“It’s nice to, by an accident of fate, be here when they needed us,” he said. “But it’s more than that. It used to be that if it wasn’t big and didn’t burn oil, nobody cared. Now they want power any way they can get it. This is a cheap insurance policy, and they are cashing in on it--in a big way.”

There are concerns that renewable energy won’t be able to contribute, once the power market settles down. But backers say they will benefit from several factors, such as the continuing volatility of the gas market.

“I don’t want to over-promise in terms of what wind can contribute,” said Randall Swisher, the executive director of the American Wind Energy Assn. in Washington, D.C. “But when you get into a crisis situation, every kilowatt-hour counts. Even though wind is what many would consider a marginal resource, there is enough out there to make a difference.”

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Wind Power

After growing little from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, the nation’s large wind farms, such as one near Palm Springs, have surged forward since 1998. They are now able to produce far more electricity.

Capacity of U.S. wind energy farms, in megawatts

Year: Megawatts

1981: 10

2000: *2,650

Sources: U.S. Department of Energy Wind Energy Program and American Wind Energy Assn.

* Projected