Lincoln County — Every day, thousands of motorists on Interstate 70 drive by a new sight in the Smoky Hills.
Dozens of white poles, standing more than 250 feet tall, with giant propeller-like blades at the top, appear on the horizon about 25 miles west of Salina.
Soon those three-bladed turbines will be rotating in the Kansas wind, sending electricity into Kansas homes and businesses.
Jason Martinson, operations supervisor for Enel North America Inc., which owns and will operate the wind farm, says he never tires of the view.
"This is our generation's way of starting a new form of energy production," he said.
When the first phase of the project is completed in January, the Smoky Hills Wind Farm will have 56 turbines spread out over 10,000 acres in Lincoln and Ellsworth counties. The farm is expected to generate 100 megawatts of electricity, enough to power a town of about 33,000 people.
"The wind resource here is very good," said Todd Regazio, Enel's owner representative on the site.
And the sight is unusual. Rolling hills, recently covered with snow, dotted by cattle and topped with massive towers and turbines.
"Kansas is just right on the tip of the sword right now. I love this industry, and it's growing by leaps and bounds," said Martinson, who has worked on wind projects across the country.
When developers first pursued the project, there was opposition from some landowners who feared the giant structures would disrupt the view of the landscape.
It's a common point of contention in wind farm development.
But economics won out on this project, supporters say.
"There has been regional, statewide and local economic benefits," said Stanley Walker, director of the Lincoln County Economic Development Foundation.
At the peak of construction, there were 225 to 250 workers, although currently there are about 130 workers on site.
Materials to build roads to the units came from a nearby quarry and all those workers needed places to live, eat and fill up their pickups.
And the project will provide royalties to landowners for years to come. Sunflower Electric Power Corp. has agreed to purchase 50 megawatts of the farm's capacity, and the Kansas City Board of Public Utilities of Kansas City, Kan., and Midwest Energy Inc. each will buy 25 megawatts.
Regional interest in the fortunes of wind energy can be seen at Cloud County Community College in Concordia, which started offering a two-year degree in wind energy technology.
Bruce Graham, who leads the wind technology course, said growth in the industry has produced a huge demand for workers to build wind farms.
"I get calls from companies, and they don't want just one or 10 people. They want 100 people," he said.
And studies are pouring in that extol the promise of prairie wind.
Kansas has three wind farms in operation producing 364 megawatts of power, but that is far from the state's potential.
The completion of several more projects next year will push the state's wind production to approximately 900 megawatts.
Gov. Kathleen Sebelius has set a goal of making 10 percent of the state's energy production wind driven by 2010, which would be 1,050 megawatts.
And President Bush has set a goal of having 20 percent of the nation's power coming from wind energy by 2030.
If Kansas, one of the windiest areas in the country, cashes in on this, it could mean big bucks.
The state has the potential to produce more than 7,100 megawatts of wind energy, which have an economic benefit of $7.8 billion, 23,000 temporary construction jobs and 3,000 permanent jobs, according to a report by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
And there may be additional money-making ventures.
Once finished, Walker, the Lincoln County economic development official, said, he thinks people driving along I-70 may be enticed to exit to get a closer view of the turbines.
"We think that it is going to be a tourism attraction, and we are working with developers and owners of the project," he said.
"We want to come up with some kind of a plan for people to stop by and learn more about the project and what it is doing and how it fits in with the environment," Walker said.
Comments
LJWorld.com doesn’t necessarily condone the comments here, nor does it review every post. Read our full policy. Also, read about banned accounts and harassing comments.
merrill (anonymous) says…
Wind Mills are better looking than coal fired lead filled exhaust any day. Same goes for radioactive waste creating nuke power.
Kansas needs to show some savvy or else any new economic growth is a GONER!
overplayedhistory (anonymous) says…
Go buy your wife some more cigarettes. Just can't stand when something good makes sense.
dlstrohm (anonymous) says…
"We think that it is going to be a tourism attraction"...this has to be a joke. When was the last time you got out of your car to look at a windmill? It is this kind of thinking that almost makes me embarrassed to be a Kansan.
Wind energy is about as much of a solution to our energy problems as Ethanol. If Bush wants wind farms, he can put these ugly things on his ranch in Texas. They are inefficient, require far too much land to ever be remotely considered a solution, and disrupt air flow and migratory bird patterns. I'm all for alternate energy sources, but why waste money and resources on what is, at best, a band-aid? Put that $7.8 billion into finding a real alternative.
Coal and nuclear plants are definitely eyesores and I would love a real alternative, but in using only a fraction of the land required by wind turbines they produce exponentially higher amounts of energy. Sorry, but wind is not the answer. It isn't even a good guess.
salad (anonymous) says…
"Wind Mills are better looking than coal fired lead filled exhaust any day. Same goes for radioactive waste creating nuke power."
You mean steam? Cause that's what's commin' out the stack...steam... and CO2, but that's invisible. Nuclear fuel can be recycled, we just lack the will to create the infrastructure to do it. BTW, I challenge you to find a power plant anywhere that makes as big an eyesore as a wind farm. One giant wind mill is cool....10,000 covering the landscape from horizon to horizon...not so cool.
Wind is a tiny part of the solution. Nuclear & coal are here to stay, and fusion is likely the distant future solution.
frankwiles (anonymous) says…
If those stupid tourist traps along I-70 can stay in business I don't see why a wind farm wouldn't be able to draw some tourists. There isn't a whole hell of a lot to see or look at along I-70 as it is. When was the last time you got out of your car to look at that huge concrete groundhog? Yeah me either, but it's still around.
Your arguments about requiring too much land is pretty silly. Is it your land? The people who have these wind farms on their property must see some benefit to it. Can't be that hard to farm/graze around a few windmills, even a few hundred on a large farm.
The disruption to the "air flow and migratory bird patterns" is also hillarious. If that were the case maybe we should consider only building under ground so we don't disrupt any of the precious air flow around Lawrence. If the birds can't move a few hundred yards in, well any direction, to avoid the windmill maybe it's time for natural selection to take it's course.
I tire of people wanting "a real alternative" one catch all Super form of energy. Why not explore all of our options and see which of them sticks? We don't use only one form of energy now...
ontheotherhand (anonymous) says…
dlstrohm (Anonymous) says:
"We think that it is going to be a tourism attraction":this has to be a joke. When was the last time you got out of your car to look at a windmill? It is this kind of thinking that almost makes me embarrassed to be a Kansan.
====
On the contrary, distrohm. There is a HUGE windfarm outside of Palm Springs and it has tons of visitors every year who want to learn about wind energy and see the monsters up close. Somehow it seems a little more intelligent than embarrassing. But then, I am more embarrassed by Kansas politics . . . :)
tony88 (anonymous) says…
"I tire of people wanting "a real alternative" one catch all Super form of energy. Why not explore all of our options and see which of them sticks? We don't use only one form of energy now:"
absolutely... decentralization of energy generation is one of the key tenants that we should begin to adopt for sustainable energy... if each house, for example, were able to generate a good share of its energy with its own local PV cells (by code hopefully) (similar to plants), it would reduce the need for a mega-unstainable energy infrastructure.
loudmouthrealist (anonymous) says…
Salad
You are sadly mistaken if you believe that steam is all that is being discharged by the coal fired plant here in Douglas county. Even though there are filters installed and the emissions are regulated by the "clean air act" (that is not really being enforced) here is a list of pollutants that are being discharged by the plant in Douglas count and by all coal plants in Kansas per year:
Douglas County
SO2 (sulfur dioxide)..................7749 tons
NO2 (nitrogen dioxide)..............6200 tons
Mercury...................................... 280 pounds
CO2...................................5,211,977 tons
In Kansas
SO2 (sulfur dioxide).............129,763 tons
NO2 (nitrogen dioxide)...........95,020 tons
Mercury.....................................2044 pounds
CO2.................................45,039,403 tons
Data collected in 2002 by
http://www.cleartheair.org/dirtypower...
salad (anonymous) says…
Sorry Loudmouth, but I have access to the actual data comming off the stackgas analyzer, past the scrubber and those numbers are incorrect. Virtually all the SO2 is removed by the scrubber, and in fact, almost everything comming out the stack is steam and CO2.
this:
Data collected in 2002 by
http://www.cleartheair.org/dirtypower...
Is no more a reliable site than all the rightwing propaganda spewed by R_T and his merry band neo-cons.
KsTwister (anonymous) says…
"If Kansas, one of the windiest areas in the country, cashes in on this, it could mean big bucks."
True, but then this is Kansas we are talking about. Coal isn't getting any cheaper and won't in the future. Water will be a premium too so the fact that wind is free and we have enough of it to power most of the nation should we choose wind is a "no brainer". Your future generations will be healthier for one thing.
salad (anonymous) says…
KsTwister, all good points. The thing about wind power that's not intuititive is that it's a maintainance black-hole. The turbines are massive pieces of machinery that require much, much more maintainance than a power plant on a per mega watt generated basis. The turbine bearings all require an oil pump and a back up oil pump, both of which require power, the blades themselves are pitchable, which requires additional machinery. The whole thing has to be regularly inspected for fatigue cracking of critical parts, and the generator requires a special piece of circuitry that converts the variable power to power that can go right into the grid. This piece is not cheap, but they are comming down in price, btw.
Put it this way: a coal fired unit is designed to run for two years continuously before a scheduled maintainance shut-down. A wind turbine is not; it's more like an airplane engine that needs to be overhauled every XXXX hrs.
overplayedhistory (anonymous) says…
Salad: prop engine or jet? Alternators are a far cry from the maintenance of any engine. Although their power output varies, it is AC power and does not need to be inverted. It is my understanding they are three phase alternators similar to the three phase alternators that all plants have always used.
Perhaps they do require more maintenance than a power plant on a per mega watt basis.
Is that a fair comparison to make when one is established on a much larger scale and the other is not?
What happens when it is no longer cheap to find low sulfur content coal?
This is not something you can put #s to.
There is always margins that can't be seen when talking about innovation.
When you stack a wind turbine against coal per mega watt are you factoring everything?
What about the amount of energy labor and $ that go into digging and transporting the coal?
Maintenance and fuel of the enormous cranes they use to dig?
Diesel fuel for the locomotives?
Maintenance of rails?
Maintenance of the locomotives?
We have been wrapping copper into coils, making props, building towers, and producing solid state circuits for some time now.
A maintenance black hole? No, not more than keeping our planes running or anything else.
There are more moving parts than wind when go from in the ground to plugging in the blender.
KsTwister (anonymous) says…
Well, there's the Kansas needs jobs argument.
jmadison (anonymous) says…
Thank God somebody allows these forms of renewable energy to be built. Ted Kennedy, a senator from Mass.
blocked their construction 5 miles offshore from his home in Hyannis, MA.
sdinges (anonymous) says…
I would just like to point out to Loudmouthrealist and salad that you've just shown how two people can look at the same statistics and argue opposing points of view based on them.
According to Loudmouth's stats, Salad, you are correct that *almost* everything that's discharged is CO2 (and we can assume H2O, though he didn't include that).
overplayedhistory (anonymous) says…
Tony88: I have spoken often of decentralization of energy and never had any response or rebuttal. It requires people to become more knowledgeable and hands on.
Centralization with the help of cheap fuel, a large land mass full of natural resources, exploitable immigrants, and two oceans to protect us is what made us a world leader. Lofty ideals are what gave us the exploitable labor.
Centralization is also at the heart of our problems with farming and home power.
We are going to have to become less helpless and less dependent.
Self-reliance is the key. This country is just too D@mn big to continue with the old oil and coal dependent to make it all work model.
dlstrohm (anonymous) says…
I will concede that wind is a cleaner form of energy, and its direct impact on the environment is minimal. My point regarding migratory birds, as well as the amount of land used, is simply that it isn't the great solution wind energy proponents suggest (by the way, I'm sure somebody once said that the smokestacks on oil refineries send the smoke up - what do we have to worry about? We cannot claim to know all of the long-term effects).
This article suggests that it takes 10,000 acres of land to power a city the size of Emporia. The impact on energy consumption is minimal, which translates to a minimal reduction in damage to the environment at an extravagant cost. Should we explore alternate energies? Yes. But it is abundantly clear that wind will not meet our needs, whether you look at economic, environmental, or consumption factors. As to the jobs it creates, what happens to those trained in wind energy today when it is entirely phased out in 15-25 years because we found something that actually works? Who will pay to dispose of the turbines when they are more expensive to operate than other forms of energy? I am simply opposed change for the sake of change, especially when it results in wasted time and money that could have gone to far better use.
monkeyspunk (anonymous) says…
dlstrohm, no one is saying that Wind is a "cure all" for the energy situation in America.
Anything that can lessen our dependency on nonrenewable resources from home and abroad is a good thing right?
We need to build more nuclear power plants. We need to utilize wind and hydraulic resources when we can and we need to support ethanol production from sources other than corn.
All of the technologies we depend on now were inefficient and overly expensive when they were first developed. It takes time to refine the processes. Just because something is hard, doesn't mean we should just give up. If something can alleviate a negative dependency we should shoot for it.
"Difficulty is the excuse history never accepts."
Hoots (anonymous) says…
I love that picture. It's as if they are looking at some oversized cool sculpture rising from the High Plains. Makes me proud to be a Kansan. One more step toward telling the Middle East where to go. I'm not a tree hugger by ant stretch but this is cool. I think more of these makes for cleaner air and a clear star filled Kansas sky.
mooner (anonymous) says…
I would think that wind turbines should be very low maintenance, although as they are relatively new there will be some learning curve until they are perfected. As far as economic operation, the Bowersock mills here in Lawrence apparently make enough money to keep them running, and I can't imagine that wind turbines would be worse ( for maintenance) than water turbines.
Toto_the_great (anonymous) says…
There is no win-win situation. Windmills are one of the cleaner solutions. Let technology catch up to make them more efficient. Illinois just landed FutureGen, which is an Ethanol plant that pumps CO2 back into the ground. We'll see how that works. One down fall of that operation is the amount of water required to run the place. Plans are to pull water from three medium sized streams (each a bit smaller than the Wakarusa), which means the streams will dry in portions of the basin (sucks if you are a fish or freshwater mussel). True windmills are an eyesore, unless we can make them look like what Don Quixote was chasing, and true a few birds and bats might die, but what are the alternatives? Hydropower causes all sorts of environmental problems (e.g., declines in fish stocks... and remember that fishing is a multi-billion dollar industry). Ethanol requires huge amounts of energy to produce. Windmills are everywhere and I see the semis carrying the parts all the time on the various local interstates. Maybe we can create something to deter the birds (something that is not obnoxious like that owl call in the lawn and garden sections of Home Depot). Remember that caribou walk under the Alyeska pipeline (as opposed to walking over it on the buried parts).We need to do something to protect my children's children's generation. Okay, time to step off the soap box.
My favorite tourist trap near I-70 is that big ball of twine in Cawker City. It is sweet. I have the salt and peppe shakers. Great conversation piece.
verity (anonymous) says…
"As to the jobs it creates, what happens to those trained in wind energy today when it is entirely phased out in 15-25 years because we found something that actually works?"---
dlstrohm
I doubt if that will actually happen, but if it does---the same thing that has been happening to all of us. When I graduated from college 37 years ago, desktop computers were not even a dream. During those 37 years I have continually been learning new things and building on what I already knew. It's not even reeducation, it's just continual education to keep up in any field. And so we get better and better at doing things and I'm sure wind power will get cheaper and many new improvements will be made as time goes on.
Why the negativity? Sounds like you want it to fail.
hornhunter (anonymous) says…
cool is back and posting his multiple stupid posts that some how include something about home designing,blah, blah blah. How can Kansas continue to grow with big businesses or companies that may want to locate here if power costs from wind is to expensive?
bertbob (anonymous) says…
I think I have the numbers straight. The EIA reports that Kansas had net electrical generation of 45,523,736 Mwh in 2006. An 1,000 Mw wind farm operating at 30% dispatch would generate 2.6 million Mwh or about 0.57% of Kansas electrical needs. To reach 10% of last year's Kansas energy generation, we will need to build about 9 or 10 of wind farms at this scale and they would cover 100,000+ acres (~160 square miles). Remember-that outside of peak load Emporia uses Megawatt-hours not Megawatts, and 250' tall wind generators are beautiful next time you look out your window.
del888 (anonymous) says…
i'm gonna charge the state a fee for using my wind.
overplayedhistory (anonymous) says…
Cool: you can sell power to the grid. Westar will not pay more than what it costs them to produce, about 2.5 cents per Kwhr. Then they sell it back for 7.
BigPrune (anonymous) says…
Lawrence is behind the times. We need these wind turbine tourist dollars.
Lawrence should build the largest turbines in the world 600 feet in diameter and mount them on Mt Blue. Just like the largest ball of twine.