Wind-buffeted landowners scramble to harvest crop

WASCO, Ore. -- Wheat farmer John Hilderbrand once cursed the wind that roars down the Columbia River Gorge and through this rural, hilly community, damaging crops and kicking up dust.

That was before the same powerful gusts paid for vacations to Panama and Costa Rica and allowed him to quit his part-time job as a real estate agent.

In the past year, dozens of wind turbines have appeared on the drab, rolling expanses of rural farmland in Oregon and Washington. The towering white machines, the latest in energy technology, loom in uneven lines on the horizon, spinning lazily over acres of tilled ground.

Hilderbrand and scores of other farmers have made thousands of dollars by leasing their land to wind farm developers.

The project's developer, Northwestern Wind Power, spent $24 million building a total of 16 turbines in Sherman County, a desolate, wind-scoured Oregon county that hugs the Columbia River.

Once considered a fringe technology, wind power has in the past few years gained currency as an economic and environmentally friendly way to generate power. It has particularly caught on in the Pacific Northwest, where a recent energy shortage and higher power prices sent developers scrambling to tie up the windiest land in a latter-day gold rush.

The region saw the second-largest growth in wind power last year, after Texas, said Randall Swisher, executive director of American Wind Energy Association. If all the proposed projects are completed, the Pacific Northwest will be the No. 1 wind power producer in the nation.

Scores of Columbia River landowners, eager for the lucrative lease payments that developers offer, have signed onto 15 projects planned along the gorge over the next few years.

"There's no question that the market for wind in the Northwest is hot," Swisher said. "If you're a windy landowner ... you've probably gotten a lot of attention from developers."

Lucrative leases

Northwestern Wind Power is paying 60 farmers in four counties to build wind turbines on at least 150,000 acres. Another developer, SeaWest Wind Power Inc., has leased tens of thousands of acres from at least 20 landowners in Oregon and Washington.

Farmers and developers won't divulge how much money they get for leases, but industry experts say payments can exceed $4,000 per wind turbine per year. Some developers give farmers a percentage of the gross revenue reaped from the wind, while others prefer a one-time fee or annual payments.

Farmers usually give up less than 5 percent of their land to the wind farms in a 20- to 50-year lease.

"It's really a no-brainer. You sit down with a pencil and push it and you say, 'So we lost three acres, so what?' said Terry Kaseberg, a third-generation wheat farmer. "We're getting something for nothing."

But Kaseberg and others realize that while wind power has helped them in the short-term, its long-term prospects are less certain.

Hurdles face those who invest in wind, including problems with inadequate rural transmission lines and the uncertainty of the energy market.

Lisa Daniels, director of the Minneapolis-based WinDustry group, said some companies will pressure farmers with a contrived deadline or sign landowners up before developers have financial backing or a buyer for the expected power.

Wind farms operate in rural areas where power transmission systems were designed to distribute power, not to handle large amounts of power generation.

In some cases, the rural substations used by wind farms to transmit wind-generated power are already at or near capacity.

Additional power generated by expanding wind farms will face a bottleneck unless utilities or developers invest in higher-capacity transmission systems -- a potential roadblock for investors.