Wind Energy

A City Council environmental committee Tuesday unanimously approved buying energy from a Wyoming wind farm. The matter will soon head to the full council. The 16-year contract is worth between $236 million and $280 million depending on how much energy is purchased. The city is trying to expand its portfolio of clean energies. Most of Los Angeles' power continues to come from coal-burning power plants that contribute to global warming.

The mood was grim, funereal. Captains of the nation's wind energy industry had gathered in San Francisco for their 1987 annual convention, but no one was having much fun. No wonder. The American wind industry, hatched in a climate of giddy optimism in the early 1980s, had taken a frightful tumble. Lucrative federal and state tax credits, which prompted rows of windmills to sprout like wildflowers in California's gusty passes, had expired, dramatically slowing new installations.

In a blustery stretch of desert two hours east of Los Angeles, where many of the world's first power-producing windmills were built, a plan for more turbines has triggered a backlash that echoes a national debate over the merits of wind energy.

The wind-energy industry, born in the petroleum crisis and raised on subsidies, sees a new future in the concern for air quality. The clean-air agenda announced recently by President Bush will help. So will the hard-nosed 20-year clean-air plan of California's South Coast Air Quality Management District. In the final analysis, wind-energy managers hope that the urgency of health will translate into an adjustment in the pricing of energy that will take social costs into account.

Environmentalists say the dozens of turbines that rise more than 300 feet over wheat fields and herds of sheep here represent the future of wind energy -- and a model for overcoming the shortcomings that have kept wind from threatening the dominance of fossil fuels.

Tom DeMoulin was not expecting a bargain when he began buying his electricity from wind farms in the late 1990s. In fact, the community college instructor paid an extra $5 a month to his local utility to strike a blow against the coal- and gas-fired power plants that spew pollution across the Southwest. But starting next month, DeMoulin's conscience-driven decision will save him money.

To hear business leaders and political candidates talk, proper industrial policy comprises only three elements: a fair tax system, a level playing field and "certainty. " So why is it that all three are about to be thrown out the window as a sop to oil, gas and nuclear interests determined to fillet the wind-power industry? The maneuvering in Washington is over a federal subsidy known as the production tax credit, which is worth 2.2 cents per kilowatt-hour to wind-energy producers.

OSKALOOSA, Iowa - President Obama visited an Iowa farm Tuesday where a family grows corn and soybeans while also generating wind energy with several turbines on their 1,000 acres. Republican Mitt Romney spent time at an Ohio coal mine, speaking in front of hard-hat-wearing workers whose livelihood depends on continued demand for their often-maligned product. In grand terms, the fight between Obama and Romney over energy policy centers on the role of federal regulators in protecting public health and promoting particular industries for the good of the country.

Reporting from Oakland — Scores of protected golden eagles have been dying each year after colliding with the blades of about 5,000 wind turbines along the ridgelines of the Bay Area's Altamont Pass Wind Resource Area, raising troubling questions about the state's push for alternative power sources. The death count, averaging 67 a year for three decades, worries field biologists because the turbines, which have been providing thousands of homes with emissions-free electricity since the 1980s, lie within a region of rolling grasslands and riparian canyons containing one of the highest densities of nesting golden eagles in the United States.

The Delta Energy Center, a power plant about an hour outside San Francisco, was roaring at nearly full bore one day last month, its four gas and steam turbines churning out 880 megawatts of electricity to the California grid. On the horizon, across an industrial shipping channel on the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, scores of wind turbines stood dead still. The air was too calm to turn their blades - or many others across the state that day. Wind provided just 33 megawatts of power statewide in the midafternoon, less than 1% of the potential from wind farms capable of producing 4,000 megawatts of electricity.