Hopes and prairies: wind ascends power hierarchy on Colorado's Eastern Plains.

AuthorBest, Allen
PositionENERGY REPORT

You expect scenes of harvest on Colorado's eastern prairies, such as the blue New Holland tractor disking the brown earth, rows of green corn in the distance, their tassels flipping in the breeze, waiting to be sliced into silage for cattle feed.

But what captures your eyes now as you drive north from Burlington, a town of 4,000 people located along Interstate 70 near the Kansas border, are the white wind turbines towering overhead, 86 of them in the Carousel Wind Farm. The $240 million project is the newest among Colorado's 23 wind farms.

Colorado barely had enough wind generation to count in the year 2000. Last year, though, wind produced 14.11 percent of the state's electricity, dwarfing hydroelectricity (2.83 percent) and solar (0.55 percent). And more wind is coming.

Utilities used to buy wind power to comply with renewable portfolio mandates. Now, they're buying wind generation because it's cheap. Costs dropped 66 percent from 2009 through 2014, according to a recent U.S. Department of Energy study. This cost reduction has been driven by improved siting techniques, but also larger turbines. Average height of turbines grew 41 percent in the last 15 years. Blades from tip to tip more than doubled. At Rush Creek, Xcel's planned behemoth project along 1-70 east of Limon, the maximum height of turbines will be 135 meters (443 feet). Colorado's tallest building, the 56-story Republic Plaza in Denver, is 218 meters (714 feet).

Who would have imagined?

The Great Plains have a new and powerful economic dynamic. To be clear, it's still farm country, with scattered oil and gas production. Now there's renewable generation, too. Colorado has 1,879 wind turbines, nearly all of them east of 1-25. The renewable generation has steadied local economies. "Because of hail and drought, there's no guarantee you are going to have a crop every year. But the wind blows every day," says John Buol, who has seven turbines of the Carousel project on his 3,000 acres of land north of Burlington. He will soon get royalty payments based on electricity generation from the turbines.

In Sterling, about 140 miles north of Burlington, Brad Hofmeister, appraisal analyst for Logan County, reports that 10 percent to 15 percent of the county's total tax assessment is directly related to the county's 227 turbines. The local Northeastern Junior College has a program to train wind-turbine service technicians, a job category that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says will outpace health care and technology in demand growth through 2024. Technicians, according to the college, start at $18 to $22 per hour on average.

Eighty percent of...

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