Hot air: an Amazon-financed wind farm--a record capital investment for eastern North Carolina--revs the debate over government's role in promoting alternatives to coal, gas and nuclear.

• Author: Martin, Edward

Overnight, Chicago's McCormick Place convention center has become a small city with throngs gathering at the flashy displays of 1,200 exhibitors from around the world--Siemens, General Electric and the like. Energy-industry executives mingle with politicians, including a bevy of Midwest governors. At the May 2009 trade show, two men at one of the floor displays ignore the chaos around them.

Henry Campen, a Raleigh lawyer in tortoise-shell glasses, buttonholes Craig Poff, who mans his company's exhibit space. An expert on the power industry, Campen is representing his law firm, but he's also an unofficial evangelist for his home state.

More than 900 miles to the southeast, the emptiness is so vast that some outsiders find it eerie. As Campen and Poff talk in the Windy City, thousands of acres of young com rustle in the breezes of Perquimans and Pasquotank counties. The government weatherman who watches this area says the soft zephyrs are deceiving. Thirty meters above ground--about 100 feet--the air this time of year wafts along at 5 1/2 meters per second, roughly 12 mph. "When you're out here working, the wind blows all day long," says Horace Pritchard, a fourth-generation farmer in Pasquotank. "Then it blows all night long too."

Tapping that potential is why Campen, head of the energy section of Parker Poe Adams & Bernstein LLP, has come to the American Wind Energy Association conference. He urges Poff, who works for Bilbao, Spain-based Iberdrola S.A., the world's largest producer of renewable energy, to visit the big-sky country northwest of Elizabeth City.

Six years later, dust trails chase caravans of trucks as they crisscross 60 miles of farm roads. The upgraded roads were set in motion by Campen's meeting with Poff. A year from now, when the first phase is completed, the result will be 104 wind turbines that, at 492 feet each, will be taller than Raleigh's landmark BB&T building.

The $400 million Amazon Wind Farm US East is the region's largest economic-development project, surpassing 1998's $300 million Nucor Corp. steel plant in nearby Hertford County. It's the first commercial-scale wind farm in the Southeast. By purchasing the wind-driven electricity from Iberdrola--which then transports the energy to existing transmission lines--Amazon lessens the need for coal, oil and other fuels that emit more carbon dioxide. Perquimans and Pasquotank counties will bask in the spotlight of the nation's clean-energy stage-- and benefit from Iberdrola's property-tax bill.

But its wind farm is notable for another reason: It is on the front lines of the battlefield of sustainable, or renewable, energy in North Carolina, with a booming industry hanging in the balance. Revenue from more than 1,200 companies in North Carolina that build solar farms, install panels and engage in other renewables work will approach $5 billion this year, says Ivan Urlaub, executive director of the Raleigh-based N.C. Sustainable Energy Association. A Research Triangle Institute study puts full-time equivalent employment at more than 40,000. The state recently topped a landmark one gigawatt in solar electricity production, thanks to favorable laws and what Urlaub calls a robust clean-energy industry. A gigabit is enough energy to power a city of 60,000 people. Now, after mounting legislative threats, the industry is uneasy. "A lot of firms are struggling with the political uncertainty," he says.

Supporters and opponents wield economic studies like jousting lances. For every dollar in tax breaks, advocates say clean energy generates $1.54 in electricity savings and industrial development, and it has saved North Carolina customers $162 million in the last eight years, according to the RTI study. No, argues a researcher at Utah State University's Institute of Political Economy, renewable electricity has cost Tar Heel residential ratepayers an extra $149 million, partly through a surcharge that averages about 80 cents a month per customer, according to Duke Energy Corp. spokesman Randy Wheeless.

Figures aside, the widening rifts are based as much on politics as economics, and paradoxes abound, even among environmentalists. One faction touts wind, sun, animal waste, geothermal and other sources as alternatives to coal, natural gas and nuclear power. Contrarian counterparts cite threats to wildlife, the impact of...