They won't be as tall as some; and they won't power many homes. But by spring, two wind turbines could rise more than 125 feet above the Lakeshore landscape.

The Zeeland Board of Public Works is planning to become the first West Michigan utility to bring electric-generating wind turbines online.

The effort comes amid a flurry of efforts to turn wind into electricity, from a proposal announced last week that would power thousands of homes in the Manistee area to much smaller efforts such as Zeeland's.

Utility officials in the city hope to erect two turbines at Helder Park in Holland Township. The turbines would provide energy for 20 to 22 homes -- about 180,000 kilowatts annually.

The $480,000 to $500,000 project is among two alternative energy initiatives by the Zeeland utility. The other is a $1.3 million project to use methane to produce electricity.

With state regulators considering a requirement for 10 percent renewable energy sources, Zeeland power plant officials believe the projects can meet that target in five years, general manager David Walters said.

Utility officials on Tuesday will ask township planners for a permit to erect the freestanding "monopoles." The application calls for a height of 125 feet, but the utility will ask to go higher.

"We'd like to go to 155 feet to get a little more wind," said Don Muller, electric operations supervisor.

By comparison, a nearby Holland Township water tower is 125 feet high.

"We see it as being a good situation, that electricity is fed back into the system that lights the soccer fields, the baseball fields and some of the homes in the area," Holland Township Assistant Superintendent Don Komejan said.

The turbines would be installed by Entegrity Wind Systems Inc. by March or April. The 6-year-old Boulder, Colo., company has put in about 100 wind turbines worldwide, including in Alaska, Canada, Ireland and Russia's Siberian region, spokeswoman Neely Quinn said.

Harvesting wind -- of which West Michigan has plenty -- is a fast-growing area of alternative energy.

Last week, White Pines Wind Farm LLC said it wants to place 20 to 28 large wind turbines near the Lake Michigan shoreline in the Huron-Manistee National Forest. Each turbine would be 420 feet high. If all are constructed, the project would produce 70 megawatts -- enough to supply 20,000 homes.

In other efforts, large and small:

• A Spanish company plans to erect three 200-foot towers to measure wind potential in Sparta, Chester and Casnovia townships by mid-July. Possible 2-megawatt turbines, 40 times more powerful than Zeeland's, could come a few years later.

• Another company has rights to 4,000 acres to develop potential wind projects elsewhere on The Ridge, an area of farmland bordering Kent and Ottawa counties.

• Holland's public works board plans to erect a 200-foot pole to gather wind-generation information at Windmill Island. The tower, to be installed by mid-October, is about 75 feet taller than the nearby DeZwaan windmill.

For the methane project, Zeeland power officials plans to build a plant near Waste Management's Autumn Hills landfill at 56th Avenue and Adams Street. The plant could start generating electricity by June 2009.

By 2013, the waste-to-energy facility would expand to generate 9 percent of the utility's electrical needs, Walters said.

"We have in excess of 20 years of capacity remaining" for the landfill, and methane gas could supply the utility's needs for 40 to 50 years, said Randy Dozeman, district manager for Waste Management Inc., Autumn Hills' owner.