In March, Fuhrländer AG proposed locating a $25 million wind turbine assembly plant in Silver Bow County's business development district. The company has now finished its initial proposal and continues to move ahead with groundbreaking plans for next spring. ...the company had been waiting for the Renewable Energy Bill to pass Congress, which it did this summer. The bill included more than $17 billion in tax credits for renewable energy companies and helped make the Butte plant "economically feasible," said Smitham.

Financing prospects for large-scale energy projects in Montana have dimmed with the crisis on Wall Street, but some that already are under way should proceed as planned, state officials and developers said. ...Gov. Brian Schweitzer told The Associated Press in a recent interview that several companies assured him their projects will not be derailed by the downturn. Still, he cautioned that the recent heady pace of development could end if the economic outlook remains grim and banks stay reluctant — or unable — to make large loans.

Montana has plenty of wind to make energy: It's everything else that we're missing. ...Mother Nature has done her job, but others have work to do, he said. Landowners need better data on how much wind blows for how long. The region needs more and better power lines to distribute the electricity produced. Power buyers need to be lined up, and the power sellers need to be ready to supply expensive spot-market electricity to their buyers on days the wind doesn't blow.

The first phase of a $500 million wind farm south of Ethridge and 85 miles north of Great Falls is finished and on the electrical grid, with the power bound for California. ...The wind farm connected to the transmission system Wednesday, said Claudia Rapkoch of NorthWestern Energy, which owns the transmission line that will ship the power to market. "Why not produce it in the state of Montana?" Rapkoch said. San Diego Gas and Electric, an investor-owned utility in California serving 1.2 million customers, is buying the electricity.

In the works for three years, a high-voltage transmission line connecting Montana's electric grid to Alberta's through eastern Teton County is on the last leg of a footrace slowed by intense scrutiny from landowners in the proposed right of way and from the regulatory agencies required to vet the project. The final environmental impact statement for the Montana Alberta Tie Ltd. 230-kilovolt power line was published in the Federal Register on Oct. 3. ... The power line would make possible wind energy development totaling 600 megawatts, 300 mw in each direction, from Great Falls to Lethbridge, Alta.

No matter where NorthWestern Energy Corp. proposes building a high power line through southwest Montana, it's an unpopular sell to people whose homes and land it would pass by. "Everybody else said no so you came through us," John Pullman, a landowner in the Boulder Valley, said during a meeting at the Cardwell School Monday that drew more than 45 people. That pretty much summed up the sentiment of landowners who are miffed that NorthWestern would propose a major power line through an agricultural valley. NorthWestern is planning to build a 500-kilovolt power line from Townsend to Twin Falls, Idaho, and has proposed three potential routes.

The state Department of Environmental Quality and U.S. Department of Energy on Monday released a summary of a long-awaited final environmental impact statement for the 203-mile Montana Alberta Tie Line, which outlines the preferred alternative and several others. Final decisions on the project by both agencies could follow in a month, regulators said. ..."We basically sat down with the director and went through this segment by segment, trying to pick which would best serve MATL's needs as well as the landowners," Hallsten said. "It's turned out to be a balancing act." The agency says it selected the preferred alternative because it provides the best balance between avoiding impacts to farmers while not making the project too expensive for the developer.

Aside from agreeing that Montanans deserve affordable energy, local candidates for the state Public Service Commission disagreed about everything else during a Billings debate Wednesday. Incumbent Brad Molnar, R-Laurel, and challenger Ron Tussing, D-Billings, debated the merits of wind energy ...Wind power is intermittent; it comes and goes with the blowing wind. When the wind dies down, utilities have to have a backup source of energy available, the commissioner said. Molnar said the backup energy has to be bought on the spot market, where rates are most expensive.

Florida-based FPL Energy, the nation's largest wind farm owner, is prospecting along Montana's wind-swept Rocky Mountain Front as it pursues an aggressive goal nationally of adding 10,000 megawatts of additional wind power to its portfolio. "The short answer is, 'Yes, we are interested,' but it's going to be a long time before we would be in a position to be able to put anything on the ground, if ever," said FPL Energy spokesman Steven Stengel, of Juno Beach, Fla. James Carney, an FPL Energy land specialist based in Bend, Ore., visited the area a month ago, when he met with landowners and elected officials in Teton and Pondera counties to gauge interest and look for available land.

The current production tax credit provides a 10-year, 2.1 cent-per-kilowatt-hour tax write-off. But the report argues a key difficulty facing prospective community wind developers is their lack of a large enough tax liability to take full advantage of the federal tax incentives, which makes it financially difficult to complete projects. Larger wind developers, meanwhile, used the tax break to shatter an industry record in 2007 by installing 5,244 megawatts of wind generation nationwide.

NorthWestern Energy said it is seeking permits for a natural-gas-fired power plant near Anaconda, Mont., and hopes to start building the plant next year. ...The $206 million plant would be used to stabilize the electric grid and allow NorthWestern to take more wind power onto the system, company officials said. ...PSC Commissioner Ken Toole welcomed the permit application. He said such a plant could allow for the production of more wind power plants, which require so-called "firming" power to fill in the gaps when winds are not blowing.

According to Dave Ryan, president of the Montana Renewable Energy Association, Montana is ranked No. 5 among the states in terms of wind resources. "There is pretty good potential here," said Ryan, "particularly the down slope winds along the front range." Ryan stresses that the secret to tapping wind energy, as with real estate, is location, location, location. "Wind is very microclimate-sensitive, which means it can vary greatly from one area to another. Just because your neighbor has a productive wind turbine is no guarantee that you will."

The groundbreaking for a multi-million dollar wind turbine manufacturing facility in Butte planned for this fall is now set for spring 2009. [The] Governor's Office of Economic Development said the project is definitely moving forward, however an overwhelming demand for turbines elsewhere has delayed the project temporarily. "Right now they are opening a brand new plant in Germany. Of course they are not a huge company, as a result of that, their focus is on that,getting that done successfully and being able to take care of three or four things going on.

Montana Alberta Tie Ltd. was granted a permit from the Alberta Energy and Utilities Board on Tuesday to construct the Canadian stretch of a 215-mile electrical transmission line between Great Falls and Lethbridge. The line is expected to spur wind farm construction in northcentral Montana. The EUB permit was the final OK needed for the Alberta portion, which makes up about 40 percent of the entire project, said Bob Curran, an EUB spokesman. Canada's National Energy Board previously approved the plan. "It means they can construct and operate the line now," Curran said.

The Alberta Utilities Commission's approval Tuesday of the proposed Montana Alberta Tie Ltd. line was the final Canadian permit needed for the 240-kV AC line, which would interconnect electricity markets and carry 300 MW north and south. The commission said the proposed line satisfied its conditions, including a process for negotiating disputes with landowners. ...Wind farm developers in Alberta and Montana have fully subscribed the line for marketing power both north and south.

Wind power's intermittency as an energy resource but minimal contributions toward peak-capacity needs are further evidenced in operational data from three Washington and Montana wind farms. Monthly and even daily energy production vary substantially. Officials from NorthWestern Energy and Puget Sound Energy recently shared these and other wind-power experiences, including reserve requirements (challenging) and wind forecasting (improving). These tales come from the 135 MW-capacity Judith Gap wind farm in central Montana, whose entire output NorthWestern buys from developer Invenergy Wind, and PSE's 150 MW-capacity Hopkins Ridge and 229 MW-capacity Wild Horse wind projects in southeastern and central Washington, respectively. ..."The relationship between load and wind output is almost zero," the former council member told the current council. "That's a real issue for us. We continue to learn almost every day some things about wind operations on our system."

A single wind farm located in a scenic setting outside this rural Canadian town was featured on a postage stamp three years ago. Today, the cumulative stamp of hundreds of turbines on the views of wide-open farmland and majestic mountains here is an increasingly sticky issue. "How many is too many?" asked Rod Zielinski, a municipal district councilman in Pincher Creek, 250 miles north of Great Falls. Last year, the district unsuccessfully tried to create a wind development-free zone in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains. Now it's proposing changes to its bylaws to address "cumulative effect." ...Some residents value tax revenue and jobs more than vistas, and vice versa, Zielinski said. Weighing these equally important but sometimes competing values is the contentious issue in regulating the siting of wind plants, he said. "Be prepared for these things [turbines] to be there forever, like the bank downtown," he said.

An estimated 1,200 bats, most of them probably just passing through Montana, were killed after striking wind turbines at the Judith Gap Wind Farm between July 2006 and May 2007, according to a post-construction bird and bat survey. The number surprised Invenergy, which owns the farm, as well as government and private wildlife experts. "It's killing 1,200 bats a year and that's a lot more than anybody anticipated," said Janet Ellis of Montana Audubon, a bird conservation group. ...The study estimates that 406 birds, or 4.52 birds per turbine, were killed during the study period.

However, not all Montanans are ready to raise their glasses. Among the skeptics is Ursula Mattson of East Glacier. She said she is all for the benefits of wind development, but worries about a potential downside, mainly "the negative impact of these huge wind farms right in front of the most spectacular scenery in our country." ..."We don't have much authority over wind farms," said Kristi DuBois, native species coordinator for Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks in Missoula. She likens the state's current level of knowledge about the wind industry and its potential effect on wildlife to what was known about the impact of hydro-electric facilities on rivers and fish when they were first constructed. For example, the state has very little information about migration pathways of bats, she said. Without that information, it's difficult to for the state to provide input on the siting of facilities to lessen bat fatalities from turbine blades, she said.