Just east of the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area on the Oregon-Washington border, one can't drive down I-84 without noticing turbine after turbine peeking out from the crest of the hills. But even as wind farms in Oregon and Washington set a new record for power production in August 2009, renewable energy developers are looking to lay claim on the latest prime spots for power projects. While solar and other renewable energy companies are anxious to take advantage of federal grants, state tax credits and plentiful opportunities thanks to state renewable energy portfolios, gaining access to suitable land is tougher than ever.

Politicians are straining to convince people the government is stimulating the economy. In Oregon, where lawmakers are spending $176 million to supplement the federal stimulus, Democrats are taking credit for a remarkable feat: creating 3,236 new jobs in the program's first three months. But those jobs lasted on average only 35 hours, or about one workweek.

Putting up towers and turbines, building roads between them and hooking them to the power grid can be expensive. Offering a little leeway on the front end in the form of tax relief - up to about $10 million until recently - has helped Oregon bring in the farms during the past decade.

For decades, most of the nation's renewable power has come from dams, which supplied cheap electricity without requiring fossil fuels. But the federal agencies running the dams often compiled woeful track records on other environmental issues. ...Yet the shift of emphasis at the dam agencies is proving far from simple. It could end up pitting one environmental goal against another.

The Bureau of Land Management is using some stimulus money to study the effect of wind farms on a dwindling sage grouse population in Central Oregon. BLM spokesman Michael Campbell said the agency hopes to lessen or eliminate any impact. The agency would hire people to tag sage grouse in areas where wind farms are proposed and track the birds' movements to figure out where turbines could be located. Contracts have not yet been awarded.

We continue our energy series, the Switch, with a look at the one renewable source of energy that started booming a decade ago: wind power. Companies like GE and Seimens make turbines; the federal government offers utilities big financial incentives to build wind farms; and as Kristian Foden-Vencil reports, hundreds of windmills have gone up in Oregon alone.

Rep. Greg Walden said Saturday that an energy bill hailed by the Obama administration as a "jobs bill" is "an Oregon job killer." Speaking to TV cameras in front of White City's Biomass One site for recycling wood waste, The 2nd District Republican denounced the bill's definition of renewable energy.

Vestas Wind Systems AS, the world's leading wind-turbine maker, may reduce jobs if the rate of new orders doesn't improve in the next 11 weeks, Chief Executive Ditlev Engel said. Orders from the U.S., the largest wind-turbine market, "came to a standstill" after the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in September tightened credit for wind-farm developers, Engel said Wednesday in New York after announcing that fourth-quarter profit doubled.

Congress' failure to include a renewable energy tax credit in the much-touted energy bill passed late last year could chill wind-farm development in the Columbia River Gorge and elsewhere, industry and utility leaders say. For several years, wind developers have taken advantage of a tax credit based on the amount of energy a project generates. That incentive is to expire at the end of this year. "Manufacturers need to plan far beyond that," said Ditlev Engel, chief executive of the world's largest wind turbine supplier, Vestas Wind Systems of Denmark. Engel was in Portland Wednesday to address the Portland Business Alliance. The production tax credit has helped fuel three record-breaking years of wind-farm development. The American Wind Energy Association says 5,244 megawatts of wind energy were installed last year, more than double the previous two years combined.

Looking east into Gilliam County and north into Washington, turbines are strung over ridgelines as far as the eye can see. And there are nowhere near enough of them. ...West Coast utilities and independent power producers are locked in a land rush to secure the best wind sites and the power they produce. Coupled with a worldwide shortage of turbines and a falling dollar, the resulting scarcity is driving up the cost of wind power, a burden electricity ratepayers will shoulder.

PORTLAND Oregon Wind Corp. and Portland State University are testing four 40- watt vertical axis wind turbines at the school's campus this summer. The 40-inch-tall Helyx wind turbines built by Portland-based Oregon Wind Corp. can generate electricity for about $1.50 per watt, according to the company's co-founder, Toby Kinkaid. "That's pretty close to what the big boys can achieve," he says. Kincaid plans to sell the machines for $60 each by the end of 2007. One Helyx operating at full capacity can only illuminate one light bulb, but a shelving unit dubbed the WindWall can pool the energy generated from up to 36 turbines, according to Kinkaid. Oregon Wind Corp. says it needs $500,000 in equipment to enable mass production of the fiberglass blades.

SALEM - State lawmakers today will take up a proposal to require that a quarter of Oregon's electricity comes from wind turbines, solar panels and other renewable energy technologies. The proposal for 25 percent of the state's electricity to come from renewable sources by 2025 is one of Gov. Ted Kulongoski's top priorities for the session. The Senate Environment and Natural Resources Committee has scheduled the first hearing today on his plan, Senate Bill 373. In a briefing with reporters, Kulongoski said he felt upbeat about the bill's chances. About two dozen states already have renewable energy standards, including California and Washington. But Kulongoski said Oregon's would be the second-most ambitious in the country. The bill calls for intermediate standards to be met along the way to the "25 by '25" target. By 2010, each utility must meet a 5 percent threshold. That would rise to 15 percent by 2015 and to 20 percent by 2020.

An Oregon State University engineering professor has helped design a new “micro” wind turbine that can be mounted along the edges of building roofs to generate electricity. The new small-scale turbine design could revolutionize the wind power industry, with rows of small rooftop turbines enabling power generation in urban and suburban settings, instead of only from large, towering, traditional wind farms in rural areas.

Power resource planners in the Northwest say several factors could buffet the region's wind farm boom. Rising construction costs, strained transmission lines and a limited ability to blend wind's fickle nature with more controllable generation, such as hydro-power, are among the biggest concerns. "Wind is a complex variable," said Jeff King, a senior analyst for the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, a regional organization created by Congress to balance power production and wildlife protection in the Columbia Basin. "It's only very roughly predictable."

Editor's Note Presented on October 20th during the 2006 Electric Market Forecasting Conference sponsored by EPIS, Inc. this addresses, in part, the issue of whether emissions are reduced with the addition of industrial wind energy. This is a large pdf file (8.55MB) and is available via the weblink below.

So why are wind companies not being prosecuted for killing birds? Rob Lee, now retired, was one of the Fish and Wildlife Service's lead law-enforcement investigators on the problem of bird kills in Western oil fields. Lee said that he doesn't expect to see any prosecutions because the wind industry is politically correct. This suggests a double standard. In protecting America's wildlife, federal law-enforcement officials are turning their backs on the harm done by "green" energy.

The Oregon Trail is in the way of a gold rush that will demolish part of our history and leave us poorer. The Oregon Economic and Community Development Department, now operating under the new moniker Oregon Business, was commanded by statute to promote the Oregon Trail as a major tourist attraction consistent with maintaining the historical integrity of the Oregon Trail. ...The gold rush that threatens the Oregon Trail is "free" and "green" energy from the wind. If only it were so.

It is well known that raptors commonly fly at an altitude that puts them at particular risk for collision with wind power blades. Proper siting was touted as the key to green wind power. So why is wind power being sited in an Audubon Important Bird Area, and why is that Important Bird Area slated for border to border wind power development? The answer is simple. Instead of proper planning, Northwest wind power is being allowed to develop wherever infrastructure is available and politicians are agreeable.

Whether the reports of health hazards are true or not is almost irrelevant. Just the fact that many people are truly concerned about the potential health effects of living near a wind farm, or the electromagnetic radiation from high voltage electrical wires, is reason enough to try to avoid buying a property that is close to power lines. It's a simple law of economics: As demand for a product goes down, so does its price. When you have a certain number of people avoiding a certain property, for whatever reason, the price of that property will be negatively affected.

Call me crazy, but maybe it would be prudent to stop mandating (not to mention subsidizing and incentivizing) massive wind-energy development and start working out the kinks in wind-energy technology while we figure out what role wind should play in the energy-supply mix. Maybe examine whether wind energy will ever be a reliable, affordable energy source before Congress and the various state legislatures declare it to be a winner, without knowing how things will play out. (Think ethanol.) If not, salmon are the least of our worries.