PPM Energy, ScottishPower's competitive U.S. energy business, will begin construction this fall on the 75-megawatt (MW) Twin Buttes Wind Power Project in southeastern Colorado. And in Oregon, PPM just announced construction of the 100 MW Leaning Juniper Wind Project near Arlington, which is expected to be commercially operational later this year.

Area farmers and ranchers got a rundown Tuesday of how to deal with what could be called Oregon's new gold rush: The land grab for wind power as Oregon and the nation aim for higher and higher green energy standards. Christian Sarason, project manager with 3 TIER North America, a wind assessment firm, said the rush is on. "The gold rush is happening right now," he said. "It's the gold rush and there's going to be continuing pressure to prospect all over the place."

Wind turbine maker Siemens Power Generation will try to convince Oregon regulators today that adequate safety measures were in place when a 230-foot tower collapsed and crashed to the ground in a Sherman County wheat field last summer. Technician Chadd Mitchell, who was working high in the nacelle, the structure that houses the turbine's generating components, died in the Aug. 25 incident at the Klondike III wind farm. Another technician, William Trossen, was injured. A third employee, Dustin Ervin, sitting in a truck nearby, gunned the engine to avoid the falling wreckage and escaped unharmed, according to a state report. ...Siemens hasn't refuted the sequence of events that led to the collapse, but it objects to the division's findings of safety violations. "The employees demonstrated they could do the work they were trained to do safely," Siemens spokeswoman Melanie Forbrick said. "The actions that led to the incident were not actions that were related to the work they were performing." Siemens appealed the findings March 21.

An application to site a 40-tower, 60-megawatt wind farm on Sevenmile Hill, west of The Dalles, was deemed incomplete last week by the Oregon Department of Energy (ODE) and returned to its authors with a request for supplemental information in key areas of concern. In a letter mailed June 7, ODE informed UPC Wind Development, LLC, the company behind the proposed Cascade Wind Project, that it had until June 20 to submit a date by which a complete application would be submitted. According to ODE's Adam Bless, "no one has ever submitted a complete application on the first try," so this wrinkle doesn't come as a great shock to those close to the process.

Big investments in renewable energy could mean higher electric bills, hitting households and businesses during high unemployment and a weak economy. Oregon's biggest electric companies, PacifiCorp and Portland General Electric, filed for rate increases last week with state utility regulators. Both cited renewable energy projects as the reason.

An energy developer from New York is moving forward with a project to build a gargantuan wind farm along the Columbia River in Gilliam and Morrow counties. If built out as proposed, Shepherd's Flat wind farm would be the largest in the Northwest and more than double the size of any individual wind project under development in Oregon. It would include as many as 303 wind turbines, some stretching 500 feet tall. At peak capacity, the project could generate up to 909 megawatts ...It would include 57 miles of new access roads, two substations, six meteorological towers, 17 miles of high-voltage transmission lines and another 103 miles of collector transmission lines. The application lists about 25 landowners within the site or within 500 feet of its boundaries.

Tax credits are essentially subsidies, and subsidies should generally be temporary. In the field of renewable energy, subsidies should be offered just long enough to encourage the emergence of technologies and economies of scale that allow new energy sources to compete without public assistance. They should never be so large or long-lived that they amount to a giveaway, promoting the development of projects that would have been completed without tax credits.

One controversial power line project through the north state has been halted, but state agencies, municipal utilities and power companies are studying other potential new north state lines. Examining how to connect the state to developing renewable power, the Renewable Energy Transmission Initiative (RETI) recently released a report that shows a potential new power transmission line running from the Oregon border through Shasta, Siskiyou and Tehama counties and south to Tracy.

The Umatilla County Planning Commission gave the green light to an Oregon wind farm project in Echo Thursday night. The commissioners voted unanimously to approve a land-use permit for the wind farm's transmission line along Highway 207. The line will carry the project's electricity to a PacifiCorp substation at Hinkle. ...Commissioner Tammie Williams said she sympathized with those who live near the line, but Umatilla County needed the money the wind farm would bring. "It would be a disadvantage to this community not to have that money generated," she said.

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.

Avista Corp. will delay building a wind farm south of Reardan by at least two years, citing the high cost of the wind turbines. "This stuff is really expensive," said Hugh Imhof, a spokesman for the Spokane-based utility. "Why build a $125 million wind farm if we don't need it for another two years?"

The final of three meetings on the highly-controversial issue of wind turbines in the foothills of the Blue Mountains takes place Thursday before the Umatilla County Planning Commission. We've said it before and we'll say it again: The commission should recognize there is a "significant resource" in our Blue Mountains and its foothills. Frankly, we don't see how the commission members could decide otherwise.

A fortified Oregon business energy tax credit (BETC), which raises the maximum write-off for renewables from 35 percent on $10 million projects to 50 percent on $20 million projects, is all but certain to pass into law as HB 2811 before legislators head home from Salem. But a new BETC won't do businesses much good unless lawmakers also close a loophole that devalues tax credits in years such as 2007, when the state will pay out a business tax kicker. As things stand, the kicker lessens corporate tax burdens and, in turn, eats into the value of the credits for would-be buyers - costly both in millions of dollars to the economy and megawatts gone undeveloped.

Investigators at the Klondike III wind farm east of The Dalles believe the huge blades on a wind turbine that collapsed and killed a man were spinning too fast. ..."While investigation is not yet complete, based on the information we have so far, there are indications that what we call an ‘over speed operation' may have occurred after a sequence of procedures performed during the service inspection," said Siemens spokesperson Melanie Forbrick.

For more than a year, the Bonneville Power Administration has tried to put a pricetag on the flightiness of wind. Earlier this week, the federal power marketer settled on a figure: 68 cents a kilowatt month or $2.82 a megawatt hour. Those are numbers only energy wonks could love. But, they're significant because they identify for the first time the so-called "integration" costs of wind and because, eventually, they'll work their way onto the monthly bills of electric utility customers. The price-setting also speaks to the rapid growth of wind energy in the Northwest and the challenges tied to a clean but quirky resource. ...Until now, BPA's customers -- the public utilities in the Northwest -- have paid for these blending costs. But most of the wind-power goes elsewhere, to investor-owned utilities PGE, Pacific and Puget Sound Energy and south, into California. Now that so much wind is coming onto the system, the costs need to be apportioned fairly, BPA's Mainzer said.

The Bonneville Power Administration has initiated a rate case to set the price for balancing services for wind generation because of the rising expense of integrating increasingly large amounts of the intermittent resource in its control area. ... The agency must also be able to absorb the highest hour of expected generation because it runs the risk that its existing resources cannot absorb the added energy. In the case of hydro or pumped storage, the agency would have to spill water rather than use it to generate power or use it at a less efficient time. Therefore, the agency will have to assess a sink charge.

When the government's $787 billion economic stimulus package became law last month, the Bonneville Power Administration was one of the many beneficiaries. The federal utility wasted no time making use of its share, rolling out plans for a major transmission project ...The project now aims to provide service for 873 megawatts of energy - about 700 megawatts of that from wind power. That wouldn't have been the case seven years ago, he said.

Today the Bonneville Power Administration will install the first of fourteen anemometers to better track where and how hard the wind is blowing. The BPA, which markets power from the Northwest's network of federal hydroelectric dams, has struggled to incorporate increasing amounts of variable wind energy into the region's electric grid.

Baker City Manager Steve Brocato doesn't want Baker City to "start looking like Boardman." He's afraid a proposed Idaho Power transmission line that will pass through Baker County - and perhaps skirt the east side of Baker City - might do just that. Brocato told city councilors Tuesday the proposed power line "will detract from the beauty of this area" and believes its presence will spawn more wind farms, which he said are "detrimental to the beauty of the community and don't contribute to economic development." ..."If the county grants a wind farm, it should be somewhere where we can't see them and I would like the caveat that it has to be built by a local industry."