Three years ago, the only members of the media who called Mike O'Sullivan about wind energy were the ones from trade publications such as Wind Power Monthly.

And the only question investors asked about the subject - if they brought it up at all - was a simple one: "Why?"

"It was out of sight, out of mind," said O'Sullivan, senior vice president of development for FPL Energy LLC, one of the largest players in the growing worldwide movement to make wind a larger part of the way we get electricity.

Today, the company has invested more than $6 billion in the burgeoning field and owns the world's largest wind farm: Horse Hollow, a 735-megawatt power generator near Abilene, Texas.

"It was more of a financial decision and investment decision that now has become very trendy," O'Sullivan said. "Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good."

Whether it was from brains or a rabbit's foot, FPL Energy's decision to get into the wind business early has brought significant benefits, analysts say.

"The returns are outstanding," said Timothy O'Brien, co-founder and managing director of the Evergreen Utility and Telecommunications Fund, which owns 632,355 shares of FPL Group, FPL Energy's publicly traded parent company in Juno Beach.

The numbers bear O'Brien out.

Early last month, FPL Group's chief financial officer said the amount that FPL Energy contributes to FPL Group's quarterly earnings is likely to surpass that of its primary subsidiary and Florida's largest utility, Florida Power & Light Co., by 2012.

FPL Energy boasted a 2006 profit of $610 million, triple its earnings in 2005. That followed an earnings increase of 200 percent between 1998 and 2002, then significant profit growth each year thereafter, mostly fueled by wind power projects.

Prospects and problems

But despite its success for investors, wind power has some way to go before being a major part of the U.S. energy supply. Although the country has seen rapid growth in wind power over the past three years, the technology provides less than 1 percent of the nation's electricity.

That could change before too long - projects are sprouting up in Iowa, Minnesota, California, Texas, parts of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic coast, as well as the breadbasket areas of the Midwest - but industry experts disagree about how much of the national power load ultimately will be borne by wind.

Wind is attractive as a source of energy for several reasons.

It's abundant and doesn't require the burning of fossil fuels, and therefore doesn't contribute to the carbon emissions blamed for planet-warming greenhouse gases.

And, as green energy fan Gov. Charlie Crist says, it's free.

To others, however, the turbines are Godzilla-like creatures that are ugly, noisy and kill birds and bats.

The issue has split the environmental community. Although the emission-free technology is cleaner than coal, oil and natural gas, for certain conservationists the impact on nature is too severe to overlook.

"The wind industry has just bent over backwards to tell the world that turbines are benign structures and are not harmful to wildlife," said Lisa Linowes, spokeswoman for New Hampshire-based Industrial Wind Action, an online group founded in 2005.

Even though most of the wind farms are built in rural or mountainous areas, Linowes said companies then build three- and four-lane highways to reach them. That, combined with the possibility that wind might not be a significant part of the U.S. power grid, is reason enough to stop future projects, she said.

"It's amazing that the industry dismisses it," she said.

Those who dislike wind power are equally against being tagged with the NIMBY (not in my back yard) label.

"We don't support wind in our neighborhood, but we don't support it at all, either, and that's a big difference," said Eric Rosenbloom, a Vermont resident and president of Rowe, Mass.-based National Wind Watch Inc.

"There's a desperation for a solution, and the wind developers play to that," he said. "The fact that they are ramming these giant industrial facilities is strange and outrageous."

But Randy Swisher, executive director of the Washington-based American Wind Energy Association, says he's worked with the National Audubon Society for years and that energy companies have a stringent process to make sure large wind farms don't pop up in the flyways of migratory birds.

Swisher said the bottom line is that some people just don't want to see giant fans as part of their landscape.

"In some places, you get the NIMBYs, they kind of go ballistic without understanding," he said. "For the most part, wind is welcomed with open arms in most communities."

Local economies helped

That's certainly true of the area around Abilene, where Horse Hollow hosts 431 turbines across 69,000 acres of land.

FPL Energy pours $76 million a year into the wind industry in and around Abilene, and $115 million a year across all of Texas.

That money has built new brick schools with computers and enriched formerly strapped school districts, said Bill Ehrie, president of the Abilene Industrial Foundation Inc.

"They have a strong tax base now, so they no longer have to struggle," Ehrie said. "Wind is becoming very powerful out here."

Landowners who once scraped by with maybe $5,000 in additional cash from hunters during deer season now can get between $10,000 and $30,000 a month in royalties from having one of the gigantic wind turbines on their farm.

"The best picture is the wind turbine with an oil-jack pump and cattle on the range," Ehrie said. "A lot of us don't see the environmental impact, but others do. There's cattle standing in the shadow of the wind turbines, and they coexist very nicely."

Some experts say setups like Horse Hollow could provide as much as 20 percent of America's energy needs in the near future.

"We have looked at the resource nationwide, and the amount of wind we have is abundant," said Walt Musial, a senior engineer at the National Wind Technology Center, part of the federal National Renewable Energy Laboratory, based in Boulder, Colo.

But other major utilities and analysts contend that the United States will be lucky to get 10 percent.

"There's no way wind could get beyond the mid-single digits," said O'Brien at the Evergreen Fund.

To reach 20 percent, power companies would have to invest between $700 billion and $1 trillion over the next 10 to 15 years and build 400,000 megawatts of wind power.

"They expect to put this stuff on every street corner," O'Sullivan said. "Not every spot in the United States has wind power."

And not everyone can keep participating.

Small and medium-sized businesses are getting squeezed out of the market, and the ones that are in now are likely backed by tax-equity investors who are in it only because of large federal subsidies.

"Wind power in itself is first of all a real estate game, and those who can find the areas with the wind currents have the most profitability," said Mike Bedley, a regulatory and commercial specialist with Apex Power Corp. in Davie.

Florida is wind-poor

Florida has another insurmountable reality when it comes to wind: There's just not enough of it. Not even the breeze along the coastline is enough to support a row of turbines. When the wind does blow in significant amounts, there's usually a name associated with it - Frances, Jeanne or Wilma, for instance.

FPL wants to put one or two wind turbines in St. Lucie County but has been mum about the details until it can work out a proposal with the county and begin securing regulatory permits.

There's another challenge, too.

The federal government hasn't created any long-term incentives to make the market more stable for wind projects. There's a production tax credit - giving companies a break of 1.9 cents per kilowatt hour for the first 10 years of a project's life - which Congress recently extended through Dec. 30, 2008. However, even with bipartisan support, the one-year extension leaves the wind industry with a feeling of uncertainty, most say.

Companies tend to pull back on their projects every 12 to 24 months while waiting to see whether the tax credit will be extended and for how long.

"What does make those projects viable is the federal tax credits," Bedley said.

Everyone from electric companies to manufacturers is screaming for some sort of long-term policy.

"It drives the market nuts," said O'Sullivan at FPL Energy. "We're big enough to ride through it, but it's an ongoing part of our core business. We don't make investments of hundreds of millions of dollars if that tax credit is not certain."

The subsidy has proven crucial for FPL Energy. The company is a member of the American Wind Energy Association, which paid Capital Tax Partners LLC $140,000 at the beginning of the year to lobby the federal government to extend the tax credit, according to disclosure forms provided by the Senate public records office.

For now, wind power is on an uphill track, said Brian Youngberg, an energy analyst at the St. Louis office of Edward Jones Inc.

"Some people don't like looking at windmills, but over time I think our national need for energy will win out in most cases," he said.