All those sky-picking fans spinning over the southern Minnesota landscape look like the leading edges of a wind-power boom.

Not only is the wind itself free, almost unlimited and earth-friendly, but the technology to capture it is ready and proven.

What a way to make money, and help the environment at the same time.

Many individual wind farms now being built have realistic generating capacities from 100 to 300 megawatts (million watts). In comparison, Rochester's power consumption has yet to hit 300 megawatts during a peak hour on a sweltering summer day.

Region catches on as wind center

The tall turbines that catch the wind have been going up in gusty places in our state for years. The Buffalo Ridge area of southwestern Minnesota is acknowledged as a major wind power zone. Most of the air-made electricity from there goes to the state's biggest utility, Xcel Energy, which supplies the Twin Cities metro area.

In recent years, wind farm developers have discovered southeastern Minnesota. Large runs of Dodge, Mower, Steele and Freeborn counties offer brisk winds aloft about 262 feet up where the turbine blades turn. In fact, average wind speeds are only a couple of miles per hour slower than in the energetic southwest counties.

"We're finally seeing a lot of development in this area because the winds are ... pretty good, and it (the area) is close to where the people are and the businesses are that are using electricity," said Jeff Cook-Coyle of Rochester, who is development vice president for Nature Energies USA, a European wind investment firm.

But, it takes more than an active atmosphere to build a commercial wind farm.

Delivering power to users is problem

Delivering the wind-made electricity from the turbine to users in the Midwest could slow -- even stop -- some plans for wind power in this part of the Midwest.

For all practical purposes, transmission lines serving the Buffalo Ridge are filled, forcing wind developers to look elsewhere until more lines are installed.

Some followed the wires to the Mower-Dodge-Olmsted county area. "There's a transmission line that goes ... right up through Mower County to the Twin Cities, and development is centered around that line," said Cook-Coyle, who has worked on utility-sized wind projects for years. The 345-kilovolt line runs through a substation at Byron and then north.

But jumping on that line is not a guarantee. In fact, so many wind power projects are requesting space on the Midwest electric network that there is a waiting list -- and it's a long one.

For example, Xcel Energy has purchased 100.5 megawatts of generating capacity, which it calls the Grand Meadow Wind Project. That farm actually is about half of the Wapsipinicon Wind Project, proposed by a company called enXco Development Corp. The organizers filed an application for space on the transmission line on Sept. 30, 2003. That might have been early enough to secure a spot on that major electricity highway, barring any conflicts elsewhere in the interconnected network.