Four proposed towers in Yakima County may soon reveal whether the Rattlesnake Hills near Sunnyside are suitable for wind turbines.

Goldendale-based Northwest Wind Partners LLC has received tentative approval from a Yakima County hearing examiner to install four anemometers, or instruments that measure wind speed.

Hearing Examiner Gary Cuillier will issue a written ruling sometime next week, after giving a verbal go-ahead in a hearing last week.

Chad Ross is the vice president of new development for Northwest Wind Partners.

"We are awaiting our conditional use permit approvals for the installation of anemometers so that we could measure wind over the next one to two years," he said.

Information gained from the towers will determine the possibility of putting turbines on the hillside, he said.

Windmills on Rattlesnake Mountain in Benton County have drawn some controversy in recent months, but Cuillier wasn't worried about that yet.

"This is just to measure the wind, and I think maybe there would be some controversy later if there were actual application for those types of uses," he told the Herald on Monday.

Objections to his decision could be filed with county commissioners, he said.

Ross declined to talk about research Northwest Wind Partners has conducted on Rattlesnake Mountain, but he wants to work with Benton and Yakima counties on wind power projects, he said.

The Herald previously reported that the company did underground vibrations tests last spring, which may have helped determine whether vibrations from windmills would disrupt experiments at Hanford's Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory and the Battelle Gravitational Physics Laboratory.

Fred Raab, head of LIGO, said he's still in occasional communication with Northwest Wind Partners but hasn't received any information about the test results.

Northwest Wind Partners is a joint venture between Ross Management Group in Goldendale, and France-based enXco, a wind energy development company.

The towers are 197 feet tall and are about 10 inches in diameter, said Erica Mignone, a planner for the county.

Four cables will support each one, she said. Each tower would be placed on one of four 600-plus-acre parcels, three owned by John Top, the other by Joe Balmelli.

Balmelli, who lives in Chehalis most of the year, said he thinks wind power is a good idea. "They're just up there going around and around and you can hardly hear the darn things," he said.

The landowners are co-applicants with Northwest Wind Partners.

The acreage is used mainly for grazing cattle and would be negligibly affected by the towers, if at all, Mignone said.

"They're silent, they're passive, they don't require any external power source," she said.

None of them would be closer than a mile to an occupied building or a public road, she added.

Yakima County doesn't have any large-scale windmill projects within its borders and there aren't other anemometers at this time, she said.

And while the county is working on its own right now, the plan is to draw on other counties' codes so that if and when windmills are proposed, the county will be ready to manage the permits, she said.