Companies are flocking to build turbine and blade plants in the United States, such as the one Siemens will build in Hutchinson. The amount of energy harvested from wind rose 50 percent last year to 25,300 megawatts.

For the people in the ethanol industry, it must sound sadly like deja vu.

Ethanol, too, was a can't-miss technology with the tide of history on its side. Today, ethanol is a seriously troubled industry filled with idle plants and bankrupt companies.

Will wind repeat ethanol's bust, as it has its boom?

The answer is: Possibly. It depends on politics, the health of the credit markets and the price of coal, oil and natural gas.

The prospects of ethanol and wind look reasonably bright, given the political climate and long-term environmental concerns, said experts.

The Obama administration included in its stimulus package $56 billion in grants and tax breaks for clean energy projects over the next 10 years, and $15 billion annually in the budget.

Ethanol's big tumble

A few years ago, ethanol's future looked bright. The price of oil was skyrocketing, and credit was flowing freely.

The federal government encouraged the growth of ethanol with significant subsidies and requirements.

A tax credit to refiners amounts to 51 cents per gallon of ethanol. It lowers costs and allows producers to remain profitable at lower prices.

In 2005, the federal government established a requirement that ethanol be blended into gasoline starting with 4 billion gallons in 2006 and rising to 7.5 billion gallons in 2012. In 2006, gasoline additive MBTE was phased out and in 2007, the government expanded that ethanol requirement to 36 billion gallons a year by 2022.

That appeared to guarantee a huge new market, reducing risk for investors. Investors big and small flooded into the market to build plants.

The result was that U.S. ethanol production virtually doubled in two years, to 10.6 billion gallons a year, according to the Renewable Fuels Association.

But all that success brought with it seeds of disaster, as speculators drove up corn prices from $4 a bushel to more than $7 a bushel in 2008, squeezing ethanol producers' margins, said Robert Starkey, vice president for fuels at Jim Jordan & Associates in Houston.

Then, in the second half of 2008, corn prices collapsed, leaving producers with purchase contracts at high prices. And gasoline prices dropped dramatically, putting further pressure on ethanol producer margins.

And finally, the credit markets collapsed, he said, killing any chance of refinancing for companies with cash flow problems.

The result is a classic energy bust: about 15 percent of capacity in the country has been idled, with many plants filing for bankruptcy.

Locally, that has meant layoffs for Colwich's ICM, which designs, builds and operates ethanol plants. ICM has cut its work force by more than 50 percent since April 2008.

Longer-term, industry consolidation likely will continue, as cash-rich oil companies buy ethanol plants at a discount, Starkey said.

Also, the industry is beginning to butt up against a federal limit of 10 percent blend of ethanol in gasoline, which the industry says is incompatible with federal production targets.

The industry is lobbying hard to raise that limit to 15 percent as a way, it says, to reduce carbon emissions and dependence on foreign oil.

The rise in gas prices in the past few months has helped, said Matt Hartwig, spokesman for the Renewable Fuels Association

"We're starting to see some of that come back," he said.

Outlook for wind

So, what happens to the booming wind energy sector?

Growth in 2009 will be down significantly from 2008, and serious potential problems loom several years down the road, said Rob Gramlich, senior vice president for public policy at the American Wind Energy Association.

Last year's rapid growth was a reaction to high natural gas prices, free credit markets and continued government subsidies, he said.

Also, many states have developed requirements for their utilities to use wind power, including Kansas. The state is requiring that 20 percent of its electricity be wind generated by 2020.

Wind isn't the same as ethanol, said Suzanne Tegan, energy analyst at National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Wind is free and unlimited, and the electrical grid -- one of wind energy's major long-term constraints -- is sufficient for the near future.

"Our constraint is policy," Gramlich said.

The industry probably will see the amount of energy created by new wind farms fall from a peak of 8,500 megawatts added in 2008 to around 4,000 each in 2009 and 2010, he said.

That will hurt wind power construction and manufacturing employment, he said. Already, there have been some layoffs, he said.

But the federal government is moving toward helping the industry.

The stimulus bill approved in February converted the wind energy tax credit that Congress previously had to re-approve every year to a grant program that will run for three years.

That allows investors to feel more secure and counteracts the drying up of the market for tax credits, he said.

But the subsidy remains the same: 2.1 cents per kilowatt hour. That lowers the price of wind power from an average of about 9 cents to about 7 cents, he said.

The next big issue, he said, is whether the government adopts a requirement that utilities buy at least a certain percentage of energy from renewable sources, called a renewable energy standard.

Last month, a proposal in Congress called for 25 percent of electricity from renewable sources -- wind, solar, biomass and geothermal -- by 2025. That would have kept the 2008 boom going until then, he said.

That proposal has been watered-down considerably, Gramlich said, and by 2012 the mandated amounts are either 6 percent or 12 percent.

He's hoping that amount can be raised before a bill passes.

Renewable energy accounts for about 7 percent of all electricity. Wind is about 1.5 percent.

Wind energy growth will be slow this year and next because of the credit crunch and low natural gas prices, he said.

But it's 2012 that concerns him. If no subsidy or energy standard is approved after that, the industry would collapse, he said, throwing most of the 85,000 people in the industry out of work.

But, he said, that's unlikely, given the political interest in alternative energy.

"It polls extremely well," he said. "Both Republicans and Democrats support it."

Ultimately, Gramlich said, wind energy is similar to ethanol and all other sources of energy in at least one way: boom and bust cycles.

"It's just the nature of the industry," he said.