On a drive to the Pawnee Buttes overlook in Weld County, the slowly rotating turbines of the new Cedar Creek Wind Farm spread east from Grover across the Chalk Bluffs, providing a decidedly postmodern backdrop to one of northeast Colorado's most famous natural scenes.

Rancher Janet Konig owns Grandads Homestead Ranch, which sits among the turbines north of the Pawnee Buttes. When the ranch was a bed-and-breakfast, her guests almost unequivocally loved the wind farm, she said.

"They sit on the porch; (the turbines) turn; they make a little sound; it's kind of awesome," she said. "Everybody thought we might as well be using our wind for something."

Xcel Energy, the Cedar Creek Wind Farm's only customer, is using that wind. And it's using the wind blowing over Peetz Table in Logan County, where more than 250 turbines rotate among the ranch houses. And the wind blowing across the Wyoming-Colorado line, where the decade-old Ponnequin Wind Farm provides electricity to Xcel's customers.

As Colorado becomes one of the greatest producers of wind energy in the country, new or expanded wind farms are being proposed all across the Eastern Plains and promise to bring great change to a rural and agricultural landscape.

With a capacity of 1,068 megawatts, Colorado is eighth in the nation - just behind New York - for wind energy production, according to the American Wind Energy Association.

That number is expected to nearly double by 2015 as Xcel Energy plans an expansion of the Peetz Table wind farm north of Sterling, CSU constructs its Green Power Project wind farm in Larimer County and other Colorado utilities consider their own wind projects, said Craig Cox of the Interwest Energy Alliance, which is made up of members of the green energy industry and environmental groups.

Larimer County's wind energy potential is high compared to some other parts of Colorado's Eastern Plains, across which the state has designated eight wind power generation development areas, or GDAs.

Most of those are on the eastern fringe of the state, but GDA 1 - home to the future Colorado State University Green Power Project on the Maxwell Ranch - straddles Interstate 25 north of Fort Collins, and has four gigawatts of wind energy potential, according to the Colorado Governor's Energy Office.

The wind farms near Peetz and Grover are part of GDA 2, which has six gigawatts of wind power capacity.

But despite all the wind's bluster in Northern Colorado, the greatest wind potential, according to the state, is in southeast Colorado, home to GDA 5 near Burlington and GDA 6 near Springfield. Together, those areas could produce 60 gigawatts of wind power.

Discussion of future wind power in Larimer County is limited to mere megawatts, with only CSU's Green Power Project on the drawing board here.

Though that project is facing challenges with its developer, when it is complete, it is expected to provide the university with 200 megawatts of wind power, a revenue stream to help fund research and a utility-scale wind farm that doubles as a research facility, said William Farland, CSU vice president for Research and Engagement.

The wind farm developer, Wind Holding LLC, was issued a notice of default by the CSU Research Foundation Board of Trustees in July, and has until Sept. 25 to comply with the conditions of its contract to build a wind farm, he said.

No other wind projects are in the works for Northern Colorado in the immediate future, but residents who live near wind farms built there in the last few years said they're glad the windmills are there.

"People come to our B-and-B and they like to come out to see the wind farms," said Louanne Timm, owner of the West Pawnee Ranch Bed and Breakfast west of Grover.

Birdwatchers, she said, are concerned the windmills might harm birds.

One of the bird enthusiasts concerned about the Cedar Creek Wind Farm is Ken Strom, interim director of the Audubon Society's Colorado branch.

The concern, he said, is that, as originally planned, the turbines were too close to bluffs and the Pawnee Buttes where raptors nest, possibly killing eagles and falcons if they fly too close to the turbine blades.

But, he said, most of those concerns were dealt with when the project was being developed, and now "90 percent of that wind farm is not a threat."

He said the U.S. Forest Service is helping monitor the wind farm's impacts to raptors.

Overall, though, the Cedar Creek Wind Farm is a hit among locals.

"I haven't heard many people around here who are negative about them," Timm said.