North Dakota's wind-power industry has grown dramatically in recent years and shows signs of continuing the upward trend. However, the industry also faces increasing obstacles in exporting electricity because of transmission bottlenecks. That was a message industry figures made in presentations Wednesday to the Empower North Dakota Commission, a new board that will help steer state energy-development policy, at North Dakota State University.

North Dakota ...has abundant resources in coal and wind, making it a logical place to produce energy for its less resource rich neighbors. ...Because the state is far away from the metropolitan areas that demand a lot of electricity, any extra power produced here will require a lot of transmission capacity to get it to its potential buyers. ... the main challenge is that many different interests have to come together and agree on terms before new power lines can be built. For even the most basic transmission construction projects, the different power companies that will utilize the lines have to agree how to split the costs of paying for the project. Also, some of the landowners along a route may object to the lines crossing through their property.

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) - A group of utilities in Iowa, Minnesota and the Dakotas plan to spend $200 million on a project in Iowa that would store energy generated by wind turbines. The Iowa Stored Energy Park would essentially act as a "battery" for wind energy, said Bob Haub, executive director of the Iowa Association of Municipal Utilities. Wind farms in Iowa, Minnesota and the Dakotas would ship energy over the power grid to the storage park near Des Moines. Xcel Energy and the federal government are experimenting with ways to "store" wind power in the form of hydrogen, but the Iowa project would employ a far simpler strategy that would include the following steps:

"Obviously there has to be a backup system because sometimes the wind just doesn`t blow or it`s very calm. There`s always a need for that baseline electricity," says Kim Christianson with the North Dakota Office of Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency.

BISMARCK, N.D. - Minnkota Power Cooperative will install $135 million worth of anti-pollution equipment at its Milton Young electric power plant to settle a dispute with the federal Environmental Protection Agency, officials said. The EPA says the plant is one of the dirtiest in the upper Great Plains.

Suddenly wind farms are beginning to pop up across North Dakota, and two new projects have been announced this week in northwestern North Dakota.