Developers will take bids from power generators, distributors and others for space on a proposed power line to transmit electricity from eastern Wyoming to the Colorado Front Range. Developers of the "Wyoming-Colorado Intertie" project will hold an open-season auction in June, hoping to collect commitments for up to 900 megawatts of transmission. Wyoming wind-generated power is expected to make up a significant portion of the power committed to the line, according to officials. If the June auction is successful, the line could be built and put into operation by mid-2013.

Much needs to be determined, but the potential for an El Paso County wind farm already has some elected officials and residents discussing what role - if any - local lands and workers might play in the future of alternative energy. "It is not really up to me; it is up to the property owners," said Commissioner Amy Lathen, whose district would house the wind farm. "Some are very excited about it, and in others we have had owners ask us not to do that. Otherwise, obviously, it is another source of power and it generates that power and revenue for those property owners. And that is all great." Opposition to the project could be fierce. ...Clipper's turbines are 2.5 megawatts, some of the largest on the market.

The state requires municipally owned Springs Utilities to derive 1 percent from renewables annually from 2008 to 2010, 3 percent from 2011 to 2014, 6 percent from 2015 to 2019 and 10 percent by 2020. More daunting is the possibility that federal lawmakers will impose carbon taxes to drive down reliance on coal. No one knows how much that would cost, but Springs Utilities could pay $150 million a year - about 16 percent of its current budget. That's a big incentive to find alternatives, and wind is one of those. ...The city's most recent poll showed 76 percent of residential customers surveyed are willing to pay $1 to $2 more a month to support wind. That's the estimated financial impact of using 50 megawatts of wind, which translates to 3.3 percent of the city's energy needs per year. The reason it doesn't account for more is that wind is an intermittent resource, and power is available from it only 35 percent of the time, Knopp said. Utilities' customer poll also showed 71 percent of the city's business customers support wind if it causes bills to increase by 1 percent or less.

A giant wind farm in northeast Weld County may be a groundbreaking model of how to generate clean, renewable energy while protecting wildlife occupying the same space. But it's also been on the receiving end of some environmental criticism. ...Ken Strom, director of bird conservation for Audubon Colorado, said he is disappointed that Cedar Creek's developers did not move all the turbines away from the escarpment. "In terms of the outcome of the hearings, I don't think (our concerns) were adequately addressed," he said. "I think they tried to meet a number of our concerns but they fought to move a minimum of the turbines." Strom notes that some birds will be killed as a result of having the turbines within their traditional nesting areas and others will simply avoid the area out of fear of the constantly whooshing towers.

Some components on Vestas Wind Systems-manufactured wind turbines at Platte River Power Authority's Medicine Bow Wind Project are failing more than 15 years earlier than expected, according to PRPA. Since the Medicine Bow, which is in southern Wyoming, went online in 1998, 30 major outages have occurred on the wind farm's nine turbines due to component failure, said John Bleem, PRPA division manager. Although outages vary, Bleem said repairs have led to turbines being down for as long as three months and costing as much as $100,000 - paid for by Vestas under its manufacturer warranty set to expire in 2011.

The Land Use Department has scheduled a Thursday afternoon forum to collect ideas for revising current regulations to provide more clarity and possible flexibility for owners of property in unincorporated Boulder County who might want to install turbine facilities. Among the current Land Use Code requirements that might be standing in the way of such projects, Oxenfeld said, are maximum-height limits for structures in rural Boulder County. Those height restrictions vary, depending on the zoning district involved. Structures in residential districts, for example, can now be no taller than 30 feet above ground level, which would rule out a rooftop-mounted wind turbine if the tallest point of the house is already at or near that height.

Clean and Green is one of many brokers in the United States selling renewable energy credits, or RECs, which allow customers with no direct access to wind power to buy the environmental benefits of renewable energy produced elsewhere. But at the end of last year, the Boulder-based company dropped its nationally recognized certification that lets customers know they're actually getting what they're buying. ...Clean and Green has no problem with the certification program, Executive Director Gerry Dameron said, but couldn't justify the cost anymore. "We called Green-e and said, 'Look, we appreciate what you guys do, and we'd love to be Green-e certified in the future, but we can't afford all the fees," he said. "We can't afford to spend $6,000 a year. Our company has never made a profit, and I've never drawn a salary, not one dime."

Walker envisions the country eventually embracing wind and solar energy. "It's coming, if people want to fight it or not," she says. For the moment, at least, some Calhan neighbors do want to fight it. And county commissioners seem likely to deny Clipper the permit for Walker's property. Jim Bensberg and Amy Lathen, reacting to comments from nearby property owners, opposed granting a permit for the tower at their Feb. 14 meeting, voting 2-1 against commission chair Dennis Hisey. ...Regardless of the outcome, that dust-up hints at disputes to come if and when Clipper or another company seeks to raise wind turbines in the county.

The Fort Collins City Council unanimously approved a resolution Tuesday night that will allow Platte River Power Authority to put two 60-meter meteorological towers on the city's Meadow Springs Ranch property to collect detailed wind-speed and other weather data during an 18-month period as PRPA investigates potential wind sites. ..."Wherever the wind is located, there is still a very complex transmission system that needs to be put in place," she said. "Putting the (meteorological) towers up is very preliminary to see if there is potential for a wind (farm) up there ... It's still far away at this point."

Austin Energy customers are one reason the agency is moving ahead so rapidly, he said. They're willing to pay more for renewables - so much so, the program had to close when all the energy was spoken for. When the program reopened this month, most of the available energy sold out within the first week to industrial companies, despite a price difference of 2 cents per kilowatt hour. ...He also noted that adding renewables doesn't change customer expectations. "They expect near-perfect reliability," he said, "and they expect it at a low price." Springs Utilities, which is heavily reliant on coal to power its electric plants, had planned to build another coal plant within the next decade. But in the past six months, City Council members have said they want to delay the plant or cut its size by supplementing with renewables or managing demand better. Councilman Randy Purvis, who attended Wednesday's session, said Colorado Springs customers are like Austin's - they've said on surveys they're willing to pay more for alternatives, such as wind. But so far, Springs Utilities has offered only a small amount of wind, about 1 megawatt, and sells it to customers who sign up to pay more.

While there are some small hydroelectric generation projects in Colorado, the bulk of renewable energy is provided by wind turbines. Under the law, solar electric is required to meet at least 4 percent of the renewable energy for investor-owned utilities. "The problem is, the wind doesn't blow all the time and the sun doesn't shine all the time," said Gary Schmitz, chief economist for the Energy Forum. "The purpose of the study was to look at how many of these will we have to build to get that amount of energy." The answer is somewhere between 1,700 and 2,000 more wind turbines that produce between 1.5 and 2 megawatts each, or roughly five times current numbers. Solar capacity would have to increase about sixfold from current levels. Power providers say they can reach those levels without much economic disruption, although requiring larger amounts of renewable energy would begin to strain financial resources, Smith said.

Xcel's voluntary wind power customers in Colorado will be hit with higher bills beginning next year. But regular customers will benefit from lower electric bills, according to Xcel filings with regulators late Tuesday. The utility says fully subscribed customers of WindSource will have to pay higher premiums - about $13 more per month compared with regular customers - because they aren't benefiting from declining natural gas prices enjoyed by regular customers. Fully subscribed customers get all their electricity from wind power. Also, savings from wind power seen in past years, when wind farms were replacing old and costly natural gas-fired power plants, are declining as wind farms are replacing newer and more efficient power plants. ...However, wind industry advocates said the current lower price of coal and natural gas does not reflect their true price. Also, those fuels likely will pay a carbon tax in the near future that would make them a more expensive source of power generation compared to wind, a freely available source.

A major blade manufacturing plant in east Windsor appears to be only a starting point for global wind-power giant Vestas Wind Systems. The company, based out of Denmark, announced Thursday that it now has intentions to build a research and development center in the United States. "Today, Vestas is a technology enterprise. If we want to be market leaders, we have to be present and drive the development, where the market is. And that is, amongst other places, in the U.S.," said Finn Strom Madsen, president of Vestas Technology R&D in a press release. The center is expected to be operating in 2009 and could employ up to 80 people at full capacity in 2010.

Despite Colorado's drive to develop renewable energy, the state will still need the equivalent of 13 new 350-megawatt plants to satisfy its power needs by 2025, according to a report by an independent research group with ties to the energy industry. The Colorado Energy Forum says even with additional power from wind, solar and other renewable sources, the state could need up to 4,500 megawatts of electricity 18 years from now. ..."There's probably a sense out there that people need to do something about climate change and with all the talk about renewable energy this year we're concerned that people will say, ‘Boy, I'm glad we got that taken care of,"‘ Bruce Smith, former director of the Colorado Public Utilities Commission and executive director of the group said Wednesday. "Even with those (renewable energy) contributions, there's still a large amount that we've got to get yet."

Rather than enjoying his role as an REC pioneer, Schendler felt increasingly anxious. In private, he pushed REC brokers for hard evidence that new wind capacity was being built. Their evasiveness gnawed at him. ...The trouble stems from the basic economics of RECs. Credits purchased at $2 a megawatt hour, the price Aspen Skiing and many other corporations pay, logically can't have much effect. Wind developers receive about $51 per megawatt hour for the electricity they sell to utilities. They get another $20 in federal tax breaks, and the equivalent of up to $20 more in accelerated depreciation of their capital equipment. Even many wind-power developers that stand to profit from RECs concede that producers making $91 a megawatt hour aren't going to expand production for another $2. "At this price, they're not very meaningful for the developer," says John Calaway, chief development officer for U.S. wind power at Babcock & Brown ..."It doesn't support building something that wouldn't otherwise be built."

Peetz Table Wind Energy needs to cross Logan County roads in 50 places, installing control cables that relate to the operation of the wind towers. ...The Logan County Commissioners unanimously approved the agreement with Peetz Table Wind Energy to allow the right-of-way crossings.

Claiming to be "100 percent wind-powered," as do local companies including Illegal Pete's, La Sportiva and Spyder Active Sports - which all purchased RECs - helps companies promote themselves as green and may make their products more appealing to the increasingly environmentally conscious consumer. But because renewable-energy credits are a relatively cheap and easy way to absolve a company's negative environmental impacts, even when other measures as simple as recycling or energy efficiency may not be used, customers are going to quickly become desensitized to wind-power claims, says Darrin C. Duber-Smith, president of Green Marketing Inc. in Nederland. "We call it 'greenwashing,'" said Duber-Smith, who also teaches classes on sustainability at the Metropolitan State College of Denver and CU. "There's going to be a big backlash to greenwashing coming up real soon. If a company is buying wind credits and then they don't recycle - come on, consumers notice this."

Now something else catches your eye on the horizon, and as you edge closer to the Clear Creek Wind Farm, you'll see white turbines with three huge helicopter-like blades dotted all over the landscape. Plans for those blades raised the concerns of biologists who aren't fooled by the appearance of wasteland in northeastern Weld and know how important the habitat is to raptors and the occasional ground bird. There was good reason for their concerns: When the first experimental wind farm was erected years ago in California, hundreds, even thousands, of raptors were wiped out by the blades. And the area Cedar Creek creators chose was prime raptor habitat.

Because of wind variability, there is no way of predicting exactly how much energy the wind turbines will produce at a specific time on any given day. Xcel Energy spokesman Tom Henley at the Denver office said Xcel adjusts for this variability with its Heat Rate Exchange Program, a centrally located part of the company's computer system. The program reads the input from Xcel's various power generating plants, from wind farms to coal- , gas- and water-powered plants. When the wind farms are going strong, the computer system will cause the most expensive power source to "back down." This will probably be one or more of Xcel's gas-fired power plants, Henley said. Coal-fired plants, such as the Pawnee Power Plant at Brush, won't be turned down. They are cheaper to operate than gas-fired plants, and also would take longer to get fired back up to full power when the input from the wind farms dropped. A gas-powered plant can be fired back up in as little as half an hour, Henley said.

Geothermal, or earth energy, is perhaps the most underutilized renewable source of energy. Whether using the earth's naturally stable temperature to provide heating and cooling, or harnessing extreme heat from deep below the earth's surface to generate electricity, the potential of geothermal energy has until now been largely untapped. But the geothermal marketplace is growing fast. Understanding the current technologies involved and the economics behind them can help building designers, business executives, and homeowners to take advantage of this renewable, clean and efficient energy source. There are two types of energy under the geothermal category, each markedly different from the other.