Can there be too much of a good thing when it comes to wind power? The Bonneville Power Administration is confronting that question this summer. The regional grid operator has a pile of new connection requests from wind farm developers. There wouldn't be much of a story if you could schedule the wind minute-by-minute. But correspondent Tom Banse reports a fickle energy source like this makes life in the control room more interesting. ...Twice this summer, they've been put to the test by unexpectedly large surges of wind power.

The foothills of the Blue Mountains near Athena and Weston may become the site for a future wind farm or two. That, at least, is where multiple companies are gathering wind information and attempting to generate landowner interest. "We're speaking to quite a few landowners," said Valerie Schafer Franklin, project development manager for Horizon Wind, in July. "We're not actually looking at this project being built in probably three to five years."

Baker City Manager Steve Brocato doesn't want Baker City to "start looking like Boardman." He's afraid a proposed Idaho Power transmission line that will pass through Baker County - and perhaps skirt the east side of Baker City - might do just that. Brocato told city councilors Tuesday the proposed power line "will detract from the beauty of this area" and believes its presence will spawn more wind farms, which he said are "detrimental to the beauty of the community and don't contribute to economic development." ..."If the county grants a wind farm, it should be somewhere where we can't see them and I would like the caveat that it has to be built by a local industry."

In Harney County, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and the county have seen a jump in interest surrounding the windy Eastern Oregon ridges and peaks near Steens Mountain as wind development companies look for different sources of the renewable power to meet state standards. Harney County has already permitted one wind farm and is considering three more ... But the wind farms that have either been approved or are under construction would add 2,400 megawatts to that total in the coming years, he said. "Oregon in the next couple of years will move from around ninth in the country (for wind power production) to maybe third," Torres said.

Wind power's intermittency as an energy resource but minimal contributions toward peak-capacity needs are further evidenced in operational data from three Washington and Montana wind farms. Monthly and even daily energy production vary substantially. Officials from NorthWestern Energy and Puget Sound Energy recently shared these and other wind-power experiences, including reserve requirements (challenging) and wind forecasting (improving). These tales come from the 135 MW-capacity Judith Gap wind farm in central Montana, whose entire output NorthWestern buys from developer Invenergy Wind, and PSE's 150 MW-capacity Hopkins Ridge and 229 MW-capacity Wild Horse wind projects in southeastern and central Washington, respectively. ..."The relationship between load and wind output is almost zero," the former council member told the current council. "That's a real issue for us. We continue to learn almost every day some things about wind operations on our system."

The Oregon Energy Facility Siting Council approved a site certificate for the 909 megawatt Shepherds Flat Wind Farm. Located in Gilliam and Morrow counties, Shepherds Flat will double Oregon's current wind operating capacity of about 889 megawatts. The company that is developing the project claims it will be the world's largest wind farm.

Wind turbines have become a familiar sight in the Columbia Gorge, where strong breezes and high-voltage transmission lines offer developers a tempting combination or renewable resource and customer access. The amount of wind power in the Northwest could quadruple in the next five years. ...While the tally shows a whole-hearted embrace of clean, renewable energy, it also exposes the limits of the transmission network, or grid. Unless more power lines are added, the Northwest won't be able to handle so much wind so quickly, BPA officials said. BPA says it has only enough space on the grid for just one-third of the anticipated 4,716 megawatts. ...These are not pie-in-the-sky proposals. Developers had to back up their request requests for transmission access with cash -- $1.56 million for every 100 megawatts they wanted to put on the grid. "Those who sign and pay, stay in the game," Mainzer said. "The rest are dropped from the queue."

A surge of wind last week jumped far beyond levels forecast by operators of Oregon's burgeoning wind-farm industry, sending more power into the regional grid than it could accommodate. For the first time, Bonneville Power Administration power managers began calling operators with orders to curtail power generation. ...The agency can sanction wind companies that disobey pullback orders. In this case, penalties were unnecessary, Silverstein said.

Columbia Basin river managers had a close call this week when they were forced to cut back on hydropower after a surge in wind energy blasted through the system. The surge forced them to spill more water over dams, risking the health of migrating fish. For the first time, it also exposed serious kinks in a plan that was supposed to deal smoothly with just such emergencies. ...Problems began Monday afternoon when wind speeds jumped far beyond levels forecast by wind-farm operators. BPA, responsible for adjusting hydro generation to accommodate the wind, realized by evening that it could no longer handle the sustained surge without increasing spills to dangerous levels.

But a doubling of wind-power supplies and an unusually concentrated surge in water levels have challenged this season's power operations like never before. ...The result: wasted power generation, excessive spill through the dams and a sometimes frenzied juggling of dam and transmission schedules. Several weeks ago, when an unexpected wind surge hit, Bart McManus, a BPA power manager, said he came close to telling wind developers he couldn't take the generation that exceeded the forecast. "So far, we haven't had to do that." McManus is part of an effort to improve the way wind power joins the system. Dramatic changes must be made within several years, he said. "If normal operations continue, we'll have a hard time meeting (electricity) reliability standards," he said. "We're busting our tails. We don't have a lot of time."

The Skamania County prosecutor is asking a judge to throw a wind farm challenge out of court. Earlier, a citizens group filed suit against the county to stop a proposed wind farm near the Columbia Gorge. This is the third wind project to run into opposition in the Northwest recently, despite public votes in favor of more renewable energy. ...Elsewhere in the region, local landowners have not hesitated to file preemptory challenges to nip projects in the bud. On the Oregon side of the gorge by Mosier, a proposal for a 40 turbine wind farm is stuck in the gate as well.

For more than a year, the Bonneville Power Administration has tried to put a pricetag on the flightiness of wind. Earlier this week, the federal power marketer settled on a figure: 68 cents a kilowatt month or $2.82 a megawatt hour. Those are numbers only energy wonks could love. But, they're significant because they identify for the first time the so-called "integration" costs of wind and because, eventually, they'll work their way onto the monthly bills of electric utility customers. The price-setting also speaks to the rapid growth of wind energy in the Northwest and the challenges tied to a clean but quirky resource. ...Until now, BPA's customers -- the public utilities in the Northwest -- have paid for these blending costs. But most of the wind-power goes elsewhere, to investor-owned utilities PGE, Pacific and Puget Sound Energy and south, into California. Now that so much wind is coming onto the system, the costs need to be apportioned fairly, BPA's Mainzer said.

Developers of the largest wind farm in Oregon expect to begin field work this year and hope to be generating power in 2010. Patricia Pilz, representing Caithness Shepherds Flat of Sacramento, Calif., gave the Willow Creek Valley Economic Development Group a project update Thursday. She gave the 49 in attendance at the Heppner Senior Center an eye-opening view of what the 300-turbine network would involve. Developers have been working on the project in Gilliam and Morrow counties for more than five years, she said.

The wind power hooks into BPA's main transmission grid where it's then delivered to electricity users in the West, primarily in Oregon, Washington and California. ...Wind is a highly variable resource. Those 1,000 megawatts of wind -- capable of powering about 680,000 homes -- weren't a constant force. ...About 20 percent of the time, wind turbines put zero to 20 megawatts of electricity into the grid, and 73 percent of the time they produced 20 to 1,000 megawatts. "You've got major fluctuations," said Doug Johnson, a BPA spokesman.

An energy developer from New York is moving forward with a project to build a gargantuan wind farm along the Columbia River in Gilliam and Morrow counties. If built out as proposed, Shepherd's Flat wind farm would be the largest in the Northwest and more than double the size of any individual wind project under development in Oregon. It would include as many as 303 wind turbines, some stretching 500 feet tall. At peak capacity, the project could generate up to 909 megawatts ...It would include 57 miles of new access roads, two substations, six meteorological towers, 17 miles of high-voltage transmission lines and another 103 miles of collector transmission lines. The application lists about 25 landowners within the site or within 500 feet of its boundaries.

By 2025, Oregon must get a quarter of its electricity from renewable resources, as required by a law passed last session by the state Legislature. On the Warm Springs Indian Reservation, the tribes are looking at a variety of ways to tap the reservation's resources to generate green energy, in part to meet the state's expected need. There's a new biomass plant in the permitting stage, studies on the prospects of wind power are under way, and the tribes are even considering geothermal potential on the reservation. ...in Oregon, power utilities that previously had enough energy sources are now looking at buying new renewable power ...

Looking east into Gilliam County and north into Washington, turbines are strung over ridgelines as far as the eye can see. And there are nowhere near enough of them. ...West Coast utilities and independent power producers are locked in a land rush to secure the best wind sites and the power they produce. Coupled with a worldwide shortage of turbines and a falling dollar, the resulting scarcity is driving up the cost of wind power, a burden electricity ratepayers will shoulder.

The wide open spaces and natural terrain and wildlife of Southeastern Washington are fading, and some residents would like the encroaching effects of urbanization toned down, such as a proposed project that would place 35 to 50 turbines on Rattlesnake Mountain. More than 30 people showed up Saturday at the Richland Community Center for a meeting to oppose a proposed windmill farm at the base of the mountain. ...Rick Leaumont, chairman of the Audubon Society's conservation committee, agreed that urgency in protesting the project is necessary because about 238 bird species have been documented in the area, and would be effected by the windmills. "Wildlife needs some kind of solitude, a place that is theirs," Leaumont said. "Any location on the mountain would be a problem."

A proposed wind farm on Seven Mile Hill near the tiny town of Mosier, Oregon is the centerpiece of the trouble that stems from development near a protected scenic area. The Cascade Wind Project, proposed by UPC Wind Partners, has thus far drawn serious opposition from not only residents of Mosier, but throughout the Gorge and beyond. The farm would be built just outside the Scenic Area boundary, and the 389-foot-high turbines of the 40 towers would be clearly visible from many areas in the Gorge, including Interstate 84 and McCall Point Trail. "This proposal is a slap in the face of the protection rights that everybody in the Gorge has had to live up to for the past twenty years," says Mike Rockwell, a real estate agent who lives in Mosier. "It's simply not a wise location."

By December 2007, more than 1,500 turbines will be churning out electricity in the Columbia River Gorge. Scientists are also concerned that since the turbines are nearing along the ridge of the gorge, canyons and shrub-covered rangeland, the natural habitats of the birds could be at risk. ...Wildlife biologists in Oregon and Washington state say the turbines are taking toll on raptors and other birds and it may limit expansion of clean wind energy.