If they are going to "talk the talk," it is time to "walk the walk." The foreign windmill promoters that are covering Montana like a swarm of locusts will be more than happy to sign you up for a giant industrial wind plant (subsidized by taxpayers) that you expect the rest of us to live with.

Small Montana wind energy producers are challenging NWE's proposal to charge them more for "integrating" their product into the portfolio. The wind producers contend that the costs NWE wants them to pay are more than what "integrating" their electricity actually costs. Further, the wind energy producers say NWE's proposed pricing could put them out of business. NWE has said that its customers will have to pay these costs if the wind energy producers don't. In its portfolio proposals, NWE assumes a carbon tax will be implemented in the future, making coal a less appealing source than in the past. The proposed portfolio also assumes the customer will increase energy conservation.

These towers will forever change the scenic value of the Musselshell River Valley. They will have a devastating effect on land values, adversely affect wildlife, create high noise levels and block the beauty of the night sky with red strobe lights. Wind power is being "sold" as green power. It is not green power. The United States Department of Energy study completed in 2007 indicates wind farms operate at 21 percent of capacity. That simply means other sources of conventional power, such as coal-fired, nuclear or natural gas, must back up the power generated by these turbines. ...Will we change from the Big Sky Country to The Big Tower Country just so a foreign utility and a couple landowners can line their pockets?

The message gets repetitious: There needs to be more electrical power transmission capacity in and from North Dakota ... more transmission capacity ... more ... So, isn't the answer as simple as stringing a bunch of lines? The fact is, no. The power has to have somewhere to go and must travel by an extraordinarily complex network of technology. For our area it's managed by a strange entity called the Midwest Independent Transmission System Operator. ...The snag is the process of hooking in a new power source. ...Midwest's queue has 224 wind projects, a 64 percent increase in one year. Not all will make it through the process; actually only 32 percent will end up connecting and producing. About 40 percent of requests drop out before even commencing the required FERC study. And 10 percent of those in the queue don't help matters at all, because they're just sitting on approvals ...

Environmental groups are not concerned with energy costs to low-, fixed- or middle-income citizens. Their only mission is to ban coal use. They don't care if the new coal steam plants are very clean. They don't care that by capturing half of the carbon dioxide, a coal plant is comparable to a gas plant. Environmental groups are insisting that electric generating plants be natural gas or a wind/natural gas combination. By the way, wind coupled with natural gas is more expensive than straight natural gas generation and always will be.

As we look to increase the use of wind power, some discussion about the suitability of specific sites for wind development makes sense. Just as there are a lot of opportunities in the state for wind energy development, there are also some places that are better left as they are today. That's the crux of the concern that The Wilderness Society and other conservation and sportsmen organizations expressed concerning a proposed wind project in Valley County. A Texas-based company, Wind Hunter, proposed developing a 20,000-acre project on Bureau of Land Management, state and private land that included 334 turbines and a new 34-mile transmission line. The project was proposed for development immediately adjacent to one of the most remote, wild, and picturesque places left on America's northern prairie, the Bitter Creek Wilderness Study Area/Area of Critical Environmental Concern.

Brad Molnar was the only public service commissioner with the courage to vote against this feel-good idea, and he has been proven right. We need four more commissioners just like him.

Jan Falstad said that wind had gone from being "technologically challenged and too expensive - to being a popular and mandated goal." Perhaps more accurately, it should have read, "Wind has gone from being technically challenged and too expensive - to being technically challenged, mandated and taxpayer subsidized."

A staffer at the Helena-based Montana Environmental Information Center recently professed mystification over state energy policy. “I don't know why we're not putting as much energy behind wind development as we are to coal development,” he said. The answer is simple. Most people want the lights to come on when they flip the switch, and they don't want to go broke when they do.

...because of reliability problems, wind power must be supported by more traditional and reliable sources of generation, such as hydroelectric, coal-fired, nuclear, and natural gas generation. Wind generation is intermittent and sometimes poses challenges to load schedulers who manage the transmission grid systems.

And, while I agree with Mr. Shutkin that wind power, as a source of clean and renewable energy, should and will play a role in our future energy portfolio, its role will necessarily be small because of its fundamental limitation as an energy source: wind power is ‘intermittent’, i.e. it provides energy only when the wind blows, and, as such, wind power is a source of supplemental, not ‘base load’ energy.