Tilting toward windmills

Hoosier touts generating energy with community-owned turbines

Paul Gipe remembers one day when, as a starry-eyed student environmentalist at Ball State University, he was testifying before a legislative committee about curbs to strip mining.

Strip mining wouldn't have to occur, he recalls saying, if more people relied on renewable energy instead of coal-burning power plants for their electricity.

"Afterwards, an old politician took me aside," Gipe says "He said to me, ‘Son, that renewable energy stuff you're talking about - that just doesn't exist.' And unfortunately, he was right."

Gipe, 57, who grew up in Alexandria, took the message to heart, and he has gone on to become one of the nation's leading experts on developing one type of renewable energy: wind power.

So it pains him to admit that, at least 25 years after the legislator's comment, wind power still barely exists in much of America, including his native Indiana.

Gipe, who now lives in California, was in Fort Wayne last month to speak to two groups involved with the local stirrings of wind energy.

And he knocked the wind out of the sails of those who think Hoosiers might be able to escape spiraling energy prices if homeowners would only plop a wind turbine on their roof or in their backyard.

"It's just not economical for homeowners," he says of wind energy.

But that isn't to say locally generated wind energy is out of the question, Gipe says.

What he sees as a happy medium between giant, utility-run wind farms with scores of $20 million wind turbines and tiny backyard windmills holds great potential here, he says.

"There are three ways of developing wind energy, and in North America, we're only familiar with two," Gipe says.

"In Europe, there's a third approach that is very effective in which you install commercial-scale turbines developed by farmers and landowners and community groups or co-ops," he says. "That's what the Danes and the Germans have figured out."

Such community-owned turbines might be the same size as those on wind farms, but they are built singly or in groups of two or three and generally power a smaller, self-contained area before feeding a larger grid.

One reason individually owned wind power isn't a solution in Indiana, Gipe says, is that the state isn't one of the windier places on the planet.

Most of northern Indiana, including Fort Wayne, rates a 2 or second-to-lowest, on an 8-point scale for conditions favorable to wind energy, according to a 2003 study conducted at Indiana Tech in Fort Wayne. Mechanical and bioengineering professor David A. Aschliman and his students performed the study.

The only place in the state that rates higher is the Gary area, which rates a 3 because of breezes off Lake Michigan, the study says. The southern third of the state rates only a 1.

Gipe says a typical household wind turbine would cost about $15,000 to $30,000 to construct - and "it wouldn't generate enough energy to run the typical Hoosier house" - at least not the large and power-hungry homes of today.

"There's not as much wind on a rooftop as people think," Gipe says. "And there's a lot of turbulence on a rooftop, and (a turbine) may wear out quicker."

There's another potential problem to home-blown wind energy, he notes.

"Because it's a machine and it vibrates in the wind ... it can cause vibration and noise inside the building," Gipe says.

But in Europe, where free-standing community-owned wind turbines exist, wind power takes a different spin.

In Denmark, the recognized leader in European wind power and "comparable (in size) to Indiana," Gipe says, 25 percent of electricity is generated by the wind.

Ninety percent of that wind power is generated by the mid-sized community wind installations whose owners then sell - not "sell back" - their excess electricity to utilities, he says.

"It's a fundamental distinction," Gipe explains. "They do not consume grid electricity at all."

In Germany, 14 percent of electricity comes from wind power, and half is generated by community-owned turbines. Some Canadian communities are also experimenting with wind energy.

But for Indiana to follow those leads, lawmakers "would need to introduce a policy that would allow you to feed in electricity to the grid and get paid for it," Gipe says.

The policy is known as a "feed-in tariff," and it's what makes European wind energy profitable, he says.

If feed-ins were in place in Indiana, he says, groups that could become wind power feeders could include homeowners' associations, schools and colleges, hospitals, office or industrial campuses and even municipalities, Gipe says.

In Fort Wayne, he says, a $5 million investment in a community wind turbine could earn $500,000 a year, if tariffs amounting to 10 cents a kilowatt hour were in place. It would pay for itself in 10 years.

"That's what they've done in Europe that has made wind power so successful," he says. "We need to make wind energy a profitable venture."

In Fort Wayne, several parties are investigating wind power.

Allen County recently received its first inquiry related to wind power since 2006, when it approved construction of a 190-foot tower east of New Haven near the state line to test the feasibility of locating a large wind farm there. That proposal has not moved forward, according to land-use planners.

The new proposal, which was approved Tuesday, comes from Victor Wagler, a farmer whose property is at 16437 Van Zile Road. Wagler asked for a height variance to construct a 96-foot-tall wind turbine that, combined with a solar panel and his diesel generator, will run lighting in his house and barn, plus a refrigerator and freezer.

Meanwhile, at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, a group of students and professors are planning a wind power installation for a building renovation on campus.

Regina Leffers, director of IPFW's Center for the Built Environment, says the building will generate all the electricity it needs - and possibly more.

A few years ago, she says, IPFW students did a study that found it would take six large wind turbines to run the campus and that they could be paid off in seven years.

"As for home wind turbines, I was really excited about that idea until I heard Paul Gipe speak. I realize now that's going to be difficult," Leffers says.

One Fort Wayne company, Jensen Cabinets, has a small subdivision, Independent Wind Energy, looking into manufacturing turbines and/or parts in Fort Wayne, according to Brian Robertson, Jensen's vice president.

The company was a sponsor with IPFW of Gipe's talk. Robertson says "a big demand" may represent an opportunity for the company, which specializes in metal fabrication and sells other products internationally.

A Fort Wayne architect, Steve Park, has urged taller turbines, at 330 feet instead of 165 feet, to make wind power more feasible in Indiana.

Park is working on two Indiana wind facilities: at Northridge High School in Middlebury and at Culver Academies in Culver.

Gipe says that even in California, the amount of wind energy being generated is barely making a dent - only about 1 percent of electricity is generated by the wind. Many installations were built 25 years ago. Texas recently passed California as the leader in wind energy production, according to the American Wind Energy Association.

But California has made progress curbing energy demand, so the typical household in California consumes 6,000 kilowatt hours a year, compared with 10,000 for the typical Indiana household, Gipe says.

Increased electricity conservation, he says, makes community or even household-generated wind energy much more feasible.

"Wind isn't the whole solution," Gipe says.