Farmers get spin-off income
By Gillian Flaccus
Associated Press
WASCO, Ore. — Farmer John Hilderbrand once cursed the wind that roars down the Columbia River Gorge and through this hilly community, damaging his wheat crops and kicking up dust.
Associated Press
That was before the same gusts paid for vacations to Panama and Costa Rica and allowed him to quit his part-time job in real estate.
Wind turbines tower over a tractor and plow tilling a field for a wheat crop near Wasco, an agricultural region of Oregon where wind-farm developers are eager to lease land.
In the past year, dozens of wind turbines have appeared on the rolling expanses of rural farmland in Oregon and Washington. The towering machines loom on the horizon, spinning lazily over acres of tilled ground.
Hilderbrand and scores of other farmers have made thousands of dollars by leasing their land to wind-farm developers.
"I'm quite well paid. We had a record drought this past year, so it was good we had this," said Hilderbrand, a third-generation farmer, who has five wind turbines on a slice of his 1,120 acres.
The project's developer, Northwestern Wind Power, spent $24 million building 16 turbines in Oregon's Sherman County along the Columbia River.
Once considered a fringe technology, wind power has in the past few years gained currency as an economic and environmentally friendly way to generate power.
In Hawai'i, there are several wind farms on the Big Island. But the concept has particularly caught on in the Pacific Northwest, where a recent energy shortage and higher power prices sent developers scrambling to tie up the windiest land in a latter-day gold rush.
The region had the second-largest growth in wind power last year, after Texas, said Randall Swisher, executive director of American Wind Energy Association. If all projects are completed, the Pacific Northwest will be the No. 1 wind-power producer in the nation.
Scores of Columbia River landowners, eager for the lucrative lease payments that developers offer, have signed on to 15 projects planned along the gorge over the next few years.
"There's no question that the market for wind in the Northwest is hot," Swisher said. "If you're a windy landowner ... you've probably gotten a lot of attention from developers."
Northwestern Wind Power is paying 60 farmers in four counties to build wind turbines on at least 150,000 acres. Another developer, SeaWest Wind Power Inc., has leased tens of thousands of acres from at least 20 landowners in Oregon and Washington.
Farmers and developers won't divulge how much money they get for leases, but industry experts said payments can exceed $4,000 per wind turbine per year. Some developers give farmers a percentage of the gross revenue reaped from the wind, while others prefer a one-time fee or annual payments.
In Sherman County, some farmers can expect a $10,000 sign-up payment, $15,000 for each turbine installed and up to $5,000 per turbine per year. That doesn't include the money developers pay to reserve the land — about $2,000 a month — to conduct wind studies.
Farmers usually give up less than 5 percent of their land to the wind farms in a 20- to 50-year lease.
"It's really a no-brainer. You sit down with a pencil and push it and you say, 'So we lost three acres, so what?' " said Terry Kaseberg, a third-generation farmer. "We're getting something for nothing."
Kaseberg said wind farms might be the future for landowners who find it increasingly difficult to make a living from traditional farming. He has leased three of his 5,000 acres to five turbines and is being courted by at least two more wind developers.
"If you don't start adding value to your crops, I guarantee you nobody's going to be farming here in 10 years," he said.
But Kaseberg and others realized that while wind power helped them in the short term, its long-term prospects are less certain. Hurdles face those who invest in wind, including problems with inadequate rural transmission lines and the uncertainty of the energy market.
A nonprofit group, Windustry, works to keep farmers informed about their rights when dealing with wind developers and maintains a Web site to help evaluate a property's wind potential.
Lisa Daniels, director of the Minneapolis-based group, said some companies will pressure farmers with a contrived deadline or sign landowners up before developers have financial backing or a buyer for the expected power.
"It moves fast and these are long-term, binding contracts," she said.
For farmers and developers already involved in projects, the transmission problems and vagaries of the power market are pressing concerns.
Wind farms operate in rural areas where power transmission systems were designed to distribute power, not to handle large amounts of power generation. In some cases, the rural substations used by wind farms to transmit wind-generated power are already at or near capacity.
A fluctuating market might also dictate how many wind projects will proceed, industry experts said. Last summer, when the Northwest was in the throes of a drought and severe energy shortage, power prices soared and investment in alternative energy sources such as wind increased.
