05/09/08 Developing Idaho Wind Power

Developing Idaho Wind Power. I'm Greg Martin as Line On Agriculture presents the Harvest Clean Energy Report. Wind power generation and farming seem to be made for each other according to John Steiner of Idaho Windfarms. STEINER: They do. The two items go together very well. When you farm a farm such as we do in large amounts of land, you don't quite harvest the crop until you've harvested the wind on your ranch. Harvesting the wind. Interesting analogy. Steiner is also a rancher in Idaho. STEINER: Wind power projects work good with agriculture for instance the project in Mountain Home it's on approximately 3800 acres of private farm ground. We have placed the wind turbines so that the farmer can complete his farming project and not change that at all. The wind machines take up very little space, it does not affect the livestock at all and it's very little impact to all the community services. As you have been hearing Idaho is embracing the wind generation technology but is still struggling with some aspects. STEINER: Idaho has greatly improved its attitude toward wind generation. I don't know how to explain it but in Idaho we have some constraints when it comes to transmission lines for wind projects in Idaho. However we are now working out those constraints and I do believe we'll see a lot more wind development in Idaho. Idaho ranks 13 in the nation for potential wind power. I asked Steiner how potential wind power is determined. STEINER: The way we arrive at potential energy is we take the national wind energy maps and we map that across our state to see where the potential capacity for wind power would be and we derive at a figure of how many megawatts could be generated from that capacity. While it is still fairly new in Idaho the industry is growing. STEINER: The door is wide open for wind energy. It's a very new field. There's a lot of capacity that can be delivered in wind power. It's being explored by a few developers now but the opportunity is great. For additional information on clean energy, visit harvestcleanenergy.org. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network. www.harvestcleanenergy.org