12/14/07 Bringing Renewables to the Community

Bringing Renewables to the Community. I'm Greg Martin as Line On Agriculture presents the Harvest Clean Energy Report. More and more we are starting to see local rural communities coming together to work on renewable energy projects. Paul Woodin is with the Community Renewable Energy Association where he assists communities. WOODIN: What I've done in a number of counties in Oregon is help them do resource assessments to evaluate the potential locally owned community projects that are available in the county and then help them as they start putting them together. Woodin says part of his job is looking at the infrastructure for renewable power. WOODIN: I look at transmission to see what's available for power generation. Oregon has policy in place that allows for 10 megawatt and smaller projects for community ownership and that's the area I focus in. Most of Woodin's work is in Oregon and the state has been very proactive when it comes to renewable energy projects in smaller communities. WOODIN: Particularly in the community environment. All of the states right now have activity in large commercial wind projects, they're profitable and there's a lot of activity. Oregon and to a lesser extent Idaho has also put into place policies to help support smaller projects. Developing community based renewable projects really need several criteria to make them profitable and viable. WOODIN: The most important thing is to one, have a power market that will support the cost of the project and then two; in the case of wind projects it's much more difficult for the small projects to locate wind turbines. Those are probably the two main focal points I'm interested in. Obviously wind regime has to be a part of it and access to transmission. There are areas where wind projects do well in remote rural areas where most of the people benefit. There's areas where there's strong resistance and they tend to be bedroom communities where most of the people that are in the view shed of the project don't see any benefit. Woodin will be one of the presenters in next months Harvesting Clean Energy Conference in Portland. WOODIN: Well I'll be talking about the movement in Oregon towards community projects as a supplement to the larger wind projects and some of the policies that have been put into place in Oregon. Some of the ways we've been able to work in the communities to benefit the large projects that subsequently have benefit to the smaller ones. 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