Area schools turn to wind power

On a perfect fall Saturday at the end of September, on a corn-covered ridge east of the campus, Northfield’s Carleton College dedicated the country’s first college-owned, utility-sized wind turbine. Costing about $1.8 million, the student-initiated turbine will be capable of generating roughly 40 percent of Carleton’s yearly energy consumption. Similar projects are currently being planned at St. Olaf College, Gustavus Adolphus College, the University of Minnesota-Morris, as well as Wayzata High School in Plymouth.

At the dedication ceremony, state senator and chair of the senate Jobs, Energy and Community committee Ellen Anderson referred to Minnesota as “the Saudi Arabia of wind energy.” The state ranks third in the nation for wind energy development and production, behind California and Texas.

What has set Minnesota apart from much of the rest of the country, however, is the number of community-owned wind projects that have sprung up around the state. Wind energy co-ops are one of the very few ways that interested citizens can tap into the vast energy market, and their number has increased so dramatically in recent years that Minnesota currently ranks first in the country in locally-owned wind projects.

“Last session, a group came to me and pointed out a glitch in our legislation,” recalled state representative Ray Cox. “School districts were never actually granted the authority to own and operate wind turbines.” Since Cox and Anderson worked to pass new legislation that fixed that gap, academic institutions now seem poised to take a leading position in further integrating wind energy into the fabric of Minnesota’s everyday life.

“The technology has improved to the point where these turbines are so efficient,” enthused the Wayzata School District’s Steve Brantner. When it’s built, Wayzata High School’s planned turbine will be the first utility-sized turbine in the seven-county metro area.

“It fits really well in our mission towards education,” Brantner continued. “Plus, with revenue challenges, it’s a good way to save the public money. Energy costs are one of those huge, fixed, inflating costs; we have 11 school buildings and we’ve cut our budget by 11 percent since 2000. When 80 percent of your funding has been frozen flat and other costs continue to inflate – specifically energy – you look for every way you can to either bring in more revenue or reduce your expenses.”

Although only one other school in Minnesota currently has a turbine—Lac qui Parle in Madison, MN—such projects have been setup all over Iowa. “Schools that are getting involved are also looking at the cross-disciplinary aspect,” explained Lisa Daniels, executive director of Windustry, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit that works throughout the country. “It teaches energy decisions, finance, public policy, physics. In addition, in many cases a school district has access to unique kinds of funding – grants, low interest loans, endowments … The additional revenue streams are very important, especially when education as a whole seems to be getting the short end of the stick.”

Minnesota’s unique community wind industry got kick-started back in 1994. That year, Minneapolis-based Xcel Energy (then Northern States Power) asked the state for an extension of their permission to store nuclear waste materials on the banks of the Mississippi River, at the Prairie Island and Monticello nuclear facilities. In the hopes of alleviating the state’s future reliance on those nuclear plants, the legislature mandated that Xcel begin major exploration of renewable energy sources.

In 2003, the amount of mandated dollars for such research and development was increased to a minimum of $16 million per year, for as long as the company continues to store nuclear waste in its current locations. With Xcel’s recent request for 20 additional years of nuclear licensing, that money should continue for decades.

Xcel is also required to purchase wind-generated electricity at a set price. While both of these finances have been important for Minnesota’s wind industry in general, the state has passed additional legislation that has not only extended significant benefits to regional rural economies by allowing for small-scale turbines, but in so doing has significantly increased the public excitement and drive for wind energy projects.

There is currently only one federal incentive pushing for wind energy. The Production Tax Credit (PTC), just renewed in Congress at the end of September, is essentially a viable option only for large corporations with enormous tax appetites. While the PTC has an enormous impact on motivating very large companies to build very large wind farms, Lisa Daniels notes that “it was determined early on in Minnesota that the PTC was of no use to most average farmers, communities, rural electric co-ops, anything.”

In 1998, the Minnesota legislature compensated for this by offering a Small Wind Incentive for projects under 2 megawatts – the usual size for a community project, and one that can generate enough electricity for roughly 700 households. With Xcel’s guaranteed price and this additional incentive put together, suddenly small-scale projects were fully feasible for Minnesotans.

At the moment some of this forward momentum has temporarily stalled, for a couple of reasons. First, the incentive was only good for the first 200 megawatts of wind projects built – a number that was quickly filled up. Second—and more significantly—with the explosion in community projects, Xcel’s major transmission lines have reached their capacity. Part of this problem has arisen because technological advances in the past couple of years have produced wind turbines that produce an enormous amount of electricity from moderate wind situations. At around $100,000 per mile, the cost of building additional lines is also an obstacle.

Usually, however, the biggest stumbling block to the building of major transmission lines is that most communities don’t want to live anywhere near them. However, “the southwest Minnesota communities supported the transmission upgrade and expansion as long as they could have some form of economic development,” Daniels noted. “It set a precedent about how a transmission expansion could go through the public process and get approved on a relatively quick timeline.”

With that expansion due in 2007, this has translated into an enormous number of wind projects in Minnesota that are currently just waiting to start construction.
At the moment, wind energy makes up less than 2 percent of the state’s total energy mix; nationwide, it’s less than 1 percent. While Minnesota’s state policies have helped significantly in laying the grassroots foundation for wind energy in the state, most advocates agree that a sustained commitment on both the national and state levels are needed for the industry to begin to make a considerable contribution.

Federal waffling, explained Daniels, has contributed significantly to Xcel’s hesitancy to build additional transmission lines. “Right now in this country, it’s been questionable who will set the rules, control the transmission lines,” she said. “If you spend a lot of money on an asset, you want assurances that you’ll control that asset … If you look at what this country has done, it wouldn’t be that much of a stretch – there’s farm-to-market roads all over rural America, and that’s to get the crops to market. This is one more crop.”

It’s certainly a new harvest and perspective for schools and universities, noted Carleton student Emily LeVine. “We study a lot of history in school, because history is all we have to go on,” she said. “With this turbine we recognize that today is tomorrow’s history.”

As someone who had successfully seen through the student-led process of putting up a major turbine, LeVine had suggestions at the dedication ceremony for students hoping to convey a wind project’s feasibility to their school administrators, or for citizens hoping to convince their communities and government officials.

“Just keep trying,” she laughed. “If they won’t listen to you jabbering about wind or composting or whatever, just talk to them on their own terms: talk about money; talk about publicity and talk about money.”