Mainstreet Radio’s Leif Enger reports on the upturn of wind turbines in the Red River Valley. Enger talks with users, suppliers, and energy officials about the potential future of this alternative energy source.
Mainstreet Radio’s Leif Enger reports on the upturn of wind turbines in the Red River Valley. Enger talks with users, suppliers, and energy officials about the potential future of this alternative energy source.
LEIF ENGER: The wind you feel in Crookston, Minnesota, and you do feel it, hits from the west most days. It moves unimpeded over the North Dakota plains, speeds across the Red River of the north, and strikes Crookston at an average speed of 12 to 15 miles per hour. That's average speed, day and night.
SPEAKER 1: When the wind is blowing when it's cold like this, I say at least we're getting something out of it.
LEIF ENGER: John [? Brulliard ?] is maintenance man at the Merrywood Community, a home for retired nuns just outside of Crookston. From his office window, you can see one wing of the large brick building, several farm fields the color of dirty snow, and high above it all a modern windmill-- a steel tower, three narrow white blades, and a tail. The machine reaps from that constant wind about half the $500 worth of electricity Merrywood uses each month.
SPEAKER 1: Originally, we didn't think it would be feasible. And our first time through getting all the prices and everything, we rejected the idea of doing it. The thing that turned it around was a rate increase with the power company. I think the final decision was really based on two things, environmental concerns, future energy needs, and secondary was maybe a little bit on the speculative side in the sense that-- where are future energy rates going to go.
LEIF ENGER: Three years ago, when [? Brulliard ?] and the sisters bought their windmill or, more correctly these days, wind turbine, such alternatives were suffering a popularity drought. The tax credits that made wind and solar energy attractive to many consumers in the early part of the decade were gone. Federal dollars for wind research had been cut from $80 million in 1980 to less than a quarter of that. Then in 1986, a foreign-owned turbine plant in Crookston went bankrupt. And a group of local investors under the name Phoenix Industries decided to get into wind.
SKIP DELONG: Well, these first blades here are 7.5-meter blades. They're new blades we've been building to replace other blades in California.
LEIF ENGER: In the production room, thick with epoxy air, Phoenix quality control manager Skip DeLong points to a rack of wing-like turbine blades, Phoenix's main product. They're glossy, smooth, a lot bigger up close than you'd expect. Most of the 10 or so blades produced here each week are shipped out to wind farms on the West Coast.
Phoenix has grown from 16 employees to 43 in just 2 and 1/2 years. DeLong says that's because wind energy research, despite its recent low funding and low profile, has learned from earlier mistakes.
SKIP DELONG: The tax credits were responsible for very hurried development of machines and the installation and erection of turbines that weren't really ready to be out there and in production. They were R&D machines and developmental machines. We sort of tried to start running before we could walk. And we didn't know, and nobody really knew, enough about the technology to do it successfully.
LEIF ENGER: That's why, DeLong says, it was common a few years ago to drive through the countryside and see wind turbines standing still as a photograph, even on gusty days. The new turbines, he says, are much better, more efficient, hardier, and cheaper to boot. Still, all this new and improved technology doesn't mean we're on the brink of a wind power renaissance.
Professor [? Philip Durkey, ?] who teaches science and alternative energy courses at Saint John's University in Collegeville, says what drives public demand for wind power won't be a cheaper windmill, but more expensive oil and coal.
SPEAKER 2: Don't expect the bandwagon to develop for either wind energy or solar energy, other solar energies, too fast simply because I don't see energy fossil fuel energy prices rising as precipitously as they did in the '70s, when OPEC quadrupled its price in something like that in '73 and then in-- quadrupled it again in '79. Prices are only going to edge up. But as they do, that means that alternative sources of energy, such as wind energy, will slowly become more and more competitive.
LEIF ENGER: It appears that wind and other renewable energy sources are staging a slow comeback. The federal research and development budget is up slightly this year, the first such increase in a decade. There's growing concern about the effect of fossil fuels on global warming. There is Phoenix Industries, growing steadily and working on a new, more efficient blade design. And there are believers, like Sister Gladys Laurent and the others who live at Merrywood, in the faithful winds of the Red River Valley.
GLADYS LAURENT: People from out of town have frequently said, my, that must be a smart group of people. And I'm glad to see that we have people who have done something to capture some of the things of nature and make use of them for the good of others.
LEIF ENGER: Retired sister and wind power proponent Gladys Laurent. This is Leif Enger.
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