Northern Valley Beacon

The people of South Dakota, particularly farmers, will not realize any advantages from wind energy, even though the state is one of the best for strong, reliable winds. The reason is that corporations, seeing, wind as a significant part of the energy picture, have managed to bind up the development of wind energy so that they will control wind energy like they now control the production of oil and gas.

The guiding principle in the development of wind energy is not how quickly and efficiently it can be developed to free us from dependence on foreign energy. It is how can wind power be established so that consumers can be exploited in the same way they are exploited in their use of oil and gas. State regulators and corporations have worked together to insure that energy distribution from wind sources will be controlled by corporations.

Since July, we have been intensely involved in investigating a possible windfarm in Brown County. As an officer for a small corporation that owns land that cannot be cultivated and is in a belt where wind is strong and constant, I have been involved in assessing the land for wind turbines. It is not likely that Brown County will ever see wind turbines because the powers-that-be--meaning corporations of various stripes--have worked to insure it cannot happen.

A big question with windpower is the matter of storing and transmitting the energy. The way this question is answered by corporations and state regulators portends that private producers and consumers will never see any benefit from wind energy.

Last July, Deere & Co., the producer of John Deere agricultural and industrial equipment, announced that it was embarking on a program to provide financing for individual farmers to participate in the production of wind energy. Its credit division is prepared to help individual farmers put up a wind tower or two on their land. However, to make up a windfarm that meets commercial standards, the farmer would have to:

1. Be ready to invest in towers that can accommodate 80-foot blades at about $1 million a unit. Deere would help set up the financing.
2. Be part of a network that would comprise a wind farm of 20 to 30 units.
3. Have a power distributor, an electric generating plant, willing to buy the power.
4. Have access to a cable system that can transmit the power to the distributor.

What this would mean for our Brown County location is that we would have to find 20 to 30 farmers in the area to form a production cooperative. Then we would have to find a generating plant that would buy the power. Then we would have to get access to transmission lines to get the power to the generating station, and this is a big obstacle because energy authorities say that such an infrastructure has still to be built.

A further complication is the wind turbines themselves. The U.S. has only one manufacturer of these big wind turbines: GE. And GE's production schedule is locked up for seven years. The other manufacturers are foreign with Denmark and India being leading producers. We were referred to the company in India and found that we would have to have all the provisions for transmission and sales of energy in place before they would schedule production of wind turbines. This is reasonable from their point-of-view, but it makes the development of a wind farm as a cooperative venture a near-impossibility.

That is the reason that wind farms are corporate controlled ventures in the U.S. Corporations can forge agreements with each other while blocking smaller companies or cooperatives from the infrastructure.

Deere & Co. said that its financial backing of wind turbines was based upon the idea of having individual producers farm wind just like they farm crops and livestock, so that they could have a part in producing the energy used in their farming operations. However, their plans are obviously geared toward very large producers who can take on millions of dollars of debt. As we investigated wind power, we found that there are alternatives to the huge windfarms.

Smaller units are available that supply power to individual farmsteads through a number of arrangments. One arrangement involves an intertie system with existing electrical sources. Surplus energy produced is sold to the power source and then redeemed when power is needed.

However, one of the systems is more elaborate and more comprehensive. In this system, the wind turbine supplies some direct electricity to the farmstead, but it also runs an electrolysis machine that divides water into its components of hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen is pumped into storage tanks. During low-wind periods, the hydrogen runs a fuel-cell operated generator. The hydrogen is also used to drive fuel-cell powered farm implements.

While this latter plan is one that scientists and engineers and agricultural economists think offers the most potential for clean, reliable, and abundant energy, it is the one that corporations are most anxious to stop. It would make farmers and other users of energy independent and self-reliant. It would change the entire energy industry and it would require massive changes in the automotive and power equipment industries.

The storage and handling of hydrogen needs some technological development to make it safe, but engineers told us that prototype systems are already in operation.

The developers and advocates of smaller units (an energy system that could supply a farmstead or rural neighborhood runs in the $100,000 to $200,000 range) have said that the huge energy corporations are mounting an all-out effort to prevent the development of independent energy production. Consequently, cheap, efficient, and clean energy is not something we will have in the near future.

[We will be posting related stories on what is happening to wind power development in our area.]