Farmers along Columbia Gorge now reaping the wind

Published 10:28 pm Monday, October 18, 2010

BICKLETON — At the Bluebird Inn, social center for this unincorporated town of about 90 residents, old-timers still spin stories of eastern Klickitat County’s glory days as a Wild West outpost. Washington’s oldest continuously operating saloon, built in 1882, survived a series of fires that ravaged the downtown area. It still has its original plank floors and vintage pool table.

In the old days, the tavern hosted all-day poker games and livestock branding parties and even had a barbershop. Women weren’t allowed inside until the late 1960s.

But these days, the chatter at the Bluebird Inn is likely to be about the latest out-of-town energy company looking to lease land from local farmers, the newest wind turbines going up out on East Road, or this week’s road closures to accommodate the tractor-trailer rigs that shuttle the sleek white tower sections and turbine blades from ports in Vancouver, Longview and Everett to this sea of dryland wheat above the Columbia River.

Eastern Klickitat County’s wind energy boom has utterly transformed the landscape. In the past four years, 624 wind turbines have risen along the crest of the Columbia Hills and on ridges south and east of this town of 90, each the height of a 41-story building as measured from the ground to the tip of the highest turbine blade. That number is likely to reach 1,000 when and if all the projects that are under construction or working their way through the permitting process come on line.

The gusty Gorge winds that set those turbine blades spinning have the capacity to generate more than 1,200 megawatts of power once all the wind farms under construction in Klickitat County are generating electricity — enough to serve about 300,000 homes.

For Bickleton, the wind-powered transformation has been abrupt, and mostly positive.

The arrival of large-scale wind development also has thrown a lifeline to Bickleton-area farmers who previously scratched out a living growing dryland wheat. Farmers are leasing land to big energy companies for the rights-of-way, easements, tower pads, underground transmission lines and construction trailers needed to erect and maintain the wind farms. Most also have negotiated deals that allow them to collect a set percentage of revenue from energy generation once the turbines start spinning.

Lawrence Goodnight and his wife netted less than $20,000 annually from their two wheat farms until wind came to the rescue. He wouldn’t reveal how much Iberdrola Renewables is paying the couple for leases on his land, but the going rate in the region is about $10,000 per turbine per year.

“Financially, it probably saved me,” Goodnight said. “There’s enough revenue to take care of me fine. I can retire.”

It all happened so fast.

Five years ago, eager to join the wind energy boom, Klickitat County commissioners adopted a renewable energy ordinance that permits the siting of wind farms and solar projects on one-third of the county’s land base, basically everything south and east of the two-lane road that links Goldendale with Bickleton.

That same year, voters in Washington approved a renewable energy standard requiring the state’s major utilities to incorporate 15 percent renewable energy in their portfolios by 2020.

Federal tax breaks have helped fuel the explosive growth.

Since 1992, wind energy developers have been eligible for a federal production tax credit worth 2.1 cents per kilowatt hour once their projects begin generating electricity. But that tax break lost its luster during the recent recession. “The production tax credit has been less useful to the wind energy industry since the economic collapse,” said Jan Johnson, spokeswoman for Iberdrola Renewables.

The federal stimulus bill, passed in February 2009, extended the production tax credit and also gave energy developers the option of receiving a 30 percent investment tax credit retroactively for wind farms placed in service before 2013 if construction begins before the end of this year.

That investment tax credit is vital, Johnson said. “It means that after we’ve spent the money, we get the credit,” even though new wind farms are not yet producing energy.

The new deadline has created a rush to get turbine towers in the ground by year’s end. “If you finish it before Dec. 31, you get the credit,” Johnson said. “If you don’t, you don’t.”

The wind boom has not been without controversy.

Klickitat County’s energy overlay zone became final only after the county reached an agreement with environmentalists to re-evaluate the zoning in seven years or after the construction of 1,000 megawatts of wind power. A hearing was held earlier this year to take public comment on the impacts of the fast-track zoning.

The environmental group Friends of the Columbia Gorge has challenged the zoning, saying it’s no longer a “valid gauge” of the cumulative impact of wind energy in Klickitat County. “Wind energy facilities have been developed in Klickitat County at a rate roughly seven times as fast as projected, with no end in sight,” wrote Nathan Baker, staff attorney for Friends.

As the turbines march closer to town, some Bickleton residents are saying they wouldn’t want them any closer. “It’s been kind of a reality check for people,” Wilson said. “Up to now, the turbines have all been in rural areas.”