[The numbers above are Department of Energy estimates as of June 1999.]

 

The Vansycle Wind Project in Umatilla County began operation in December 1998. It has a generating capacity of 24.9 megawatts. Portland General Electric buys 100 percent of the output. The project, built and owned by FPL Energy, consists of 38 Vestas turbines. 

 

Nearby is the Stateline Wind Project. The Oregon portion of the project consists of 181 turbines with a generating capacity of 119 megawatts. The overall Stateline project includes an additional 273 turbines in Washington. The total generating capacity of the Oregon and Washington turbines is almost 300 megawatts. PacifiCorp Power Marketing buys the output from the Stateline facility.

 

The Wyoming Wind Energy Project is a 41.4 megawatt wind project at Foote Creek Rim near Arlington, Wyoming. PacifiCorp owns 80 percent of the project and the Eugene Water and Electric Board owns the rest. The Bonneville Power Administration buys the output from 15 megawatts of the project and sells the electricity to Salem Electric. The project, consisting of 69 Mitsubishi turbines, was designed and built by SeaWest.

 

SeaWest owns the Condon Wind Energy Project in Gilliam County. Phase 1 of the project has a generating capacity of 24.6 megawatts. SeaWest plans to complete Phase 2 by June 2002, bringing the total capacity of the project to 49.8 megawatts.

 

Northwestern Wind Power operates a 24 megawatt wind project at Klondike in Sherman County.

 

Oregon State University's Energy Resources Research Laboratory (ERRL) has managed the data collection, quality assurance and analysis for the Bonneville Power Administration's wind energy resource studies since 1978 and manages other data management activities for transmission line research. Some of the recent data was collected from a three-year project with funding from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to monitor wind conditions at two sites in Oregon. This project was carried out in cooperation with the Oregon Department of Energy. ERRL maintains a large data base of wind data for the Pacific Northwest, including wind statistics from the five Bonneville Power Administration's long term wind monitoring sites in Montana, Oregon and Washington.

 

The principal barrier is competition from lower-cost gas-fired generation. The environmental benefits of generating electricity from wind and other renewable sources are not given value in the marketplace. Other barriers include zoning, inadequate information about potential wildlife issues and the cost of transmission from remote sites to load centers. Data on wind conditions may not be available for some promising sites, resulting in a long lead time to assess wind potential. Local environmental and wildlife concerns may limit development in some areas.

Wind power technology has improved greatly in the last decade. The generating capacity of wind turbines has increased significantly, and the cost of generating power from wind has declined.

 

Wind resource assessments began in the 1970s and continue today. Oregon State University has wind data from 152 sites. In 1980, the Wind Task Force of the Alternate Energy Development Commission found that Oregon had significant wind resources and promising opportunities to use it. The Oregon Department of Energy followed up by publishing the Windy Land Owners Guide and model city and county ordinances for siting wind systems. The agency was involved in the nation's most extensive research on local siting regulations for wind projects, in a Coastal Wind Data Inventory and in wind measuring projects at two coastal parks, Bullard's Beach and Fort Stevens.

 

In response to public interest in residential systems, the Oregon Department of Energy operated an anemometer loan program through the Energy Extension Service during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The instruments were set up for a year to see if adequate winds were present. In most cases, the measurements showed inadequate winds to effectively power a turbine.

As a result of a federal research program in the 1980s, small turbines for field testing were installed in Wasco County and at Cape Blanco. Cape Blanco's high winds and coastal bench topography attracted several attempts to develop wind projects with over a million dollars spent on feasibility studies. Just north at Langlois another wind farm received a permit from the Energy Facility Siting Council but the project was never built.

 

In 1983, the first commercial wind project in the Pacific Northwest began operation above Whiskey Run beach along the southern Oregon coast between Charleston and Bandon. The 1.25-megawatt project consisted of twenty-five 50-kilowatt turbines. This project was removed 10 years later when energy prices fell and spare parts became unavailable. 

In a project sponsored by eleven consumer-owned utilities, an experimental 500-kilowatt vertical axis turbine was installed just north of Newport. At the time it was one of the largest vertical axis turbines in the world. After several years of operation, the manufacturer ceased supporting it, and the turbine was removed.

 

Over forty small-scale systems were installed across the state during the 1980s. They were built by people responding to marketing by local wind dealers and wanting to make renewable energy. The Department of Energy approved tax credits for many of the installations.