News

Farmers reap wind for energy

 

BY ROBERT FRANKLIN, MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE

Duluth News Tribune, MN

February 21st, 2006

 

TRIMONT, Minn. - Business consultant Earl Cummings recalls the day in March 2003 when Doug Scholl came into his Mankato office with a couple of sheets of paper that looked "like he wrote on them with a chocolate bar."

 

A few farm families owned a total of about 6,000 acres near Trimont and near a Great River Energy electrical generating plant, Scholl said, explaining his hermetic drawings. Why couldn't the landowners become entrepreneurs and develop their own wind farm rather than have some company put up windmill towers and reap most of the profits?

Turns out they could.

 

With help from Cummings and others, the families created the country's first commercial-scale wind farm developed by landowners, according to PPM Energy, a national wind-power company. Under contract with the landowners, PPM built, bought and operates the Trimont farm, which includes67 towers on more than8,500 acres and a 100-megawatt total capacity, enough to power 29,000 houses.

 

It's also enough to bring more than $1 million a year into Martin and Jackson counties through lease payments, revenue sharing and production taxes, said Neal Von Ohlen, a farmer and chief manager of the Trimont Area Wind Farm, the landowners' group.

 

Across the nation, companies, towns, schools, Indian tribes and landowners are riding the wind and putting up turbines these days. But the Trimont landowner model is being highlighted at an American Wind Energy Association meeting this week, PPM spokeswoman Jan Johnson said from company headquarters in Portland, Ore.

 

Wind accounts for less than one-half of 1 percent of U.S. electrical production but has tripled since 1998 and now produces enough power for a city the size of Chicago, according to the federal Energy Information Administration. Large areas of southern, western and northwestern Minnesota have more steady wind than was thought earlier, according to a report issued last month.

 

Cummings, who runs TurningPoint Management, said he's involved in a couple of other wind projects, and Von Ohlen is working on a project adjacent to Trimont that could be twice its size.

 

Doug Scholl didn't live to see the wind project become reality. He died in a light plane crash later in 2003.

 

His son, Jeff, now farms the family's land and is benefiting from his father's vision. Wind power, Jeff said, is "diversification for us."

 

Jeff's grandfather, Jim Scholl, calls Minnesota the Saudi Arabia of wind and sees the Trimont ownership model as "the future in wind development in rural areas."

 

Things weren't that clear at the beginning.

 

"No one knew anything," Von Ohlen said last week. The landowners were excited, venturesome and green. They thought, "We'll throw some money together and we'll build a wind farm. That's all there is to it," he said.

 

Of course, that wasn't all.

 

They had to get agreement from about 40 landowners -- important partly because the wind towers require a 1,000-foot setback -- raise seed money, test the wind and get permits.

 

They won against 55 other wind proposals to hook up to Great River Energy.

 

Roxanne Scholl, Doug's widow, can look out her window and see the 262-foot-high turbines with their 254-foot blades and know which way the wind is blowing.

 

She talks about the development in rural terms: "A farmer feeds 122 families," she said. "Now we can heat those 122 families."