Jay Clapper’s quest to plug his community into wind power began with three quick phone calls. But it has taken three years to flip the switch.
“It’s been this dance. You’re moving forward one day and back the next,’ Clapper says. “But every time something went bad, it turned out to be a blessing, because the project just got bigger.’
Now the 34-year-old teacher is about to see his passion and persistence pay off. On a hill overlooking Wray, an Eastern Plains farm town just 13 miles from the point where Colorado, Kansas and Nebraska meet, a huge crane will soon erect a wind turbine big enough to supply a quarter of the town’s electrical needs and provide $180,000 a year in new revenue to the cash-strapped school district.
“This will be the first large single-turbine installation in Colorado, and the first one in the state for a school,’ says Clapper, who launched the project after 20 staffers were laid off because of budget cuts in 2002.
“It’s an awesome story, and it’s bigger than me. I started it and did some of the grunt work, but there are a lot of people who have jumped in and made it work.’
In some ways, the nearly $2 million project reflects the growing appeal of renewable energy, which will be celebrated Friday on Earth Day as an eco-friendly way to lessen the nation’s oil consumption.
But as Robert Mailander of the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union sees it, the venture in Wray has less to do with environmentalism than with self-sufficiency.
“I think this is a community that pulled together and saw this as a vision they wanted to pursue to make things better,’ he says. “It’s an energizing thing.’
The project, launched with $3,000 in seed money from the Farmers Union, is financed with a combination of grants, loans and in-kind donations. It is expected to produce some 5 million kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, which the town has agreed to buy from the school district for 3.5 cents per kwh, in lieu of power it currently buys from the local rural electric association.
It’s not expected to lower anyone’s bills, but it will help insulate the townspeople from future rate hikes.
Meanwhile, it will generate new income for the school district, which faced a $750,000 shortfall on a budget of $4.6 million before the layoffs.
As anyone familiar with start-ups might attest, however, getting the project going hasn’t exactly been a breeze.
“This thing has been as flighty as the wind,’ says Steve Oestman, a school board member who has lived in the town of 2,200 all his life.
The latest glitch involved the turbine, which Clapper had hoped would be up and running in time for the national meeting of the American Wind Energy Association in Denver in mid-May.
He anticipated no problem in getting a 1.5-megawatt machine, the workhorse of wind farms all over the country.
But in mid-March, with the groundwork in place and papers ready to sign, Clapper was informed by the manufacturer that orders were backed up for 49 weeks.
With federal tax credits due to expire at the end of 2005, demand for generators has been as brisk as, well, wind on the high plains.
“It’s extremely difficult to get the attention of the big boys for one turbine when they could sell 100 with the same effort,’ says Peder Hansen of Valmont Industries, a Nebraska-based manufacturer that has designed a new type of tower for the turbine and committed to build it at a discount.
Another turbine was found. But Clapper also had to negotiate a detour over the location.
With winds averaging 17.5 miles per hour year-round, Wray has plenty of the raw resource. But the original site, on a yucca-studded hill overlooking the high school on the south edge of town, got a thumbs-down from the Federal Aviation Administration because it’s in the flight path of the municipal airport.
Now plans call for the tower and turbine to be erected on a knob of fallow farmland about a mile farther southeast, where the apparatus with rotor blades attached could stand as high as a 30-story building.
The toughest challenge, though, was finding a way to pay for a project in the midst of a declining economy in agriculture and rural America.
Among the keys were donations of some $200,000 apiece from the family of the late
Ralph Bowman, a local wheat farmer, and from the Kitzmiller-Bales Trust, a legacy of the town’s longtime doctor.
They proved instrumental in securing a $350,000 grant from the Colorado Department of Local Affairs – as did an urgent appeal to the community at large.
“We had 21 people donate a total of $149,000 in about a two-week window at a very critical point,’ says Clapper, “and that says a lot about a small town.’
What it says, in Mailander’s view, is that Wray has embraced the notion of self-sufficiency in a way that sets it apart from many other struggling small towns – just as its setting, among the limestone cliffs and buttes that mark the headwaters of the Republican River, sets it apart from the more desolate sand hills and sage-covered fields to the north and south.
“They’ve got a whole different dynamic in Wray,’ Mailander says. ”
They started talking about 10 years ago about being more self-sufficient, in response to an economic development director who got them thinking about how to deal better with change.’
The community, the county seat of Yuma County, built a recreation center that rivals any in suburban Denver in appearance and amenities.
That was followed by an assisted living center, a swimming pool and other projects that demonstrated the same vibrancy Clapper found in marshaling support for the wind project.
“In this state, we spend just over $6 billion on energy – oil, gas and electricity – and 80 percent of that money leaves Colorado,’ says Clapper, a Colorado State University graduate who teaches agricultural science and is FFA adviser in the 220-student high school.
“What this does is trap dollars in the community, and what I tell my kids is that every dollar that stays has $5.20 in impact.’
But the wind project carries with it an appeal that goes beyond its economic benefits, says Oestman, who, as secretary-treasurer of the school board, will be among the first to see the revenue picture improve.
“Once it’s physically there,’ he says of the tower and turbine, “I think it’s going to show that Wray is a town that can get things done and isn’t afraid to be on the forefront of something new. I don’t see how you could lose by putting up something that will generate money for the schools for 30 years.’
Staff writer Jack Cox can be reached at 303-820-1785 or jcox@denverpost.com.
About wind power
Wind turbines supply about 6,400 megawatts of electricity in the United States, or less than 1 percent of the country’s total generating capacity.
But the American Wind Energy Association (www.awea.org) expects another 2,000 megawatts to come on line in new projects this year – five times the increase posted in 2004.
Of the total, about 500 megawatts are produced in Colorado, which ranks 11th among the states for wind potential, just behind Iowa (North Dakota, Texas and Kansas are tops).
Wind energy technology has become far more efficient over the past 20 years: Turbines and rotors are so big they can hardly be transported by truck. Hence some developers are promoting offshore locations, where oversized parts can be shipped and assembled more easily.
The benign image of windmills has been tarnished in recent months by reports that the huge blades can be hazardous to birds and bats, and by complaints – especially on Cape Cod – that the rows of towers on wind farms amount to visual pollution.
But increasing numbers of turbines are being sold for community-based and single-owner installations.
The Governor’s Office of Energy Management and Conservation is preparing a video guide to small wind sites, outlining more than 20 issues that any user must address, from gathering wind data to financing, permitting and maintenance. It is expected to be posted on the agency’s website (www.state.co.us/oemc) within the next few weeks.
– Jack Cox
