Betty Purcell can’t recall how long it’s been since she and her husband, Allan, had a good cattle-raising year in Lemhi County. But at their Leadore-area ranch, every year is a good one for wind.

“It blows and blows,” she says. Indeed, it blows so hard that the Purcells have decided they want “a great big wind farm”—a stand of tall, silently turning, steel wind turbines that would harvest their stiff eastern Idaho winds, send the energy to power-hungry markets, and freshen their pockets with a little welcome cash.

“We can hardly farm or ranch here with this continual drought,” says Betty Purcell. “A wind farm would provide jobs and it would help our county, which needs the money. It would help us all.”

With a wind-measuring anemometer from the Bonneville Power Administration and a small installation grant from the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, the Purcells are collecting the year’s worth of meteorological data they hope will attract a wind developer to their site.

At the Idaho Energy Division, staff engineer Gerald Fleischman has a 70-person waiting list for the anemometers he loans out. Fleischman, assigned to the Idaho Wind Power Working Group, says he’s talked to “tons of people.”

“They want to make money,” says Fleischman. “They look at it as another cash crop.”

Since last summer, David Luck has spent 10 to 15 days a month talking with Idaho farmers and ranchers. Luck represents enXco, one of a handful of wind development firms that are evaluating opportunities in the Gem State. Unless Idaho utility policies change, the folks Luck talks with won’t be able to tap directly into the wind farm’s power grid, but they will be able to tap into a steady stream of easement payments.

Fast Fact: If all Idaho’s wind potential were developed it would produce 322 percent of the state’s electricity consumption.

At an estimated million dollars a megawatt to install wind turbines, developers can’t afford to settle for a simple breeze. They need to locate “commercial quality wind—enough wind for enough time,” as Luck defines it. By this summer, he expects to be testing 10 to 12 promising Idaho sites—most of them at 4,500 to 6,000 foot elevations.

“The average wind along the flat part of the Snake River Plain doesn’t have enough energy to work commercially,” Luck says. So enXco looks for buttes, ridgelines, notches, and other geographic configurations that funnel or concentrate wind. Within the next five years, he believes rural Idaho economies will begin benefiting from a series of modestly sized wind farms spanning unused corners of center-pivot irrigation systems.

At Kimberly, UI water resources engineer Rick Allen notes that water weighs a thousand times more than air and, as such, is capable of generating a thousand times more energy per set of turbines. “But there’s a whole lot more air than liquid water in southern Idaho,” he says, “so wind power has its place.”

In addition, environmental issues are “making it really difficult to get much more hydropower,” Allen notes. “The environmental impact of a windmill is much less.”

“If wind energy is reliable, it’s a very attractive source of energy,” says rancher Allan Purcell. “It’s non-polluting—and it’s free.”

© 2002 University of Idaho, College of Agricultural and Life Sciences.