Volume six number four, two thousand ten | winter

Is Montana Ready for Wind Energy?

Witnessing Yellowstone with

Photographer Tom Murphy

Nearly Four Decades After his Death,

a Soldier Finally Comes Home

Fiction by Rick Bass

Wild Bandits of the Wild West

 Montana is on the threshold of
becoming a major wind energy producer.
The benefits are clear, but at
what costs?

WINDS OF
CHANGE
BY SCOT T MCMILLION PHOTOGR APHY BY THOMAS LEE

E
AST OF THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS, WIND SCULPTS MONTANA.
It bends our trees and tatters our flags. It pulls the tears from our eyes
and dictates how we farm, where we build a house, how we plan our
highways. We cuss it and joke about it and sometimes we just stand in
awe: when it makes the wheat dance, when it blows a boat upstream,
when it tips over a train. It’s an incredible amount of energy, flowing pretty steadily, day
and night, untapped and unused.
That’s changing.
“You ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” is the way Gov. Brian Schweitzer described Montana’s
fledgling wind industry.

Giant wind turbines dot the farmland north of Harlowton

at the Judith Gap wind farm, one of two large wind
projects in Montana. Major wind farm expansion,
at Judith Gap and other proposed wind farms
around the state, is in the offing if an efficient
way of shipping the electricity out of the
state can be constructed.

M O N T A N A Q U A R T E R LY 7
 Today, wind farms remain scarce in Montana. A sizable one
stands south of Judith Gap, and an even bigger one looms over
Cut Bank. Three others are pretty small. But 45 more wind farms
are in the development process so far. If they all rise to reap the
wind, they’ll produce enough electricity to power perhaps two
million homes.
Chances are, none of those homes will be in Montana, a
state that already exports half of the BTUs it generates through
coal, natural gas and hydro power. Electricity from new wind
farms will travel to hungry cities and industries in Canada and
Nevada and on the West Coast. They need the energy and are
willing to pay. Montana has the wind. Deals are in the works.
“There’s always a constantly evolving development list,” said
Evan Barrett, Schweitzer’s economic development specialist.
Wind farms could provide lots of benefits. County and state
governments could pull in huge tax windfalls. They will create
jobs, maybe 12,000 for construction and 600 permanent ones
to run and maintain the windmills. The nation won’t need to
rely quite so much on hydrocarbons owned by foreign dictators.
Landowners can rent or lease their land to wind companies and
remain in the cattle or wheat business. (Montana leases state
land to wind companies for $50,000 to $70,000 per year for a
square mile. Private deals typically remain private.) Plus, wind
farms don’t pollute, and they can reduce the need for new coal or
nuclear plants.
But for any of that to happen, the electricity has to reach the
market: the office towers of Calgary, the hot tubs of Los Angeles,
the air-conditioned gambling halls of the Las Vegas Strip.
Taking electrons to those places means building new power
lines, some of them not so intrusive and some of them huge, but
all of them crossing streams and ranches and somebody’s back
yard or favorite place.
Plans are afoot to build new power lines all over the state.
A big loop would run from Great Falls to Fort Peck to Colstrip
to Townsend, gathering wind-generated electrons. More lines
would carry juice from Montana to the Dakotas, Washington and
Las Vegas. Most of it would flow through hubs in Great Falls and
Townsend.
Powerline construction would cost $4.2 billion and create
1,900 direct jobs per year for four years. Add up the powerlines
and windmills and it would mean a $16.2 billion investment in promises a stable supply of electricity, spending billions on power Men plant another 150-foot pole into the farmland near Shelby, part
lines tends to spook investors. of the 214 miles of power lines going up between Great Falls and
Montana and $221 million a year in new property taxes, accord- Lethbridge, Alberta. When completed, perhaps as soon as the spring of
ing to Schweitzer’s office. But once the lines are complete — no easy process — it 2012, the lines will enable power generated by wind farms to go through
Current proposals call for 6,000 megawatts of new elec- makes wind farms possible. It’s already happening. Great Falls and on into Nevada and California.

trical transmission, most of it to come from wind farms. That
means at least 2,000 new windmills, maybe 20 times today’s
number. And it could get a lot bigger than that.
THE CHICKEN AND THE EGG
Schweitzer says wind development in Montana faces three
major problems: “transmission capacity, transmission capacity
and transmission capacity.” Without new power lines, wind energy
is just wind, unharnessed energy rolling across the prairie.
And that’s where the chicken-and-egg problem arises. Without
new power lines, wind farms can’t sell energy. But until somebody
One hundred fifty feet in the air, metal power poles line up to wait for
line to be strung from Great Falls to Lethbridge, Alberta. More power
lines such as this one near Shelby will need to go up around the state
if Montana’s dreams of becoming a major source of wind power are to
come to fruition.
One major power line now under construction — a 300-
megawatt, 214-mile structure owned by Montana Alberta Tie
LTD (MATL) — will run from the Great Falls area to Lethbridge,
Alberta. Though court disputes over MATL’s use of eminent
domain laws could delay things, a Spanish wind farm company
announced in October that it will build a new 206-turbine
project near Kevin to tie into that line, selling the electricity in
Canada.
“This is the first project, but it certainly won’t be the last,”
said Bob Williams, a consultant to MATL, which, like most of
the big players in Montana wind, is a foreign company. It’s based
in Canada. MATL hopes to nearly double the new line’s capacity
and build more of them around the state. That could make a lot
of wind farms possible.
The nation needs electricity. The U.S. Department of Energy
says that, by 2035, national consumption could increase by 30
percent, even with conservation measures in place. Americans
have shown an unwillingness to, as Schweitzer puts it, “live
naked in a cave and eat nuts.” They want the light switch to work
and, increasingly, they want “green” renewable energy.
In California’s huge market, recent rules and laws dictate
that 33 percent of that state’s electricity must come from renew-
able sources by 2020, and that state can’t provide all of its own
juice. So wind developers are looking at Montana, particularly
along the Rocky Mountain Front, from Cut Bank down to Big
Timber, in the Yellowstone River corridor between Livingston
and Billings, and the area north of Ennis. Other wind farms are
planned near Havre, Hardin and Baker.
“Some people think they’re majestic,” Barrett said. “Some
people think they interfere with the scenery.”
But everybody agrees on one point: They sure are big.
Imagine a football field, including the end zones and maybe
some bleachers, standing on end. They’ll be visible from miles
and miles away. At night, strobe lights will warn away aircraft
and light up the prairie sky.

M O N T A N A Q U A R T E R LY 9
 Accordingly, opposition is growing, though it remains small
and scattered.
People who oppose wind farms find that they don’t have a
lot of legal tools in Montana. The windy regions of rural Montana
seldom have zoning, and local officials tend to spread their arms
for new industries and the jobs and tax base that come with them.
The state of Montana is actively courting wind farms, offering to
cut property taxes in half for the first 15 years of the plant’s life.
“My job is to encourage them,” Schweitzer said. “They don’t
have a lot of state hoops to jump through. And I like it that way.”
The federal government is pushing wind power too, offer-
ing subsidies that provide 30 cents worth of tax credits for every
dollar’s worth of electricity generated. Add up all the state and
federal subsidies and they can comprise as much as 50 percent
of a wind project’s costs.
Siting a power line is more complicated. It requires complex
Corky Brittan looks out on his lawn along Mission Creek east of Livingston.
Brittan, long an advocate of wind energy, is opposing a 20-megawatt wind
farm near his home. Brittan says the 430-foot turbines will present a danger
to nearby nesting golden eagles and are too close to the Livingston airport.
environmental impact statements plus approval from a raft of local,
state and federal agencies. And none of that starts until suppliers,
financiers, customers, landowners and transmission line owners
have all reached agreement. Opposition is assured.
“It will generate a lot of noise and fury,” Barrett said of
proposed powerlines and their routes. “That’s what happens in
permitting. But ultimately, a site will be chosen. We expect some-
body will go to court on it.”
10
BATTLING WINDMILLS
Gordon “Corky” Brittan finds himself in an odd position
these days. He’s been advocating wind energy for 26 years, but
now that a relatively small wind farm has been proposed for
the area near his home east of Livingston, the Montana State
University philosophy professor is working to slow things down.
Wind energy is good, he maintains, but it has to be properly
located. The Mission Creek area, where he lives, is home to golden
eagles, which he fears will be killed by the spinning blades. The
company proposing the 20-megawatt farm, Sagebrush Energy,
of Jackson, Wyo., has no track record of building wind projects.
The wind farm is too close to Livingston’s small airport. And the
idea of 430-foot turbines in a rural area with astounding views
rankles him and other neighbors. At the very least, Brittan said,
a full-blown study of the area should be completed before any
structures rise.
He has dedicated much of his life to pro-
moting locally-generated, locally-consumed-
alternative energy. He doesn’t like the expense
and waste that comes with shipping electricity
so far away.
Many companies, he said, are less inter-
ested in generating clean energy than they
are in mining the federal subsidies, which
favor big companies with income and capital
to protect.
(According to the Wall Street Journal,
energy giant Duke Power is now completing
10,000 megawatts of wind energy capacity.
“Thanks to tax incentives, it has been able to
recover 38 percent return of its investments
in the first year,” the Journal reported.)
In Montana, laws don’t require much
in the way of impact studies for wind farms.
Rather, existing state and federal laws and
subsidy programs encourage them. The
MATL project even received a $161 million
low-interest loan, as part of the federal govern-
ment’s stimulus package, to take wind energy
to market.
Brittan said he and others will approach the Montana
Legislature this winter, hoping to get some statewide guidelines
and standards in place. Firm rules would be good for the indus-
try, he maintains.
“The big thing is predictability,” he said. “And regulation
gives you predictability. At the end of the day, you know where
you stand.”
Schweitzer and Barrett said they don’t expect the 2011
Legislature to come up with a bunch of new rules for wind
farms.
“I don’t think that’s in the cards,” Barrett said.
LOOKING BACK,
LOOKING AHEAD
Ever since the fur trade, distant trends and markets
have shaped Montana’s economy. First came the beaver
trade, then the gold rushes, then the early degradations of
cattle grazing. Timber had a good long run. Oil, gas and
coal still flow to distant markets. In all cases, Montanans
had jobs exporting products, then had to live with impacts
ranging from mine wastes to weedy and erodible clearcuts.
Wind farms don’t come without impacts. They kill some
birds and bats, though much fewer than earlier models did.
They are not silent. They need lots of new powerlines and
roads. They are incredibly visible and, like most forms of
energy, they rely on subsidies from the taxpayers. But they
don’t pollute, they don’t require the mining of coal or gas or
“It’s been two and half years since I’ve worked at home. To be able
to go home and see my kids every weekend is a blessing,” says
foreman Tim Veyna, one of the Montana workers put to work by the
power line project.
uranium and they don’t contribute to acid rain or climate
change.
The federal government is shoveling money at wind
farms, with the goals of addressing climate change and
gaining energy independence while creating jobs, though
there are scoffers who say that wind won’t make much of a
long-term dent in any of those areas.
Under current policies, wind farm placement will be
decided by a combination of market forces and bureau-
cratic pressures, cumbersome entities that will dictate
where the new power lines will go. It’s likely to be a long
conversation.
And we’re all part of it, every time we turn on a light
switch.
M O N T A N A Q U A R T E R LY 11