Air, Water Powerful Partners in Northwest

"That is enormous in its implications," said Pascal Storck, president of 3Tier, a Seattle-based firm that advises companies investing in renewable energy. "It means the region is really ready to use this energy."

When the wind does blow -- and it blows a lot out here in the semiarid and relatively unpopulated farm country east of the Cascade Mountains -- there is a unique wind-hydro bonus that helps keep greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.

As wind turbines produce electricity, the big dams ease off, conserving more water, allowing them to produce more clean energy as needed.

The Northwest has been flat-out lucky when it comes to wind power, several experts say.

Besides the dams that iron out kinks in the wind, it so happens that the wind blows hardest and most reliably in those parts of eastern Washington and eastern Oregon where there is an abundance of high-voltage transmission lines that run west to the population centers of Seattle and Portland.

The wind blows in pretty much the same places where hydro dams were built by the federal government and private utilities between 1940 and 1970. Major transmission lines that connect those dams to the West Coast grid have considerable unused capacity -- although new lines will need to be strung in coming years as energy generated from wind power increases.

"It is an almost ideal land-use situation," said Jeff King, a senior resource analyst for the Northwest Power and Planning Council, a regional group created by Congress to balance electricity production and environmental needs. "We have avoided the aesthetic and environmental controversies that have plagued wind development in other areas of the country."

Most local land owners and county governments have embraced wind power, primarily because there is money in it for them. A farmer can expect $2,000 to $4,000 per year by allowing a wind turbine to stand on his property.

Just north of the Columbia River in Washington's Klickitat County, the planned construction of at least four large wind farms is expected to yield about $5 million a year in property taxes. That windfall will increase county tax receipts by about 25 percent, and the money is likely to keep flowing for decades.

"Oh, yeah, this is by far the biggest boom for the tax rolls we have ever seen," said H.J. Vandenberg, the county assessor.

There is, though, a fundamental unanswered question about wind and hydro: Is the combination good for the salmon? Those fish are often described as symbols of all that is worthwhile about life in the Pacific Northwest.

Dams have been famously destructive of salmon, blocking or delaying their migration, while pushing many species to the brink of extinction. This has triggered a complicated and costly effort to use the Endangered Species Act to protect the fish.

Some environmentalists are hopeful that wind power, because it allows more water to be stored in the river, will be good for salmon. They say there will be more water to spill downstream when salmon need it for migration.

But at the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, King is not so sanguine.

"For hydro to work well with wind for reliable power production, it needs to release water on a minute-to-minute schedule," King said. "There is going to be a conflict with fish."