Tilting At Windmills

Founder of Southwest Windpower Sees the Answer Blowin' in the Wind

by Gary M. Kaye New York - May 5, 2008 - Zero Energy News - From the first moment he sat down, you could tell Andy Kruse is passionate about wind power. The co-founder of Southwest Windpower firmly believes that in many instances, small scale wind can be the most effective form of renewable energy.

Despite significant opposition to some large scale wind projects, especially the Cape Wind Project proposed for the waters off Cape Cod, Kruse says most small scale projects (turbines of under 10kw) have generated very little opposition, though there have been some notable exceptions. In Watertown, Connecticut, not far from Waterbury, a local zoning board that had first approved the installation of a Southwest Skystream turbine, eventually blocked the project because of opposition from a single neighbor. Says Kruse, "I've gotten to know a little bit of the not-so-nice neighbor and then our customer. And it really transitioned from a position, not of, 'this is something that's going to harm the neighborhood,' or'this is not something I just don't know about,' or 'this is not safe.' It was just about, 'I want to be right.' And she was just so upset, there was just so much anger in this woman that it was just beyond anything I imagined."

Kruse said the opposition to small scale wind to some extent parallels the early implementation of electricity, when residents of lower Manhattan were so fearful that people would be electrocuted from 240 volt service that they forced the new electric utility to adopt a 110 volt standard that's become the exception to the rest of the world.

He believes the biggest challenges to the deployment of small scale wind turbines are zoning, available wind resources, and to a lesser extent interconnection issues. He notes that even in Massachusetts, where zoning of large scale installations has received so much publicity from the Cape Wind Project, that small scale wind is still fascinating, "when you do a (trade) show in Massahusetts, and we've done some in Boston, the people are just real excited about it, and they come up and touch it and go, 'this is unbelievable, I want to have one.'

Kruse says that in other sections of the country, especially the Midwest, small scale wind has been welcomed with open arms, "after all, for generations, farmers have used windmills to pump water all across the Midwest. This is just the next step."

At this past September's Solar Power 2007 show in Long Beach California, Southwest's turbine display stood out like the proverbial sore thumb in the midst of a sea of solar panels. Says Kruse, "That's where our customers are. We've been doing solar shows for years. It's probably the second most challenging thing for our industry is that we're so small compared to solar and large scale wind. Like solar, we're a distributed technology that's largely for homes and conusmers. We have some solar farms that are being developed, 2 megawatts, 3 megawatts in Arizona. But for the most part the practicality of solar, the beauty of solar is that you can integrated it into a building to produce power right there. That's our market too."

There are some challenges that small wind and solar face in common, including net-metering, and interconnection with the electric grid. Kruse says,"while some states, like Massachusetts, have resolved those issues, we're really working hard towards "feed-in" laws because ultimately, that's really where I want to go. It's not about every about every extra watt rebate, or solar. We really want to deploy this technology. We want to maximize energy production." Kruse claims the consumer gets far more bang for the buck with windpower, so it makes sense to offer tax incentives, " the conusmer benefits from that because his tax dollar is going towards something, not just to a solar panel that does about one tenth of what it should do."

Next week, Kruse comments on the challenges of rural electric cooperatives, standards, federal energy policy, and the cost effectiveness of small scale wind in comparison to solar.