Rural county zones itself for wind

BICKLETON, Wash. – A plateau of dry wheat fields and desert sagebrush line the horizon at the Powers family’s south-central Washington ranch.

At first glance, rural Klickitat County might not appear to offer much. But a second look at the wheat, still green from late spring rains, finds it fluttering in the region’s newest natural resource: wind.

Earlier this year, county officials took a bold step by creating a so-called Energy Overlay Zone, a planning tool aimed at expediting renewable energy development. Wind developers – who often face bitter battles with locals who object to massive turbine farms – say it is the first such zone in the country, and they’re calling the few residents who live in Klickitat County a mighty progressive bunch.

“This is like the year before the gold rush, and they’re on top of it,” said Bruce Morley, chief executive officer of Wind River Power, a consortium of companies aiming to build a 300 megawatt wind farm in central Klickitat County. The project would be one of the largest in the world, creating enough electricity for roughly 100,000 homes.

“It’s very clear there’s a green power revolution going on in the United States now, and Klickitat County is really at the forefront of that,” he said. “It’s really unusual to see that from an area so rural.”

Klickitat County has certainly seen better days. Stretching about 100 miles along the Columbia River, its bounty has been natural resources, including agriculture.

But since the timber mills in the area shut down in the 1980s, the county with a population of fewer than 20,000 people has had one of the top five unemployment rates in the state. The jobless rate has averaged 10 percent or more for the past 15 years, twice the current national and state rates of about 5 percent.

The closure of a local aluminum smelter following the energy crisis of 2001 didn’t help.

“Rural areas that have these natural resource-based economies are getting hammered right now,” said Dana Peck, director of economic development for Klickitat County.

Klickitat County aims to change that with a resource that’s likely been blowing through its hills and canyons for hundreds of years.

The county spent $500,000 to assess the potential for wind farm development, including wind and bird studies, a review of land uses and the economics involved, and public meetings to gauge residents’ interest.

The result was the Energy Overlay Zone, a sort of mapping tool that tells wind developers where they are welcome.

The general idea is nothing new. It’s much like the bundling of automobile lots in one pocket of a metropolitan area. But addressing zoning for wind makes the county rare, said Jim Green, senior project leader for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado. Zoning allows a county to create a generic ordinance for a larger area, rather than create ordinances in a piecemeal fashion for specific sites, he said.

The Energy Overlay Zone covers more than 1,100 square miles, two-thirds of Klickitat County.

“It seems to me that that’s the leverage to this type of approach,” he said. “And hopefully, behind the overlay is a planning piece that has considered the needs of the county and the opportunity for wind development, and has done a credible job of assessing land use.”

Typically, wind energy developers will quietly lease a piece of land they may be able to profit from, before the public is even aware of the idea and before prices for leasing the land go up, he said.

“The siting decision is basically made without any public input,” Peck said. “We’ve tried to put the public in front of that process.”

Transmission lines from Columbia River dams alleviate what can be a thorn for wind developers in rural areas, but individual projects still must go through environmental assessments.

Residents also had the option to opt out, and some did: Near Snowden, in the western half of the county, residents made it clear they opposed wind development in their back yards.