RAUB (AP) — A nearly treeless stretch of northern Indiana that once produced only corn and soybeans is now dotted with 87 hulking wind turbines that harvest the region’s incessant breezes, generating enough power to light 43,000 homes.

The 130-megawatt Benton County Wind Farm — the state’s first commercial power station fueled by the wind — went online this month about 90 miles northwest of Indianapolis near the Illinois state line.

The $250 million project is the first of six Indiana wind farms in the works that will generate a combined 3,000 megawatts, and several other projects are in the planning stage.

“We’re zooming from nothing to 3,000 megawatts in just a few years, but they’re just scratching the surface of the state’s potential,” said Eric Burch, a spokesman for the Indiana Office of Energy and Defense Development.

Indiana was once deemed unsuitable for wind farms because of the assumed lack of sufficient winds. But its wind potential was uncovered by a series of wind studies by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

The most recent, released in 2006, found that Indiana’s winds could produce at least 40,000 megawatts of electricity, or more than twice the state’s current generating capacity.

Another report released May 12 by the Golden, Colo.-based laboratory found that wind energy could produce 20 percent of the nation’s electricity by 2030, up from the current 1 percent.

That could be good news farmers like Bryan Berry, whose family has farmed in the Benton County area — Indiana’s wind hot spot — for 60 years. While farmers once used old-style windmills to pump well water to the surface, those rusted relics could be supplanted by high-tech wind turbines in the years to come.

Berry’s farm now includes one turbine owned by the Benton County Wind Farm, which was codeveloped by Cincinnati-based Vision Energy LLC and Orion Energy Group LLC, of Oakland, Calif.

Berry said he and his neighbors are still awed by the 400-foot-tall machines spread like gray giants along eight miles of a slight ridge.

“Some say they’re majestic, others just say, ’Wow, they’re big,”’ he said.

Under a 20-year purchase agreement, Duke Energy is buying all of the power the wind farm produces. Fifty additional wind turbines will eventually be added to the project, which sends the power it generates directly into the local power grid.

About 50 landowners who have turbines on their property will receive a total of about $750,000 each year in lease payments, with totals depending on the number of turbines they have.

Turner Hunt, Vision Energy’s project manager at the site, expects the annual payments to run about $8,000 per turbine.

“The landowner grows two crops now. He’s growing corn and beans and so forth and now the wind. And that gives him a sort a hedge in a down year, when you get a drought or a downturn in grain prices,” he said.

Another Benton County wind farm is expected to begin operating later this year.

The 750-megawatt Fowler Ridge Wind Farm will be one of the nation’s largest when complete, said Sarah Howell, a BP America spokeswoman.

That project is a joint effort between Dominion Resources Inc. and BP Alternative Energy Inc. A first phase is expected to go online late this year with 222 turbines that will produce about 400 megawatts, she said.

But efforts to develop others have slowed due to uncertainty over the status of a federal tax credit that provides a 1.9-cent per kilowatt hour benefit for the first decade that a wind, solar or other renewable energy project operates.

That tax credit was allowed to expire at the end of 1999, 2001 and 2003, leading to a “boom and bust” cycle that’s undermined the development of pollution-free renewable energy sources, said Gregory Whetstone, a spokesman for the American Wind Energy Association.

The credit is set to expire again Dec. 31 unless Congress renews it, and Whetstone said the uncertainty is impeding investors’ ability to line up financing.

“The investment decisions for projects to be completed in 2009 are being made today, and obviously there’s a reluctance to commit capital if you don’t know what the tax law is going to be,” he said.

Indiana lawmakers also have been hesitant to embrace the wind revolution.

In January, they rejected a bill that would have required the state to generate 10 percent of its electricity from wind, solar and other renewable sources by 2018. The state’s utilities argued the goal was too ambitious and would have cost them billions.

Jesse Kharbanda, executive director of the Hoosier Environmental Council, said a renewable energy standard like those in place in 26 states would attract new investment and jobs to Indiana, which gets about 95 percent of its electricity from coal-fired power plants.

Kharbanda said he and his colleagues will try again next year to push a renewable energy standard. He said they hope to arrange visits with lawmakers to the Benton County Wind Farm to help convince them of the need for a state standard.

“We’d like for them to see firsthand why our perspective about wind power is grounded in reality,” he said.



More details:

INDIANA’S FIRST: The Benton County Wind Farm, the state’s first commercial wind farm, went online this month. The developers are Cincinnati-based Vision Energy LLC and Orrin Energy Group LLC of Oakland, Calif.

POWERED UP: The farm generates up to 130 megawatts of power through an array of 87 1.5-megawatt wind turbines mounted on 265-foot-tall pylons. The turbines are driven by wind blowing against three 132-foot-long blades that give each machine a full height of 400 feet.

HOW IT WORKS: When the wind reaches about 22 mph, the turbine’s three blades generate their peak level of 130-megawatts. Higher wind speeds do not increase the output.

TOO WINDY: If winds rise above 55 mph, the turbines’ blades rotate 90 degrees in their sockets so their edges face windward and “dump” the wind to prevent structural damage.

KEEPING WATCH: Workers monitor each machine’s status by computer in a control building. Most problems can be corrected remotely.

MAINTENANCE: Sometimes a technician must work on the turbine. He scales three separate ladders inside the pylon to reach the wind-tossed housing that encloses the turbine.

“Up there, you can feel it rocking. It sways just like you’re on a ship,” said Jerry Short, a supervisor for enXco Inc., which manages the farm.