33 East: First Leg

I have to say we didn't expect to see 90 mammoth wind turbines twirling slowly in open farm fields outside of Portage on the way to Beaver Dam this past saturday.

For all of us who have travelled the state, we might come to get used to passing the rustic serenity of the typical Wisconsin farm field, bluff region, or any number of small towns, but to look up into the blue horizon and see one of these turbines – which then quickly comes to multiply and range over the contours of the entire valley (altogether a 17,000 acre wind farm) – the feeling is a strange mix of experiencing at once the oldest and newest of technologies known to us on earth.  One of the farmers who has allowed his acreage to host turbines says, "It's rather majestic, isn't it? Isn't it kind of a marvel about how they can get that much power out of the wind?" The 90 turbines can generate 162 megawatts of power, some 45,000 homes – an ironically 'small' part of the Wisconsin Renewable Portfolio Standard, which mandates Wisconsin Utilities to generate 10 percent of their energy from renewable sources by 2015. WI now gets around 3 percent from renewables, so the $350 million investment by WE Energies is just the tip of the...retreating iceberg.  Locations for wind farms tend to be studied by prospective energy companies for at least a year in advance in order to determine whether the area can produce a consistent wind source that is also not too forceful.  Turbines must receive at least 9 mph of wind to generate, but are also built with a brake component so to slow at a speed of 56 mph.

The nacelle, or body, portion of these turbines are 71 tons each; the weight of the tower 138 tons; the blade length 148 feet; and up to the tip of the tower 410 feet.  When we returned home the following night along 33 west, the turbines that had looked like sharp white scissors cutting through the crisp winter sky, now looked a bit more gentle slowly gliding in the dark.