housands of them rise from the parched desert floor and hillsides flanking Interstate 10 in the San Gorgonio Pass northwest of Palm Springs; thousands more populate the mountains surrounding Tehachapi and the Mojave Desert, a hundred miles north of L.A.

In Southern California, land of excess, very little has the capacity to continually fascinate, amuse, or delight. But as you drive past them, it's hard not to wonder:

Will California reclaim its role as a world leader in wind energy? By John Lehrer Photographs by Todd Masinter

What are they? Where did they come from? What are they doing here?

Nearly everybody calls them windmills, but to be more precise, they're wind turbines — distant relatives of the machines that ground grain and pumped water in an earlier time. They generate electricity, and they could help resolve California's energy problems. But after two decades of boom-and-bust, wind power in California stands at a crossroads, and it's hard to predict what will happen.

Why Wind?
Most Southern Californians still remember with unease the state's electricity crisis, which began with escalating power costs in the summer of 2000 and culminated in the rolling blackouts that swept across Southern California in the winter of 2000–2001. The blackouts weren't merely inconvenient; they created a feeling that something basic was wrong with our infrastructure: How could our lights go dim?

According to the U.S. Government's Energy Information Administration, California's electricity crisis resulted from a core set of economic, environmental, and legislative factors, which included demand that outpaced the state's investment in new power generation, preexisting rules that forced utilities to buy high-priced power, and low water levels in the Pacific Northwest that led to a decrease in imported hydroelectric power.

Adding wind to California's energy mix makes good economic and environmental sense, advocates say, and could stabilize our capacity to generate electric power and reduce the chances of future crises. For one thing, wind power is unaffected by fluctuating fuel prices because wind is free and abundant. This, combined with a wind turbine's low maintenance requirements, means wind plants can produce energy for a stable, predictable cost.

Furthermore, modern wind turbines are powerful, efficient, and reliable. They produce 10 to 20 times the power of early wind turbines and are reliable for 98 percent of their 20-year life span. This has made wind energy cost-competitive with other fuels. For example, the wholesale cost of wind-generated electricity is about five cents per kilowatt-hour, compared with about four cents for natural gas (although in January of 2001, the cost of electricity generated by natural gas jumped to as high as 15 to 20 cents per kilowatt-hour).

Perhaps more important, wind energy is clean. It creates no pollutants or hazardous waste, which makes it even more attractive because electricity generation is one of the most polluting of all industries. About half of California's electrical energy comes from burning natural gas and coal (the energy from coal-burning plants is imported from out of state), which emit carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, and sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, which contribute to air pollution.

Some argue that because wind doesn't blow continuously, wind power plants can't respond to every increase in the demand for power. This is true, but "if wind power plants are distributed over a wide area, they can produce a fairly stable supply of power," says Tom Gray, director of communications for the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) in Washington, D.C. "And when it's windy enough to produce a lot of power, utility companies can just dial back the amount they receive from other sources."

Wind now produces about 1.5 percent of California's electrical energy, more than enough to provide residential power for a city the size of San Francisco. But only a small portion of the state's wind potential has been tapped. AWEA has estimated that wind could generate at least 10 percent of the state's electricity. "Tehachapi could easily produce twice as much electricity as it does now," says Linda White, executive director of the Kern Wind Energy Association.

California Breezin'
The course of wind energy in California has shifted with changes in political and economic policy for the two decades of its existence. The initial boom, what became known as the great

New Mitsubishi 600-kilowatt turbines in San Gorgonio Pass (top right), operated by SeaWest Windpower, were installed in 2001. A field supervisor for Enxco Service Corp., one of a half dozen companies that own and operate wind turbines near Palm Springs, schedules the day's maintenance (above).

California wind rush, began suddenly in 1981, when the federal and state governments offered generous tax incentives and favorable long-term utility contracts to entrepreneurs and investors willing to risk developing a new technology. Visionaries, techno-wizards, true believers, and not a few scoundrels answered the call.

Overall, the program was so successful that in the 1980s California dominated the worldwide development of wind energy. By 1987, nearly 15,000 wind turbines had sprung up, mainly in Altamont Pass (located southeast of San Francisco), Tehachapi, and San Gorgonio Pass, three of the windiest places in the country. This represented 95 percent of the world's wind capacity — although at first, many of these flimsy, hastily installed machines worked poorly or not at all.

Wind power output peaked in 1994, then dropped over the next few years. In 1995, California still produced about 30 percent of the world's wind energy. But long-term power contracts were running out, existing turbines were becoming outmoded, and federal and state incentives for new construction had dried up. "The state that once boasted 90 percent of the world's wind energy now operates less than 10 percent of it," Paul Gipe, wind advocate, author, and critic, said in 1999. "California has become a wind energy backwater widely scorned for its legacy of poor environmental practices."

But the state's wind energy fortunes were about to change, albeit briefly. In 1996, California moved to deregulate its electricity industry, and in 1998, legislation took effect that made available millions of dollars in state-funded incentives for renewable energy programs.

Winds of Change, Part Two

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