Wind farmers want to sell 'green' power

HEBER CITY — Six years ago, Tracy Livingston sold his $8 million medical device company and "went looking for the next big thing." An engineer, he settled on energy and was drawn to the mouth of Spanish Fork Canyon south of Provo, where winds blow 30-40 mph almost like clockwork every night.

He offered the owners of a gravel pit royalties on wind production, got a zoning change and approached Utah Power, the state's utility.

That's when things started getting complicated for Livingston as it has for other entrepreneurs looking to sell electricity to Utah's power company.

Utah produces 94 percent of its power from coal-fired plants. Only now is the Utah Public Service Commission deciding that the utility will have to pay for power from a new class of alternative energy projects in compliance with a federal law passed in 1978. Technological advances in wind technology have made projects of between 3 and 100 megawatts more practical to build — the class at issue in the proceedings.

But Livingston and other wind-farm developers aren't cheering in anticipation of a ruling, expected within weeks after more than two years of deliberations. They expect the Public Service Commission to adopt a rate structure that could make their projects uneconomical, even as PacifiCorp, the parent company of Utah Power, buys other states' wind power and offers it to Utah customers willing to pay a premium for "green" energy.

They blame Utah's rock-bottom pricing system for scaring off alternative energy projects, as well as a reluctant utility backed by a price-sensitive consumer watchdog agency and compliant regulators, and conservative Republican legislators unwilling to mandate a mix of renewable energy.

"What's their motivation to do this? They could just go build another coal plant," Livingston said at his office here for Wasatch Wind.

Utah is surrounded by states aggressively developing wind power: Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico each boast more than 200 megawatts of it; California more than 2,000 megawatts. Utah, beside a derelict windmill here and there, has a mere 0.2 megawatts of wind capacity, from a pair of turbines that help power the National Guard's Camp Williams. A megawatt is enough to power about 300 homes.