Wind farms pick up speed in Idaho
This is part of a continuing
series in which one person from each of the 50 states will be interviewed
about their lives, community and state of the union.
Four years ago, farmer Leroy Jarolimek of Burley, Idaho, didn't know
anything about wind power. $530,000 in grants later, he'll never pay
another power bill in his life, and he's working to help other farmers
see the light at the end of the wind tunnel as he sets up shop on
his family farm.
Jarolimek, 62, is the son of a farmer who shares in a significant
American legacy. In the 1950s, Jarolimek said the federal government
plotted hundreds of thousands of acres of land, mostly desert, to
help veterans get started with a new life.
"It was a good deal," said Jarolimek, whose family turned
the ground with special machinery that allowed for the successful
irrigation of the arid land for growing crops.
With 2,000 acres of his own, Jarolimek has been producing sugar beets,
wheat, potatoes and barley for decades.
The federal government, he said, "isn't doing much to help family
farms survive."
Small farms are selling out, Jarolimek noted, because they just can't
make it economically. With quotas imposed on farmers who must watch
their surplus rot while foreign markets sell their cheaper, unregulated
harvests, it's getting more frustrating, and difficult, to be an American
farmer.
Aside from the tragic loss of our own amber waves of grain, the ramifications
of this are severe. In the United States, regulations exist to prevent
the consumption of many dangerous chemicals that are unregulated in
many of the third world crops we now consume, meaning the countless
food allergies that have cropped up might well be a reaction to toxins,
not to a seemingly harmless fresh-looking strawberry, for example.
"We're being pushed out of the market," Jarolimek said.
"We're at a competitive disadvantage, and we're bogged down in
bureaucracy. I'm confused by [President George W.] Bush. He says he
wants to help but then cuts funding from USDA and farm bills."
Nobody knows how the economic ramifications of losing American business
to third world countries are going to "wring out," Jarolimek
said. He remembers the days when the family farmers of Idaho would
"buck together" to help each other get their crops out,
but this value is being lost as "big farms from California"
have been ringing the death knell for the classic American family
business.
"Agriculture was federally protected because they wanted cheap
food for Americans," Jarolimek said. "Now we've been put
into the same basket as other businesses. We can't pass our costs
on to the public. The consumer is getting mislead, but people just
don't realize it."
When Jarolimek was first approached with the idea of a feasibility
study on his property for the possibility of establishing a wind farm,
he was against it.
For a long time, he said, the "federal government played games
with the energy bill," while heavy lobbying went on for a production
tax credit for renewable energy. Prior to the passage of this credit,
he said there was "hardly any wind energy at all."
"Most of the people who fight wind power haven't taken the time
to get educated," Jarolimek said. "At first people were
skeptical. They thought it would kill birds and devalue property.
Now the public has turned around 180 degrees. There's tremendous potential,
especially for agriculture. It's exciting."
Two wind farms on Jarolimek's property will take up seven acres each,
and he can still plant his crops around them, since they'll be carefully
engineered around irrigation systems. A private investor has agreed
to help defray the cost of establishing the wind farm.
"We're facing a national crisis of energy resources," Jarolimek
said. "This is becoming really important."
Where's there's money, there's a change in perspective, and that's
what happened. Fluctuations in the price of natural gas can drive
utility bills through the roof, but that's not the case with wind.
Eventually, 14 turbines on Jarolimek's farm will power a whopping
12,000 homes.
A 120-foot-tall, 20-kilowatt turbine was installed on his farm in
2004 to get the project started. He said he hasn't paid a single utility
bill for his house, pumping water to three homes, his farm or his
manufacturing shops since.
The turbines will cost over a million each to install, and will stand
up to 250 feet.
Jarolimek said proper placement of the windmills is critical, a position
that was echoed by environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who found
himself in the crosshairs of friends and foes alike when he opposed
the first major offshore wind farm proposal in the United States,
off the coast of Cape Cod, where his family famously owns property.
Cape Wind Associates is reportedly hoping to power 75 percent of demand
on Cape Cod and neighboring islands Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket
with a 420-megawatt output wind project. Kennedy prominently posted
his opposition with an op-ed piece in the New York Times on December
16, 2005:
"As an environmentalist," he wrote, "I support wind
power, including wind power on the high seas. I am also involved in
siting wind farms in appropriate landscapes, of which there are many.
But I do believe that some places should be off limits to any sort
of industrial development. I wouldn't build a wind farm in Yosemite
National Park. Nor would I build one on Nantucket Sound…"
According to Kennedy, technologies are evolving at a rate that would
permit extensive development further offshore with less destruction.
Jarolimek said a heightened focus has been placed on discovering the
proper venues for constructing windmills.
To that end, he received a total of $30,000 from the United States
Department of Agriculture prior to the half million from the same
agency that went toward his project once it was determined that his
farm offered the right variables.
Once the tax production credit went into effect, Jarolimek said two
years' worth of production materials were sold in two weeks, which
pushed the process back. A bidding war drove the price up, and rampant
construction in China has created a shortage of steel. Coupled with
last year's record-breaking hurricane-related catastrophes and the
necessity to rebuild, materials are at a premium.
I often return to something Brian Hugick, an earth science teacher
from Somers High School, once told me about the effect of human nature
on energy consumption. Whales, he said, were practically facing extinction
before humanity turned to kerosene instead of burning their blubber.
And so it seems that just as we complete our exploitative rampage
through one resource and turn to another, our existence and development
as a species is largely characterized by the ability to harness energy
and transfer it into the collective path of human history.
We have so much to learn and discover.
Jarolimek is right. It's exciting.
