A couple quick responses before heading off to sleep. To dream, perchance, about tomorrow's meeting.

One dealing with six or seven of those huge windfarm projects (several of which were not even on that map, yet). Should be a fun three hours.

First, to Bonnie:

Most of the electric power from these projects is supposed to go to a "hub" in Idaho, where it will be distributed wherever it is needed. But the company folks tell us, it's mainly to Las Vegas. With options to California, Arizona and Oregon.

And to Melissa:

You're right about the project sites being selected according to profit margins. The feds tell us the reason the companies are proposing such huge wind projects in our part of the world isn't just because we have a lot of wind... it's because we have a lot of public land. And what private ranches we have tend to be huge, on the order of hundreds of square miles... (I have never heard anyone here ever discuss a ranch size in acres. It'd be kinda like discussing house or apartment sizes in square inches.)

So when you want to put a project in, you usually only have one private landowner to deal with, rather than in the prairie states where the landownership changes every quarter-mile (160 acres, if you're counting, or 64ha).

And as is the case with several of these projects, the investors just simply bought the ranches (for tens of millions of dollars) so they can build on their own property.

But most of these turbines are planned on our public lands. Again, only one owner to deal with (who appears to be rolling over to accommodate, just like they did with the oil and gas companies), and this one only charges a minimal annual lease fee to make exclusive use of a small piece of public land.

No royalties off the wind power that is generated. At all. Just a simple annual fee, like with cellular towers.

Hell of an incentive to stay off private lands, where landowners are a little wiser about what the use of their land is worth.

As for the idea of building turbines by existing roads... apparently these huge turbines (>400' tall, counting the blades) need an equally huge "safety zone" around them, of about a third of a mile radius. (That's the companies' recommendation.)

Apparently, the blades sometimes break and throw pieces off. So our highway department wants these things at least a half mile from any public road, and I suspect any other state would have similar concerns.

The good news is, scuttlebutt on tomorrow's meeting is that it isn't just another company telling us what they're going to do. Apparently the economic downturn is forcing this company (but not others) to delay some of their plans, and what they are hoping to learn is which of their many projects is environmentally the least objectionable, and most likely to be quickly approved.

A silver lining to anything, even a recession.

And so to sleep.