A nearly treeless stretch of northern Indiana that once produced only corn and soybeans is now dotted with 87 hulking wind turbines that harvest the region's incessant breezes, generating enough power to light 43,000 homes.
The 130-megawatt Benton County Wind Farm — the state's first commercial power station fueled by the wind — went online this month about 90 miles northwest of Indianapolis near the Illinois state line.
The $250 million project is the first of six Indiana wind farms in the works that will generate a combined 3,000 megawatts, and several other projects are in the planning stage.
"We're zooming from nothing to 3,000 megawatts in just a few years, but they're just scratching the surface of the state's potential," said Eric Burch, a spokesman for the Indiana Office of Energy and Defense Development.
Indiana was once deemed unsuitable for wind farms because of the assumed lack of sufficient winds. But its wind potential was uncovered by a series of wind studies by the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
The most recent, released in 2006, found that Indiana's winds could produce at least 40,000 megawatts of electricity, or more than twice the state's current generating capacity.
Another report released May 12 by the Golden, Colo.-based laboratory found that wind energy could produce 20 percent of the nation's electricity by 2030, up from the current 1 percent.
That could be good news farmers like Bryan Berry, whose family has farmed in the Benton County area — Indiana's wind hot spot — for 60 years. While farmers once used old-style windmills to pump well water to the surface, those rusted relics could be supplanted by high-tech wind turbines in the years to come.
Berry's farm now includes one turbine owned by the Benton County Wind Farm, which was codeveloped by Cincinnati-based Vision Energy LLC and Orion Energy Group LLC, of Oakland, Calif.
Berry said he and his neighbors are still awed by the 400-foot-tall machines spread like gray giants along eight miles of a slight ridge.
