Building Wind Power Superhighways

Oct. 04--The wind is so strong in Iowa and Kansas that more wind farms there could power the country's largest cities if only there was a way to move that electricity to where most people live.

Enter Michael Skelly, a Houston businessman who envisions building five superhighways -- transmission lines -- to carry vast amounts of wind-generated power across more than 3,000 miles, multiple states, hundreds of jurisdictions and thousands of pieces of privately owned land.

The lines, the diameter of a human arm, would be hoisted on 150-foot-tall structures, about the height of the Statue of Liberty foot to top of torch.

The founder and president of Clean Line Energy Partners has two $2 billion lines in the works that would slice through Illinois: Rock Island Clean Line across the top of the state, and Grain Belt Express downstate, each shipping enough electricity to power 1.4 million homes annually. Importing that much cheap wind power has the potential to dramatically cut electricity prices in Illinois and help the state meet its goals of deriving 25 percent of its energy from renewable sources such as wind and solar by 2025.

Skelly's idea is that with high-voltage lines crisscrossing the United States from every area where the wind blows, they would nearly always carry wind-generated power. That's significant because in Illinois and states to the east, wind blows intermittently, which results in electricity generated in fits and starts.

"This is necessary and helpful to a cleaner energy mix, a more diverse energy portfolio," said Skelly, 52. "If it's all connected, then the wind is always going to be blowing somewhere. Not all the time. But with a much higher confidence interval."

His efforts have brought together an odd collection of bedfellows, pro and con, who, under any other circumstance, would be unlikely pals at a Texas barbecue.

On his side is an army of nouveau environmentalists who see this businessman's for-profit transmission line company as a way to save the world, because wind power doesn't produce greenhouse gas or contribute to climate change. They are aging ranchers, whip-smart Rice University graduates, engineers who jumped ship from wind companies, Republican politicians and people like Eleanor Elbert.

Just 24, the soft-spoken 2012 Princeton University grad was in Belize four years ago with other environmentalists fighting offshore drilling. Today, Elbert is fighting on the side of an energy company instead of against it.

"I've always been concerned about climate change," she said. "This could enable so much wind power to get integrated into the grid."

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Building Wind Power Superhighways