Bring Back the Buffalo!

A Sustainable Future for America's Great Plains

Ernest Callenbach

Bison and wind power offer us strikingly parallel opportunities — ways to utilize the endlessly renewable resources of grass and wind that can preserve the Plains ecosystem and support its human inhabitants indefinitely. They are thus not at all the unrelated subjects they might at first seem. In the great test case that the Plains present to us, if we learn to honor and use the bison and the winds we will have made a fundamental transition in attitude from reckless exploitation to respectful coexistence with the great natural forces of the planet. Both bison and wind are there, waiting to teach us the imperative lessons of sustainability.

Only two generations ago, windmills were the normal power source for wells throughout agricultural America. Windmill, water-storage tower, and house constituted the basic image of the isolated farmstead, imprinted on our minds through a hundred Western movies. Spinning day and night, the faithful windmills pumped up life-giving water, the creak of their gears providing reassurance that all was well. Even today, amazingly durable old-fashioned windmills provide cheap and reliable pumping to many farms and ranches. Finding and rebuilding an old windmill, in fact, has now become the pride of former city dwellers moving to the country — a sign of nostalgia for a time when it was universal for farmers to draw energy directly from sun and wind and live sustainably on the land with their animals. But wind power is poised to return to the Plains in a new, highly sophisticated, modern-technology form.

As in any region, people on the Plains use energy for many purposes. Transportation, heating of dwellings and other buildings, refrigeration and air-conditioning, lighting, and water heating are the biggest direct ways in which energy is consumed — most of it in the forms of gasoline, electricity, and natural gas. Plains coal is used in large quantities to produce electricity. But overall, the Plains depend on (as does the United States as a whole) imported fossil-fuel energy — a regime that cannot be maintained indefinitely.

A basic criterion for a society's sustainability lies in its material and energy "throughputs" — everything that passes through the industrial system. Mining and smelting of metals, casting and stamping, refining of oil and molding of plastics, painting and finishing — all the processes of manufacturing cause substantial environmental impacts, as do the combustion-driven shipping and distribution of products. Such are the scale and intensity of contemporary industrial activity that these impacts are overwhelming the capacity of the earth's natural systems to absorb them. Thus, either a scale-down of industrial production will have to be accomplished voluntarily or nature will enforce it. For instance, executives of major global insurance companies are beginning to think that increased floods and other weather-connected disasters may be due to carbon dioxide-driven global warming. Higher disaster risks translate directly into higher insurance costs, which feed back to reduce risk-exposed human activities.

Similarly, energy-intensive farming and ranching convert imported fossil-fuel energy (turned into fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides, equipment and its fuel supplies, animal feed, and so on) into beef and wheat. The unsustainability of this situation is increasingly manifested through the rising operation costs experienced by farmers and ranchers.

On the Plains, the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy (solar, both thermal and photovoltaic; wind power; and existing hydroelectric development) will actually be easier than in other regions because of the Plains' sparse population and rich resources of grass and wind. Whereas solar installations will probably not become widespread until the middle of the next century, wind power is on the verge of wide deployment now.

It is sometimes argued that the transition to a sustainable-energy system, on the Plains and elsewhere, can be postponed indefinitely or avoided through reliance on coal and natural gas. The discovery of new large reserves of gas, in particular, has been welcomed by some as a sign that fossil fuels can power a century of continued economic growth. New supplies of carbon fuels, however, are in fact a curse rather than a blessing, since they will encourage the already industrialized nations (and rapidly developing larger nations like China and India) to avoid adopting renewable energy systems. However, burning up the planet's fossil fuel reserves will almost certainly exacerbate global warming to disastrous levels. Though gas produces somewhat less pollution and carbon dioxide than does coal, it can only serve as a transitional fuel to the renewable era.

A few scientists have begun to suspect, incidentally, that natural gas is a geological product still being created deep within the earth and not, like coal and oil, a fossilized biological product. Even if this turns out to be true, the long-term picture does not change; the gas-formation process, if it exists, must be enormously slower than human use of gas. Gas can serve, to some extent, only as a "bridge fuel" between the fossil-fuel era and a renewable-energy future.

A Plains Resource

Writers have often described the Plains winds as overwhelming — indeed, a character in O. E. Rølvaag's Gians in the Earth goes mad because of them. But wind, like grass, is a fundamental, permanent resource on which the Plains can draw for a sustainable future. And, as we shall see, wind and bison make an elegant combination.

Generated by differences in solar heat distribution over different regions of the planet, winds blow most strongly where they are unobstructed by trees, buildings, or rough terrain. Thus, the strongest and most constant winds are found at sea, along seacoasts, and in relatively flat country like the Plains, which are sometimes called the "sea of grass." The energy available from wind is proportional to the cube of wind speed. That is, wind three times as fast has twenty-seven times the energy, so wind installations are most efficient in high-wind locations. Many places qualify on the Plains.

Bison have always lived in harmony with the wind, and they survive winter weather so cold that ice forms on their beards. They face into blizzards, not away from them as cattle do, so they never crowd up against fences and freeze to death. When winter winds thin the snow on a rise, bison go there to nose down and find the underlying grass.

Wind and bison have fit together in the ecological past, and they have a sustainable future together as well. They are both dominant features of the original Plains landscape, and we can learn to rely on them both.

Our daily experience does not equip us to grasp the massive energy potential of the winds. But North Dakota's wind alone could provide 36 percent of today's total national electric demand; the state has more wind-energy potential than California, heretofore the nation's leader in wind power. The Great Plains as a whole could meet the nation's energy needs many times over. And wind installations, including the narrow service roads they need, occupy only a fraction of the land's surface, leaving plenty of room for bison. Well-designed "wind-farm" roads and towers do not cause soil erosion; wind-farm transmission lines can and should be placed underground wherever scenic values are important. And an important economic appeal of wind power is that leasing land for wind farms can provide much-needed supplementary income to ranchers, helping to preserve open space that might otherwise be developed into condominiums and strip malls.

Using their massive shoulder muscles, bison brush aside snow with their muzzles to reach grass beneath it. They will also eat snow for moisture if necessary, whereas ranchers must keep water sources open for cattle in winter. Photo: Michael H. Francis.

World Wind Power Today

The Plains need not play a pioneering role in wind power; they can merely follow along behind striking developments elsewhere. A wind farm may soon replace one of the reactors at the Chernobyl nuclear plant, and there are twenty thousand wind turbines spinning worldwide. Northern European wind-power installations are expanding rapidly, but projects are also under way in Argentina, China, India, Mexico, New Zealand, Spain, and other countries. In New England, the United Kingdom, and Poland, among other places, wind turbines producing large amounts of energy are being planned for mounting, like oil-well towers, in shallow offshore waters. Some energy experts believe that wind power will come to supply 20 percent of the world's energy.

In the past, public and media perceptions of wind power, along with the decisions of U.S. utility executives, were colored by a series of spectacular failed experiments with giant wind machines by Boeing, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, and the U.S. Department of Energy. The blades of some of these early monsters were as long as football fields, and, predictably enough, they vibrated dangerously. But the learning curve in developing more modest-sized and easily managed machines has been steep. Three or four technical generations of design experience in California and, more recently, in Europe have led to much more efficient blades and to more responsive, electronically controlled turbines. Wind is now a thoroughly proven technology.

Moreover, the maintenance and repair of wind installations is a nondemanding, medium-tech business for which the Plains could easily supply the work force. Working on wind machines does not involve the heroic precautions for radiation safety or drastic interruptions to service that nuclear plants are subject to; when a wind turbine needs repairs, hundreds of others nearby keep right on working. In certain damp locations, like Vermont's Green Mountains, wind machines are subject to occasional icing up in winter. But otherwise wind has become a reliable, almost humdrum source of power. It will be right at home in the American heartland, along with bison.

By its nature, wind power is irregular — some days, even on the Plains, winds drop off — so heretofore it has always been used in conjunction with other power sources. But the peaks and valleys of wind generation will soon be smoothable by the deployment of a new generation of storage devices, including high-tech flywheels as well as new types of batteries. Sophisticated flywheels that store impressive amounts of rotational energy are a still-unfamiliar technology but one nearing commercial application. Essentially high-tensile-strength and virtually zero-friction motor-generators, they come in sizes small enough to supply power for cars or houses and also big enough for use by power companies. They will be particularly useful in regions like the Plains, with thin and dispersed populations. Meanwhile, wind is a natural complement to the new natural gas-turbine generators, which turn on and off quickly and can thus make up for drops in wind output.

Although Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas have sometimes been referred to as the Saudi Arabia of wind energy, to this point wind power in America has developed on a commercial scale only in California and Hawaii. The Altamont Pass area, in fact, supplies enough power for the city of San Francisco's 700,000 people — about the population of Montana. Strong, consistent winds produce even more power near the Los Angeles metropolitan area. Like many other American industries, the intensive wind-power development in California since the 1970s has been encouraged by accelerated depreciation allowances and other occasional incentives, but its development now relies on sheer profitability.

The costs of building and installing wind turbines have dropped steadily and will certainly continue to drop. Some observers feel that Belgium and Germany have now surpassed the United States in wind technology, and the Japanese are also actively in the race. The authors of a recent study of American competitiveness in environmental industries note: "As is the case with other renewable technologies, wind power's early significant advances in this country have led to a worldwide technology development effort that far surpasses current domestic expenditures. In Europe, seven countries and the Commission of European Communities are each spending as much or more on wind energy research, development, and demonstration as the United States."

The old and the new: modern wind-energy technology, which has made wind power virtually the cheapest source of new electrical generating capacity, will gradually spread to profitably windy sites throughout the country.

But in America, wind power has made its striking advances despite the fact that government support still flows overwhelmingly to the oil, gas, coal, and nuclear power industries. According to the Congressional Research Service, nuclear power has so far received some $97 billion (in 1990 dollars) and soaked up 65 percent of all federal funds for energy research and development from 1948 to 1992 — not including the future subsidies that will be needed for decommissioning of closed nuclear plants and for disposal or storage of wastes and, conceivably, accident disaster relief.

Through advanced turbine design, wind power currently costs, on the average, about 5.3 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) to generate. This is roughly competitive with other types of newly built power generation — even with coal plants or natural-gas turbines — and markedly less expensive than nuclear power, which comes in at 10-12 cents per kWh, not including government subsidies and decommissioning costs. It is also less expensive than solar-thermal energy — produced by long reflective troughs heating fluid in a pipe to drive a generator — in sunny regions. Within a decade, wind power will probably be the cheapest known way to produce new electricity. It should cost 4 cents per kWh by the year 2000; if moderate tax incentives are provided, around 3 cents. A recent round of competitive bidding for power generation in California showed that wind turbines are already more economical than gas-plant repowering. They are also built very quickly, so when wind power really gets going on the Plains, it is likely to develop with surprising speed.

To assess wind power fully from a sustainability standpoint, a net-energy analysis should be carried out according to the same logic used to assess petroleum-based agriculture. How much energy goes into a wind farm's construction and, later, maintenance, versus how much comes out? A careful study along these lines has been done of photovoltaic cells — the devices now used to generate energy for roadside emergency phones, lighted buoys, and many other remote applications. Thin-film photovoltaic modules pay off in six months' to two years' time. It is almost certain that wind turbines pay off their energy investment in the first year of operation; thereafter, for the twenty or thirty years that an individual wind machine lasts, it generates net positive energy. Its maintenance causes hardly any environmental degradation, and it requires no mining or drilling, transportation of fuels, emission controls, or waste disposal.

Thus, wind power, as is recognized by most continental European countries and by the British, must be a substantial part of any long-term, sustainable national energy policy. It certainly should come to play a major role on the Plains, as it will in much of the world.

Over the next decade or so, the only way to acquire energy substantially more cheaply than through wind power will be to invest in installing more efficient motors, lighting, heating, and air-conditioning, thus creating "negawatts" — newly available power achieved without the building of new generating plants. Such conservation investments can make saved power available at a cost some 24-44 percent lower even than that of wind power — something that should have strong appeal to thrifty Plains people. U.S. energy use per capita is so high that conservation is now and will be for some decades the best energy investment we could make, and some state public utility commissions have found inventive ways to motivate utilities to help their customers improve efficiency. Many state regulatory agencies have yet to act on these long-term benefits for their economies, however, so the national pace of change has been regrettably slow. Yet in Iowa, a switch to renewable energy has been adopted as an official state goal, and six wind-power projects are planned or under construction. If the saying "As Iowa goes, so goes the nation" still has validity, this is good news.

Wind Power on the Plains

For the Plains, wind has a great many specific advantages over fossil-fuel power. It blows most strongly in the daytime and in the winter, when power needs are highest; it would thus be especially desirable for customers — businesses, farms, or householders — that presently pay stiff rates for peak-period power. Wind installations are highly compatible with ranching operations, whether of cattle or bison. From a jobs standpoint, residents of the Plains, which have suffered boom-and-bust employment in oil and coal, should find particularly appealing the fact that wind development creates about fifteen jobs for every million dollars of investment, slightly more than coal does,while hydroelectric power and natural gas are only half as job productive. Residents of rural southwestern Minnesota, aware of these figures, have lobbied their state legislature to push for wind development. (One site there is named Buffalo Ridge, and its present small wind farm will be greatly expanded by 2002.)

If current consumption trends continue, it is likely that the United States will depend entirely on foreign sources for its oil within fifteen years. But wind power is not subject to fearsome swings in international fuel prices — no OPEC could ever block the winds from blowing. Nor could wind power ever incur the equivalent of the costs we would bear in the event of new Persian Gulf warfare: we spent tens of billions of dollars in military costs defending Middle East oil fields against Iraq — equivalent to a public subsidy to the oil industry of about $100 per barrel.

Plains resources of biomass could also furnish massive amounts of energy through the burning of crop wastes and the cultivation of fast-growing fuel crops like switchgrass and coppiced poplar. Putting biomass and wind together with an aggressive energy-efficiency program could make the region self-sufficient in energy and result in long-term net savings to the regional economy of trillions of dollars — dollars that would no longer flow out of the region to the stock markets of New York or Tokyo or London.

Settlers experimented with different types of windmill blades to cope with extreme wind conditions. This model has been restored at Kauffman Museum in Newton, Kansas, which also boasts a small plot of tallgrass prairie.

Translating this potential into reality will, of course, take time. Even in Nebraska, which has a publicly owned utility system, there is as yet no renewable-energy development aside from the encouragement of ethanol production, mostly as a gasoline additive. However, small rural electric cooperatives can sometimes be individualistic and innovative, and a few may begin wind-power development soon. Only in Minnesota is rapid deployment in progress, since the legislature there mandated that the state's biggest utility bring renewable energy on line by December 1996.

Extensive wind-power development on the Plains would be a natural match with an increased presence of bison, and some ranchers are beginning to understand the financial possibilities involved. Entrepreneurs active in the field are not usually avid for publicity, probably because a key element in developing wind farms is obtaining rights from landowners to build towers and access roads; too much public awareness could lead to a "wind rush" and a rise in leasing costs. In windy parts of Wyoming, a hectare (2.47 acres) sells for around $100 but could yield $25,000 worth of electricity yearly. If Plains landowners received royalties similar to those in California, it would mean average annual payments of around $40 per acre on top of earnings from grazing or farming — enough, for many, to make the difference between bankruptcy and survival. In fact, since yearly cash rents for land range from around $30 per acre to $140 in rich-soil farm country, leasing land for wind turbines could greatly increase a landowner's income. Moreover, many prime wind-power sites are in elevated, poor-soil areas — exactly the areas where bison make special sense for ranchers. Income from leasing land to wind-power companies also has the crucial advantage for a rancher or farmer that once the wind-power installation's output is established, payments are made according to a long-term contract and thus provide security that volatile farm-commodity prices cannot offer. Some landowners could, in fact, grow rich, just as Texas ranchers did when oil was struck on their properties. Leasing to a 100-megawatt wind plant might reap earnings in the neighborhood of $400,000 per year.

The conditions for cooperation between landowners and wind-power companies are thus increasingly favorable, and some news has surfaced about upcoming developments. Kenetech, the parent company of U.S. Windpower, which was one of the major developers of the wind-power installation at California's Altamont Pass and now operates internationally (and is also active in biomass-energy production), recently announced a contract to build a Windplant^TM in southern Wyoming for a utility called PacifiCorp. This is among the first wind installations to be sold directly to a utility; most are operated by smallish private companies. The site is in Carbon County, so the plant's power can be routed to the fast-growing Denver metropolitan area, not far away. It is, of course, a delicious irony that a county named for its coal reserves should become a pioneer in wind power. Texas, which is within original bison range, also has some quite windy areas. Four wind farms are currently planned in western Texas. One, for a utility company, is not far from El Paso and will feature a dozen newly designed turbines whose blades are 130 feet across.

Indian reservations on the Plains include a lot of windy territory, and Indians are interested in the bison-wind power combination too. In South Dakota, Fred DuBray has had the eastern half of the Cheyenne River Sioux reservation mapped for desirable turbine sites, according to Mark Heckert. The Indian perspective on current energy issues is a bitter one. In the beginning, of course, the tribes tended to live along the rivers, until whites pushed them back into arid lands. The whites then proceeded, in the 1930s, to build hydropower and irrigation dams and flood what were the best low-lying wildlife habitats. DuBray literally watched his own house float away as a reservoir was filled, so alternative energy sources are not a theoretical concern for him. Now, like all the inhabitants of the region, Indians must pay electric bills for power — power they see as coming from dams on their land. So to Indians — although finding the investment capital will not be easy — wind power on a small scale, decentralized on the reservations but perhaps also sufficient to allow them to sell surplus power to the grid, beckons as a means toward self-sufficiency and independence from economic exploitation. Needless to say, this is a scenario that would fit in well with bison.

It was not only Indians who were affected by the dams. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers created lakes that extend virtually across the Dakotas, flooding out many bottomland farmers and ranchers in the process. These happened to include Roy Houck, who was forced to move the ranch operation on which he later pioneered bison raising. It is an intriguing energy footnote to Houck's story that his new ranch has hot-water artesian wells that not only provide water for his animals but also heat his houses, slaughterhouse, and shop. Unfortunately, such geothermal energy is not a significant factor in the future of the Plains.

Time has not been kind to the irrigation agriculture the dams were supposed to promote; nearly all the farmers who got into irrigation have gone bankrupt because of high power costs. Some have reorganized and are irrigation-farming again, but the low costs of bison raising are likely to prove more appealing over the long run.

A New Model for Utility Planning

A careful analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists, using computer modeling to isolate the top-quality sites for wind power in Kansas, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, and several neighboring states to the east, found that wind power could be installed in these areas in the near future for very attractive rates.

But in the deployment of electricity, access to transmission lines is actually a greater problem than is generating cost, and this has special implications for the thinly populated Plains. Like any large, central generating plant, a sizable wind farm must be located near existing heavy-duty transmission lines, since constructing new, long transmission lines is more expensive than constructing the power source itself. Unfortunately, the best Plains wind sites do not happen to lie near existing major transmission lines. However, wind power, like solar power, lends itself without economic penalty to smaller-scale plants. Thus, it seems likely that in the long run much wind-power generation, and not only in regions like the Plains, will provide electricity to relatively small areas over already existing power lines.

In fact, planners' increasing recognition that transmission and distribution costs are greater than generation costs has led to the concept of a "distributed utility," with many small-scale generating facilities rather than a few massive central plants. This idea has been gaining ground for traditional plants in densely populated regions, but it makes even more sense for a region like the Plains, with a light and dispersed population. Moreover, it favors sources of renewable energy such as wind, sun, and biomass, because plants utilizing these sources are modest in size and can be modular in design — hence easily, quickly, and gradually built. Integrated resource planning, a basic criterion for maximum long-term efficiency that enlightened public utility commissions have gradually been adopting, also welcomes such systems because they may deliver power to users at a price lower than a centralized system would; furthermore, they have advantages of reliability and flexibility.

Utility-scale wind-energy projects in the United States: new generating capacity scheduled for operation before 1997. American Wind Energy Association.

We may even see utilities or service companies offering individual isolated ranches wind-power installations to meet their own needs, entirely separate from the grid. There is an intriguing historical irony here because rural electrification was a major program of the New Deal, aiming to lift farmers out of their Depression-era isolation and poverty. To bring refrigeration, electric lighting, and even radios — on which farmers could hear FDR's presidential fireside chats — to farms at the end of the line, hundreds of cooperative electric companies were organized. Wires were strung to virtually all the scattered, lonely farms in the Midwest and on the Plains — a tremendously expensive undertaking. With present technology, it turns out, it would often be cheaper to give unserved farmers or isolated homesteads small wind-turbine and energy-storage installations and forget the wires.

Wind-power enthusiasts sometimes envision very large wind farms on the Plains that would be capable of providing power to urban areas — for instance, to replace the aging nuclear plants that ring Chicago when they begin to have accidents or are decommissioned. But to build new heavy-duty transmission lines over long distances would require billions of dollars in investment. Privately owned utilities thus will probably continue for some decades to build massive fossil-fuel generating plants near metropolitan areas. So wind power on the Plains is likely to develop for some time as a relatively rural matter. This may be to the good, however; a region with its own ample supply of local energy, not committed to distant buyers, is in a solid position for the future. And selling power back to the utility, a process that occurs whenever a wind installation has a surplus of power and "runs the meter backward," would certainly appeal to the thrifty instincts of Plains ranchers and farmers.

Perhaps most important of all, the political appeal of wind power will come from the fact that it keeps money within a state rather than exporting it in exchange for fossil fuels. It thus generates jobs indirectly as well as directly. Moreover, wind power provides a hedge against future rises in natural-gas prices.

Utility planners concerned about the reliability of wind and solar power (while living with nuclear plants, whose down time is often almost as great as their operating time) may find that one of their first compelling needs for wind-power installations is to meet fluctuations in demand in remote parts of their grids — a factor even more important in servicing the thinly dispersed populations on the Plains than elsewhere. Building local wind farms would be markedly cheaper than building more central generating and transmission capacity for the whole network.

But old ideas die hard, and the logical leap to realizing that the most important number is cost at the customer's meter, not cost at the generating plant, is not an easy one. If it were, all the Plains utilities would already be busy building modest-sized wind-power plants strategically placed to obviate the need for building bigger transmission lines. Indeed, where wind plants are situated near consumers, wind power may even now cost only 3 cents per kWh, all expenses taken into account — around half what most conventional power costs. When devices like flywheels become capable of storing wind-generated power overnight or longer, in both household-scale and industrial amounts, wind power will be used as "baseload" as well as peak-period power.

We might expect that such factors would earn very broad acceptance of wind power among utilities. However, because regulatory bodies customarily allow utilities to pass on fuel costs to their customers, they are not strongly attracted to the free-fuel aspects of wind and solar power. State regulatory bodies thus need to provide financial incentives that will lead utilities to diversify their energy base. Wind power's general benefits for society have led Congress to create tax credits for projects established before the year 2000, and this may spur Plains states into action — though many of them have yet to establish state energy offices.