ST. LOUIS (AP)--With new technology driving down the cost of developing wind energy, private developers and the state are looking at whether a large wind farm could work in Missouri.

The Department of Natural Resources is working with utilities to study winds at high elevations to find out if a large commercial wind farm--like the Gray County Wind Energy farm in southwest Kansas that generates 112 megawatts of power with 170 turbines, enough to power 40,000 households--might be possible in Missouri.

The state's two largest utilities, Kansas City-based Aquila Inc. and St. Louis-based AmerenUE, have agreed to help fund a $150,000 study. The yearlong study through the University of Missouri-Columbia will look at six locations.

Kansas City Power & Light and Joplin-based Empire District Electric Co. are working on a similar project with the Department of Natural Resources, said Rick Anderson, an analyst with the department's Energy Center.

"I'm expecting that our best wind resource is at least in the realm of being worth further investigation," Anderson told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "Sometimes you just have to keep walking off into what's a little bit foggy ahead of you."

And thanks to a $25,000 in federal funds, the Department of Natural Resources was able to get new maps of the state's wind speeds. The maps, delivered in March and created with computer models and meteorology to estimate wind speeds and density, show the windiest part of the state is in northwest Missouri, rather than southwest Missouri as a map from the 1980s showed. The federal funds covered about half the new maps' costs.

Bill Barbiere, Ameren's managing executive of renewables, said the reduced costs of developing wind power, driven by innovations such as improved turbine design, prompted his company to look at wind power in Missouri.

The cost of developing wind power has dropped 80 percent over the last two decades, according to the American Wind Energy Association, and wind energy capacity has more than tripled since 1999 to 6,740 megawatts.

"Technological advances have helped so you can now look at areas that you thought might not give you the best wind-energy potential," Barbiere said.

Date: 6/23/05

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