When Brad Crandall Jr. opened the electric bill for his fertilizer manufacturing company in June, it was as if the weight of high energy costs were swept away by a cool breeze. The Pacific Gas and Electric Co. bill was $11.52, down from almost $5,000 a month previously to run the factory in Suisun City.

"It was so wonderful," Crandall said. "We all dream of not having a PG&E bill."

Crandall's company is saving money by taking advantage of a fast-growing, clean technology. But if you're thinking this is another example of the benefits of installing solar panels, think again.

Two windmills were installed at the plant in spring, propelled by the consistent marine winds blowing from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The wind turbines are generating enough electricity to allow E.B. Stone & Son to run its organic fertilizer plant and sell some back to the utility. With the savings, the company plans to add another warehouse, hire more workers and perhaps shift to electric forklifts.

"This helps us control costs, so we can expand and hire more people," said Crandall, chief executive officer of the firm. "It helps the economy and local businesses. We love our new windmills."

With a state mandate to increase usage of energy from renewable sources, much ado has been made about the sun's bright future in California's energy production picture. But wind installations are frequently cheaper to build and more compact in some sites. The technology has matured and is already churning out more than quadruple the power for homes and businesses produced by solar installations.

Nancy Rader, executive director of the California Wind Energy Association, foresees wind providing 10 percent of California's power by 2020.

"People have the impression that solar is a bigger player in the renewable energy market, but that's not the case," Rader said. "And it won't be the case for the foreseeable future. We are much less limited. The wind numbers are large in terms of resources."

California's first modern foray into wind energy in the 1970s was a demonstration phase. Power produced by older wind turbines, such as those installed in the early 1980s at Altamont Pass, wasn't cost-competitive with other sources. The huge Altamont wind farm, with more than 5,000 turbines, was particularly controversial for causing the deaths of thousands of birds, including raptors, each year.

Newer turbines are safer for birds and can match, or even surpass, power prices from many coal and nuclear plants, Rader said, with the cost of producing wind energy dropping nearly 75 percent since 1980.

Investment grows

The state's utilities and private investors are betting on the growing wind industry.

The Sacramento Municipal Utility District and PG&E are including more wind power in their portfolios, and companies are putting up towers and turbines to capture wind and sell to users, including a wind farm in Solano County. Rader said total private investment in California wind energy since 2002 is more than $3 billion.

With better technology, bat and bird mortality rates are down, Rader said. Turbine blades move more slowly, allowing birds to see them in time, and tower designs now prevent birds from perching near the blades.

Rader said 2,000 turbines in Altamont Pass are currently being replaced with 100 newer turbines that will create more energy and cut down on raptor mortality.

Wind power turbines use the motion of wind-driven blades to make mechanical energy, which is then converted into electrical energy.

The wind industry is composed of two markets, utility-scale "wind farms," which use turbines and underground power transmission lines to connect the farm to the utility grid; and distributed-use systems, such as the one at E.B. Stone & Son, which provide on-site power, either standing alone or connected to the grid. They can be used to power commercial businesses, water districts, schools, rural homes and farms.

Rader said more than 13,000 of the state's wind turbines, or 95 percent, are in three major areas: Altamont Pass, Tehachapi and San Gorgonio, near Palm Springs.

California was one of the first states to develop utility-scale wind farms, and until 2000 had more installed than the rest of the country combined, Rader said.

Since then, Texas has become the U.S. leader, according to the American Wind Energy Association, with nearly three times as much utility-scale wind power capacity as California, which now sits at third, behind No. 2 Iowa.

Equipment in demand

A recent study by Robert Fountain, an economist at California State University, Sacramento, showed that the industry's recent growth is helping breathe life into a stalled economy. A typical wind farm installation employed more than 1,000 people during construction, the study showed.

On top of new construction, manufacturers are responding to demand for equipment. In 2010, 14 new manufacturers set up shop in the U.S., about the same as in 2009. Making wind power parts now employs 22,000 people at more than 400 plants building components in 42 states, according to AWEA.

California is home to major wind power manufacturers, including turbine maker GE Energy and tower supplier Ameron, Rader said. More than 15 manufacturers around the state are involved in manufacturing for the wind industry, and Rader estimates up to 5,000 people are employed either directly or indirectly by the wind industry.

Much as with solar-panel production, however, U.S. companies find themselves hard-pressed to compete with China, which became the world's largest producer of wind turbines in 2009.

Beyond the utility-scale wind farms, smaller turbines are being used to produce electricity for hundreds of homes and farms in California. These distributed generation units are a component of Gov. Jerry Brown's vision of clean power potential.

As part of the implementation of state Assembly Bill 32 – the Global Warming Initiative that mandates the state get 33 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020 – Brown gave specific goals for local clean energy resources, including 12,000 megawatts of new production from distributed-use wind systems.

Lately, however, the state's small wind industry has been severely hobbled because of allegations of fraud involving an incentive and rebate program run by the California Energy Commission. The program was suspended in March while the commission investigates. (See accompanying story.)

Local utilities on board

Utilities that serve the Sacramento region have invested heavily in clean energy sources, including wind.

SMUD gets about 23 percent of its energy from renewables, with about 2 percent of total power generation coming from wind, said Scott Flake, manager of power generation for the utility. SMUD operates a 102-megawatt wind installation at Solano County Wind Farm near Rio Vista, and is building wind turbines and towers at the farm to produce another 128 megawatts of power, Flake said.

"That will be coming online in the first quarter of next year, and will more than double our generation from wind," he said.

PG&E currently gets about 16 percent of its energy mix from renewable sources, such as wind, geothermal, biomass and small hydroelectric plants. In 2009, it contracted with Iberdola Renewables Inc. to buy and operate a $900 million, 246-megawatt wind generation plant in Southern California.

Some opposition raised

The growth of wind power, particularly the utility-scale wind farms, is not proceeding without opposition.

Some ranchers, farmers and other rural residents who live near wind farms have objected strenuously to the appearance and the noise from the huge turbines, some with blades 100 feet long.

In addition to their long-standing concerns about turbines killing birds, environmentalists have challenged wind-farm projects on the grounds that they despoil natural landscapes in remote areas and harm native species.

Many projects have faced legal challenges over these types of concerns. And there are practical problems to consider, as well.

Connecting wind farms in remote areas to the electrical grid can be expensive and time-consuming, and raises additional issues of environmental and aesthetic damage.

One of the problems with wind power is its dependence on a natural force –wind – that generally picks up at about 2 a.m., not a high-use time for customers, SMUD's Flake said.

"You can't store electricity," he said. "Once you generate it, you have to use it. Energy storage will be an up-and-coming topic, how we might store electricity in batteries or other technologies. We're doing some research in that area."

And it remains to be seen when the wind industry will mature enough to survive without a reliance on tax credits and government incentives.

Small projects have withered while California's incentive program has been suspended. And federal tax incentives on wind installations will expire in 2012.

"We do see a future in wind," said Mark Tholke, vice president of the southwest region for enXco, a renewable energy design, construction and management firm. But he worries about the end of federal tax credits.

"Unless those are extended, we'll see a dramatic contraction in wind industry," he said. "The market will just crash."

© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.