By Matthew L. Wald
The New York Times
The wind industry’s main trade association is predicting that new installations will fall to zero without a renewal of the production tax credit, which applies only to projects finished by New Year’s Eve. Since renewal is iffy, some wind machine factories are already shutting down, as my colleague Diane Cardwell reported on Friday.
From another perspective, this is the moment for the feast before the famine: the impending deadline means that a surge of projects are approaching completion.
On Saturday, officials will cut the ribbon on what some people say is the largest onshore wind farm in the United States, Shepherds Flat in north-central Oregon. (We will defer to whatever the Guinness Book of World Records decides; the title of biggest depends on whether the Alta Wind Energy Center in the Tehachapi Mountains in California is counted as one project or five.)
The Energy Department puts the capacity of Shepherds Flat at 909 megawatts, although, like most wind farms, it will operate most of the time at a lower output. Its 338 turbines are spread over 32,000 acres just south of the Columbia River, in an area that has already drawn so many wind machines that it often referred to as a “wind ghetto.”
