Albuq. Journal: The Eggbeater

By Rosalie Rayburn
Journal staff writer

Motorists driving between Moriarty and Santa Rosa on Interstate 40 have a new attraction to eyeball next to Clines Corners. What looks like a giant eggbeater sitting in a field just east of the community's gas station, restaurant and souvenir store is New Mexico's first commercial vertical axis wind turbine.

The VP100 turbine built by Placitas-based Vawtpower Management, Inc. stands 78 feet tall with curved aluminum blades about 50 feet across at their widest point. (The first four letters of the first word in the company name stand for vertical axis wind turbine.) At that location, with average annual wind speeds of about 14 miles per hour, it will generate enough electricity for between 25 and 30 average homes.

Vawtpower Management picked the location because of its visibility, wind conditions and access to power lines, said Paul Vosburgh, an investor with Vawtpower Management. It also wanted a site close to Albuquerque to attract maximum attention, Vosburgh said. Clines Corners was the closest point to Albuquerque where winds are consistently strong enough to generate power. The site's proximity to an Interstate travel center gives drivers an opportunity to stop and see the technology, he said.

And they have.

Jeffrey Anderson, general manager of the Clines Corners travel center, said he's had inquiries about the turbine from several West Texas ranchers who thought they could use one on their property.

Vawtpower Management has signed a deal to sell power from the Clines Corners turbine to the Mountainair-based Central New Mexico Rural Electric Cooperative, which supplies about 14,000 customers.

Vosburgh and Vawtpower Management president Jerry Berglund now plan to market their vertical axis turbines to businesses and co-ops in eastern New Mexico and windy parts of Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. The smaller vertical axis turbines offer many advantages for customers in rural areas, Vosburgh said. Unlike the 20-story-tall horizontal axis turbines, they don't need to be turned to catch the wind and their control systems are at ground level, which makes repairs and troubleshooting easier for maintenance crews.

Vosburgh said he previously worked for Alcoa, which collaborated with Sandia National Labs to research and develop the technology. Vosburgh founded his own vertical axis turbine company in the early 1980s and sold turbines to developers who used them to produce electricity commercially in California. But interest in the technology dried up when federal tax incentives expired a few years later, he said.

In recent years, a federal production tax credit of 1.9 cents per kilowatt-hour for wind energy has helped encourage new investment in wind energy, including four large wind ranches in New Mexico. That credit is due to expire in December 2007.

Congresswoman Heather Wilson, R-N.M., who attended a recent dedication ceremony at the turbine site, said she will try to get the credit extended or made permanent. Using wind power helps reduce the nation's dependence on high-priced fossil fuels such as natural gas, Wilson said.
At present, New Mexico ranks sixth in the nation for production with 407 megawatts of wind power at four commercial wind farms. All use turbines that sit atop tall towers; their vanes rotate on a horizontal axis.

(This article was the cover story of the Albuquerque Journal’s Business Outlook section on Monday, September 4, 2006. The Journal is New Mexico's largest circulation daily newspaper.)