The Rocky Mountain Collegian

Issue date: 5/11/09 Section: News

Media Credit: Brandon Iwamoto Power lines disappear over the horizon at the Maxwell Ranch near the Colorado-Wyoming border on Saturday morning.

LIVERMORE -- A long train of electrical transmission lines, supported by large skeletons of power transformers, vanishes over a distant horizon east of Red Mountain Road on the edge of the 11,000-acre Maxwell Ranch in northern Colorado.

The road, which CSU plans to use as construction access for its proposed Green Power Project -- a lofty initiative to power the university's main campus solely with wind energy -- snakes through a network of deep arroyos and large hills in the windswept foothills of the area.

Nina Jackson, a member of a group of about 35 local property owners that organized to oppose the project in October, steered her white Ford F-350 over the crest of one the hills and pointed out a CSU weather tower close to the power lines.

"The winds are typically pretty fast here," she said, explaining that the fierce foothills wind is often unpredictable, bringing problems to the project, which, university officials admit, is already uncertain. "With the change in terrain, you have to expect how the wind is going to change from this area to this area."

If construction of CSU's wind farm is successful, she said, the tower, which gathers meteorological data for the university's Atmospheric Science Department, will be joined by dozens of massive wind turbines that are expected to completely fuel the university.

But the project -- which comes with a $400 million to $500 million price tag and is pending large amounts of research to determine its viability -- is not without skepticism.

Jackson and the 35 other local residents formed the group to protest the initiative because, they say, preliminary preparations for the project herald a largely unattainable goal, pitting the university's contractor against a myriad of challenges.

The group cited a number of problems that threaten the legitimacy of the project that include:

What the group said is a lack of commitment to the will of the rancher who donated the land to CSU for agricultural research

A lack of existing infrastructure to transmit the energy produced by the wind farm to the energy grid and ultimately to CSU

Inconsistency of wind velocity on the hilly property, and

Continued...

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