PIERRE, S.D. — The wind-swept Great Plains could easily augment the nation's thirst for electricity by removing political and practical roadblocks to major expansion of modern wind farms, industry officials say.

Electricity from wind amounts to less than 1 percent of all the power generated in the United States. But industry leaders say wind someday could generate up to 20 percent of energy needs.

Wind should supply at least 5 percent of the nation's energy by 2020, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

Breezy rural areas of the Dakotas, Montana and Wyoming could fuel huge wind farms, says Jim Burg, who chairs the Electricity Committee of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners.

Burg, an 18-year member of the South Dakota Public Utilities Commission, believes a giant wind farm up to 5,000 megawatts — which would nearly double the nation's total wind-energy output — should be built in the upper Midwest. The state lucky enough to land such a project would become an island for a mammoth wind-power support industry in a sea of potential, he says.

‘‘The first area that does that on such a scale is going to get the economic development,'' Burg says. ‘‘The large turbines are difficult to move on roads, and I believe manufacturing plants would spring up for turbines and blades and towers. The state getting them would become the hub for other large wind farms in the region.''

Clipper Windpower of California plans to build the nation's largest wind farm in South Dakota — a 3,000-megawatt, 1,000-turbine project that's planned to be built in stages as the transmission capacity increases.

States in a corridor from North Dakota to Texas are among those with the greatest wind energy potential and have drawn increased interest from wind developers.

But the lack of adequate lines to deliver extra electricity to power-hungry cities and uncertainty over a federal tax credit are big obstacles.

The tax credit is locked in at 1.8 cents per kilowatt-hour for the first 10 years that wind farms operate, making them competitive with the cost of power plants run on natural gas.

Congress recently reinstated the credit through 2005, but the federal incentive has lapsed three times since first passed in 1992. Each expiration sent wind-farm plans into a tailspin.

Wind projects totaling more than $2 billion had been on hold since Dec. 31, when the tax credit last lapsed.

Congress should extend the tax credit for at least five years to provide the industry more stability, says Tom Gray, deputy executive director of the American Wind Energy Association.

Even with the incentive's renewal, developing major wind farms on the Great Plains is hampered by inadequate transmission lines, Gray says.

The entire Great Plains transmission system needs to be redesigned and redeveloped, he says.

‘‘Transmission is a serious impediment in terms of using wind in a major way,'' Gray says.

AWEA calls for fixing electrical transmission system problems in three stages: reforming rules for use of the power grid, building some smaller power lines to eliminate existing constraints, and plowing up to $20 billion into two large, high-voltage lines from the Northern Plains eastward to Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Louis, and westward to Denver, Salt Lake City and the Pacific Northwest.

With only minimal manufacturing and relatively light demand for electricity in the Dakotas, mammoth wind farms are unlikely to be located in the Plains unless customers are found elsewhere and enough transmission capacity exists to carry power across state lines, says Susan Wefald, a member of the North Dakota Public Service Commission.

‘‘Lack of transmission is a major impediment to the large expansion of both wind and lignite (coal) energy sources in the Upper Midwest,'' she says.

A May report from the Department of Energy to Congress says the question of who pays for transmission expansions will be a major barrier to ‘‘large-scale exploitation of the abundant wind and coal resources in the Upper Midwest.''

Power lines capable of carrying huge amounts of current can cost up to $500,000 per mile.

Building transmission lines involves dealing with utilities, investors, landowners and environmentalists.

Burg says it may take federal assistance to erase the transmission bottleneck in the Great Plains. Major power lines are needed to feed more electricity from both wind farms and new power plants located near coal fields in Montana and North Dakota to metropolitan areas, he says.

‘‘Everybody says it's going to be impossible to build those power lines. I'm not personally convinced of that,'' Burg says.

FPL Energy, the national leader in wind energy development with 43 wind farms in 15 states, is interested in adding wind farms in the Plains, says John DiDonato, director of the firm. He, too, says major upgrades first are needed in the transmission system.

‘‘We have to be focused on the customer, and our customers are limited by the transmission constraints of the area,'' DiDonato says.

Increased electrical transmission capacity has gotten lots of attention since a major power blackout last year affected 50 million people in several eastern states.

Beth Soholt, director of Wind on the Wires, says more than 30 transmission studies are under way in the Northern Plains. The group, which supports increased development of the wind industry, believes wind farms are finally finding their niche.

‘‘The economics are starting to get there,'' Soholt says. ‘‘It's getting to the point where it really does make sense. It's going to happen. We just have to figure out how to do it best.''

Solving the transmission problem is a key to major development of wind energy in the Great Plains, Soholt says.

‘‘We've got this wind corridor right down through the middle of the United States, and South Dakota is among the best — if not the best — but we simply don't have the infrastructure to move large blocks of electricity out of here,'' she says.

The electrical industry has dealt with congestion in the grid system by building many local power plants fueled by natural gas. Large coal plants produce more than half of the nation's electricity but are expensive and face rigorous environmental obstacles.

Burg says coal plants take years to develop and build, while wind farms can be erected within months after design.

The ability to quickly turn natural gas plants on and off is a perfect fit for the intermittent electricity supplied by wind farms, he says. The huge propellers on wind turbines stop when there's no wind, and that's when natural gas can pick up the slack for power companies, Burg says.

Wind power had its last heyday shortly after the energy crisis of the 1970s. But poorly built turbines and falling fuel costs at traditional power plants snuffed interest in wind-produced electricity.

On the Net:

http://www.awea.org/

http://www.windonthewires.org