GRAND MEADOW TOWNSHIP, Minn. — It isn’t every day a structure the size of a 38-story building rises from Jeanette Curley’s bean fields. Digital camera in hand, Curley watched as workers in hard hats hosed off wind turbine blades to get them ready to be hoisted onto a steel stalk looming above the soybeans. She wasn’t going to miss this.

The Grand Meadow Wind Farm — the first wind project Xcel Energy will own and operate in Minnesota — was ready to top off a turbine looming over her Mower County farm.

Minneapolis-based Xcel is stitching together a wind farm roughly six miles long and four miles wide just south of Interstate 90, about 27 miles southwest of Rochester. Eventually Grand Meadow will hold 67 turbines, capable of producing 100 megawatts of power, enough to supply 33,000 homes.

On this gorgeous August day, Curley can see finished and half-finished wind turbines in every direction. The finished ones looked like giant pinwheels while the half-finished towers wait for a Paul Bunyan to slip on their whirligigs.

Curley, 54, and her husband Wayne agreed to allow two of the 1.5 megawatt turbines on their 240-acre farm, which has been in Wayne’s family since the Great Depression.

The decision didn’t come overnight.

The Curleys were first approached about a wind farm in 2001.

At first they were skeptical, she says. “People are always coming into town to sell farmers something.”

But unlike some of those folks, the developers for what would become Grand Meadow didn’t disappear after they made their pitch. EnXco, the renewable-energy company that managed the wind farm development for Xcel, was persistent. As time went by, the Curleys began to realize wind energy wasn’t a fad.

Wayne, who was on the township board for 27 years, rallied farmers to the project.

He would have loved to have seen this, Jeanette Curley said. Wayne died in a farm accident last fall.

“My husband is the one. He really pushed this. To get all those farmers on one wavelength …” her voice trailed off. “I’m just ecstatic. It’s just unbelievable.”

Xcel will need to find a lot more Wayne Curleys in the years ahead.

PLUGGING IN

In terms of the power it produces, 100-megawatt Grand Meadow is small compared to the plants Xcel is used to building, like the 750-megawatt coal plant under construction at a cost of $1.3 billion in Colorado. But there are many more wind farms than coal plants in Xcel’s future, especially in Minnesota.

The company now gets less than 5 percent of its energy from wind in Minnesota, but by 2020, must produce 30 percent of its power from renewable sources to reduce dependence upon dirty coal. At least 25 percent of that clean energy must come from wind.

That translates into roughly 3,000 megawatts of wind-produced energy that Xcel will have to buy or build in the next 12 years.

Put another way, that’s roughly 2,000 wind turbines.

To begin to meet that need, Xcel put out a request for proposals last December for 500 more megawatts of wind energy that could be available by 2011, and got responses for 22 projects in Minnesota, North and South Dakota and Iowa.

The proposals add up to more than 3,000 megawatts of wind from which Xcel can choose, according to a plan it filed earlier this month with the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission.

But there are challenges that could slow the work.

Negotiations with property owners, usually for long-term leases, can take years.

For Jeanette Curley, who now rents out her land to someone else to farm, the extra income (which she declined to specify) for allowing two turbines is welcome. But not everyone with property in the Grand Meadow project area decided to participate.

Jim Fuller, 84, of Austin, said he supports wind energy. But the developers told him that because of the slope in his 400 acres in Grand Meadow, only two turbines would work on it.

Fuller and his business partner rent their land to a farmer, and said they decided the $5,000 they were offered per turbine per year wasn’t worth the lost crop production and hassle of his farmer plowing around the access roads and site, so they passed.

“No hard feelings, no problems,” he said.

Another issue: a federal tax credit that encourages development of wind power and other forms of renewable energy is set to expire at the end of this year. If Congress doesn’t extend it when it returns to session in September, the loss of the production tax credit will bring work on most wind farm projects across the country to a halt.

Finally, the state and entire wind industry is wrestling with inadequate transmission capacity.

Southeast Minnesota and the region called Buffalo Ridge on the west end of I-90 are rich with wind energy potential but there’s a bottleneck getting that electricity to urban areas that need the power such as the Twin Cities.

Xcel is proposing changes to speed up approval for new transmission lines, but in the meantime will add five 34.5 kilovolt power lines in the Grand Meadow area.

The five lines will carry power from the 67 turbines to a substation, where a single 161-kilovolt line will run to another substation that plugs into the region’s power grid, said Nathan Svoboda, Xcel’s plant manager.

EnXco, the U.S. arm of a French energy company, will run the farm for its first two years, as it teaches Xcel employees wind farm maintenance. Then it will hand it off, said Svoboda.

HEAVY BALLET

Wind power is new to Svoboda. Previously, he worked at an Xcel garbage-burning plant in Mankato and before that, at a coal plant in Rapid City, S.D., for Black Hills Power Co.

Construction of the farm has been quick. The gravel access roads and concrete foundations were laid before Svoboda arrived in July and the workers, from Mortenson Construction in Minnetonka, topped off 37 turbines in six weeks. On some days they finish three or four, he said.

The site is a hive of heavy equipment, pickup trucks and spindly cranes.

“People are moving in and out almost like a precise ballet,” said Warren Grieves, enXco’s spokesman.

Once the foundation is laid, a crane stacks the bottom two tubular steel sections of the tower. Meantime, workers attach the three blades to the hub on the ground to form the rotor.

For the final stage, a larger crane is rolled in, and the top knuckle of the 253-foot tower is lifted into place. Workers bolt it into to the tower with the machine-gun rattle of a pneumatic torque wrench.

The square machine head, called a nacelle, is next. It’s 12 feet tall, can be entered by ladder inside the tower for maintenance and lets workers who can stomach the heights climb through a hatch onto the hub outside.

It contains the power generator, and at 62.5 tons, it’s heavy. An 18-wheeler weighs only 40 tons.

The blades, by comparison, are considered light. Made of fiberglass, they weigh only 13,900 pounds apiece, or not quite 7 tons.

The blades and hub get lifted last, very carefully, with guide lines wrapped around the tips to help position the blades.

Folks who live in the area often stop to watch.

Once the turbine is complete, the crane’s diesel engine roars to life and it begins to creep off like some weird walking tree. The workers pack up and it’s off to the next tower.

TAX CREDIT

As long as Grand Meadow is operating by the end of the year, it can claim a federal energy production tax credit for the next 10 years.

Other projects may not be so fortunate. The renewable energy tax credit costs the country $3 billion over 10 years, and it has had to be renewed repeatedly since its creation in 1992.

During the periods when it has been allowed to expire, wind development dropped by as much as 90 percent, said Gregory Wetstone, senior director for government and public affairs for the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), a trade group.

Total U.S. installed wind power capacity stands at 19,549 megawatts this year, with new capacity of 2,725 megawatts added so far, according to AWEA, but the pace slowed in the second quarter as nervous developers eyed the calendar.

The association says the country could add up to 7,500 megawatts of wind energy this year if developers get a reason not to suspend projects that may not beat the clock.

AWEA staffers traveled to the Democratic National Convention in Denver last week to push for the tax credit extension and plan to do the same as a sponsor at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul this week, Wetstone said.

“I think (the tax credit) will eventually be extended,” he said. “The question is when.”

Meanwhile, Jeanette Curley has a sense of satisfaction, and her picture.

“This is a wonderful project,” she said. Then she laughed. “The only problem is it doesn’t come with a hookup to run an extension cord out to it.”

Leslie Brooks Suzukamo can be reached at 651-228-5475.