Stand under a tower and you hear the ocean, but faster. The gentle swoosh, swoosh, swoosh of the blades rolls over you like up-tempo waves lapping on a beach. Only there is no water here. Wild Horse Wind Farm is in central Washington State, arid sagebrush steppe in every direction. On a clear day, you can see the heavy hitters of the Cascades—Adams, Hood, Rainier—in the distance.



This climb is also the equivalent to scaling an 18-story building.

The only sign of civilization is the towers and their ocean sounds. Wild Horse has 149 of the towers, enough to power 63,000 Washington homes that reach from nearby Ellensburg to the actual ocean, about four hours away. Wild Horse is an unusual wind farm. For one thing, it has a visitor’s center that welcomes 15,000 people a year and maintains a (nearly) five-star rating on TripAdvisor. (What utility company gets a five-star rating for anything?) The energy facility is also a nature preserve whose 11,000 acres connect neighboring government-­managed wildlife areas. You can stand inside a turbine tower, learn how wind could power your flat screen, and then step outside to encounter a herd of elk.

Potter checks a control panel for signs of overheating. Kyle Johnson

The attraction to Wild Horse is thick with its small staff. Take Andrea Nesbitt, manager and all-around utility woman at the visitor’s center. She scored an internship at Wild Horse during her senior year at a nearby college, then turned that into a two-year part-time stint, stepped up to a contractor position for seven years, and finally, last March, accepted a staff gig. “I kept hanging around,” she says.

Her colleague Ron Potter maintained the 34 miles of access roads at Wild Horse—filling, grading, plowing—as a contractor for ten years while he waited for a permanent position. One finally opened last year, after someone retired, and Potter felt lucky to fill it. “It’s one of the prettiest places you could ever work,” he says.

The Wild Horse land sprawls over and around Whiskey Dick Mountain. The name sounds less off-color when you consider nearby Whiskey Jim Creek. And the acreage covers steep ridgelines and valleys with Dick being more of a bump and incidental high point. Deer, elk, bear, and bighorn sheep roam the sage-dotted hillsides; the air is a mix of songbirds and raptors.

“The main hazard is falling objects; make sure you’re tied off so you don’t become one,” says Nesbitt. The rings behind her ­measure wind speed and direction. Kyle Johnson

It seems an odd place for a power plant, amid all this beauty. But environmental protection was a selling point when the utility company Puget Sound Energy proposed building Wild Horse in 2004. PSE replaced an absentee landowner and planted sage plugs to restore the steppe habitat that has been shrinking as neighboring farmland expands. The company keeps its footprint small, and consistently passes its environmental compliance checks by the state. Wild Horse also opened the land to the community. Sunup to sundown, the roads and trails are open for hiking, mountain biking, and seasonal hunting. ­Nesbitt leads wildflower tours every spring, and bikes and hikes over the dirt in her free time. Potter, a hunter, bushwhacks off-trail and spots animals with the same binoculars he uses to check turbine blades for damage.

“You’re looking down on God’s country from up on this great hill."

Scattered from northwest to southeast across two ridges, the Vestas V80 turbines stand 351 feet tall from foundation to blade tip. The blades resemble airplane wings and work on the same principle of lift. As wind passes around the blade, its curve creates a pressure differential that pushes it toward the low-pressure side. At peak efficiency, about 31 mph, the blades spin at a lazy 17 rpm. By itself, a poor power source. But an 18-ton gearbox in each nacelle (the mechanical room at the top of the tower) connects the driveshaft to two sets of planetary gears (cogs within a cog) and a helical gearset, like what most cars use, to wind up to 1,900 rpm at the generator.

The generators grind out as much as 2.0 megawatts. And before the electricity leaves the tower, a transformer inside the nacelle steps it up from 690 volts to 34.5 kilovolts. A higher voltage prevents significant power loss to the resistance of transmission lines, so it’s also sent to Wild Horse’s substation for another step up before it hits PSE’s grid. Nesbitt and her team run the tower inspections, climbing as many as four a day to check repair work from contractors and spot new trouble. Climbing the towers, they say, is reason enough to work at Wild Horse.

There are four landings to stop and rest, if needed, on the climb up a tower. Kyle Johnson

To climb a tower, says Nesbitt, you start with a full-body harness and APE self-rescue kit on which you could rappel down in an emergency. At the base of the ladder you clip into the Lad-Saf fall arrest and the climb assist, a personal winch that provides 125 pounds of lift and feels like a tow rope, says Adam Crawford, one of Wild Horse’s four tower inspectors. You sit back into the harness for a boost as you pull the rest of your weight up the rungs. A fast ascent takes around three minutes. Without the assist, it could be 15.

The ladder you’re climbing, by the way, is attached to the inside of the tower by neodymium magnets. Not a single bolt or weld, just metal blocks with 88 pounds of magnetic force. The design feature improves the strength of the tower by eliminating potential weak points from drill holes or the heat of welding. This climb is also the equivalent to scaling an 18-story building, but oddly, says Potter, there isn’t a feeling of being up off the ground. No fear of heights will trigger. As you climb the narrowing tube—just 7.6 feet across at the top—you’ll feel a subtle sway, but never the height. On particularly windy days, the top rocks back and forth like a boat atop the 221-foot steel pole. The only feeling you might have is seasickness, if you’re up too long.

Nesbitt and Ron Potter examine a spare gearbox. This turbine transmission requires a 250-foot crane to be replaced in the nacelle Kyle Johnson

At the top of the ladder you reach the nacelle, a 10-by-50-foot box packed with the generator, transformer, and gearbox, which keeps a constant growl as it tries to match the wind speed. But then there’s the top of the turbine, too. Through two hatches, you can pull yourself onto the top deck of the nacelle and—after attaching yourself to both anchor rails—stand up for that 100-mile view into the mountains. “You’re looking down on God’s country from up on this great hill,” says Potter. “Everything looks so small. Our big construction equipment below looks like toys.” You can see these towers from down on Interstate 90, but from there, you can’t appreciate the scale. Up here, you feel it—the breadth of the land, the light on your face, the power of the wind.

This appears in the March 2018 issue



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