Inside the First Wind-Powered City in America
Rock Port, Mo., may be a small rural town, but it has big energy ambition.
May 19, 2008— -- Rural Rock Port, Mo., looks like just about any small farm town -- with mostly cattle pastures and cornfields. But there is something remarkable on the horizon.
Peeking out above the rooftops and the tree line stand four towering windmills. The sleek 40-story turbines spin like pinwheels in the afternoon breeze, harvesting Rock Port's newest crop, wind-generated electricity.
The turbines now power every computer, every appliance and every light in town -- even the only traffic light on Main Street -- making this city of 1,300 the first and only in the nation to run completely on wind power.
"It's a unique small town," said Eric Chamberlain, who runs the wind farm from his family's funeral home.
Chamberlain is also the local undertaker, which is how he got the wind farm idea in the first place.
"I was driving a funeral procession through Iowa," Chamberlain said. "We drove past an operating wind farm, and I was fascinated with the towers."
So Chamberlain began investigating how he could build a wind farm in Rock Port. It became something of an obsession for him.
At his office at the funeral home there are caskets on display along one wall, but tacked on another wall are wind maps.
"I grew up here. I lived here as a child, and I thought, well, you know, it felt breezy," he said.
Turns out it was. Rock Port is one of the windiest spots in the state.
After weeks of monitoring the wind, Chamberlain recruited the local power company and Wind Capital Group, the developers of a wind farm going up down the road.
They erected four turbines, which are expected to produce 16 million kilowatt hours of electricity every year -- 3 million more kilowatt hours than the city is expected to use.
"On most days, this is not only powering this town, but selling enough energy to power another town of its size," said Tom Carnahan, president of Wind Capital Group.
"What it's going to allow is to keep prices steady," Carnahan said. "They're not going to see the same kinds of increases in prices that other towns will."
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