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Northwest Wind Energy Output Surpasses 1,000 Megawatts by John Gillie The News Tribune, January 11, 2008

Electrical power generated by the wind and transmitted over Bonneville Power Administration lines has surpassed 1,000 megawatts peak capacity, BPA said today.

A thousand megawatts is enough to power some 680,000 Northwest homes and is equivalent to a normally-sized coal-fired power plant.

The capacity to generate windpower started slowly in the '90s but has expanded sharply in the last three years.

Until the fall of 2005, the windpower generation capacity in the region was less than 250 megawatts. By December that year, the windpower generation had jumped to 475 megawatts. By 2006, the wind capacity had reached 775 megawatts. By November of 2007, the peak windpower capacity had surpassed 1,000 megawatts.

Northwest power planners see the region's windpower capacity growing to 5,000 megawatts over the next two decades, the BPA said.