Windmills spinning energy for the future.

The treeless waterfront expanse of the South Shore of Randall's Island will soon be dotted with underwater turbines, solar panels and windmills as part of a $1 million power station pilot project undertaken by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.

The comprehensive project is one of several local programs designed to use wind energy to slowly draw pressure away from the state s taxed electrical grid and reduce the city's dependence on fossil fuels in the future.

"In some ways, our project is a throwback. A number of our parks are places where, 200-300 years ago, these kinds of techniques were used routinely," said Adrian Benepe, commissioner of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. "Now things have changed and we as a society are recognizing that we need to do more to preserve our local ecosystems, as well as the larger ecology of the planet. If we find that these same sources can be harnessed properly and economically, then they can bring us completely renewable, inexhaustible and efficient sources of energy we will need."

Other large scale projects that have incorporated wind technology into their plans include the Statue of Liberty on Ellis Island which switched over to 100% wind power last year, the Freedom Tower, whose windmill plans were scrapped in 2005, and the Fresh Kills landfill, which is currently being examined for the possibility of installing several windmills to power nearby homes as part of the region's redevelopment plan.

More recently, the New York Power Authority, a state entity that brokers power, negotiated a contract to purchase 72 megawatts of wind power for various city government agencies, including the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Port Authority, to purchase power from two farms in upstate New York--Maple Ridge Wind Farm and the Madison Wind Farm, the largest wind farm east of the Mississippi.

Wind power currently accounts for a total of 369 megawatts of wind going into the New York State grid--a relatively small percentage of the overall demand for electricity, which peaked at 5,000 mw last summer and is drawn primarily from coal, oil and nuclear based plants. New York has the potential to sell 3,300 additional mw of wind power into the grid without building any more plants, according to Carol E. Murphy, executive director for the Alliance for Clean Energy in Albany.

Reducing our dependency on fossil fuels was brought to the forefront of the state's political agenda in 2001 when Governor George E. Pataki signed into policy executive order 111, which pledged the state's commitment to transfer 20% of the state purchases of energy to renewable energy sources, such as solar, hydro and wind power, by the end of the decade.

"We are hoping that, in the future, wind will generate as much power as hydropower, which is 6%, or eventually 20%. There are absolutely no technological obstacles to making that happen," said Christine Real de Azua, spokesperson for the American Wind Energy Association in Washington DC.

In a speech last month, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said upgrading the city's energy infrastructure and producing cleaner, more reliable power, were among the main sustainability challenges facing New York City up to the year 2030 and he urged businesses to search for alternative energy sources.

The idea of using renewable energy is beginning to catch on and numbers are growing exponentially, according to Michael Saltzman, communications director for the New York Power Authority. Saltzman attributes the growth of wind power stock to advances in technology that allow wind farms to run more efficiently, such as technology that automatically stops turbines if wind speeds run too high, the increased awareness of global warming and fluctuations in international oil prices.

"Electricity prices are more stable with wind technology. If you install a wind farm, you just have the up front capital costs of building and infrastructure. You are not going to see your prices go up when the price of fuel goes up," said Real de Azua.

Though wind power is variable, new technology that allows engineers to gauge wind patterns allows wind power used in conjunction with other sources of energy to be an extremely reliable form of power, Real de Azua said.

Wind farm owners have seen interest pique as well. New York gets most of its wind energy from the Maple Ridge Wind Farm. The 22,000 acres of turbines on the farm capture wind which is trans formed into 230,000 volts of electricity that run underground, is fed to substations and run through power lines to communities on the grid throughout the state. Representatives from these communities regularly come to the farm to examine the viability of purchasing power.

"In the past, wind farms would look for places, but now places look for wind farms," said Lee Hinkleman, communications manager for Maple Ridge Wind Farm.

Rather than threatening the communities where they are based with pollution, as with a nuclear or older coal plants, windmill farms generate money without harming the environment. In the case of the Maple Ridge Wind Farm the $8 million per year the farm generates is a substantial amount split between two school districts.

"The farmers refer to the windmills as cash cows they don't have to milk on land they don't have to plow." Hinkleman said.

If projects like the one on Randall's Island succeed, the city may soon be grazing its own cash cows along the windswept shores of our coastline.

There's a lot of waters edge in New York that might be employed to place other turbines. We have no way of knowing yet how effective the turbines will be, but these projects are certainly worth trying. We know that there is a limit to our access to fossil fuels, and we have to do something," Benepe said.

* Front page picture: Maple Ridge Wind Farm.