By Sarah Doty

Post-Bulletin, Rochester MN 

WOODSTOCK, MINN. -- Thirty years ago, a young Dan Juhl was traveling the country trying to make it as a musician when a friend asked for help. Apparently the friend and his dad wanted to put up a wind turbine on their land in Alaska, but they needed an extra set of hands.

Juhl, who has always been into gadgets, readily agreed.

Sometime during the installation however, something went wrong, and Juhl ended up getting shocked.

It was that jolt that forever dedicated him to working in wind.

"It set something in me," he said.

So when he came back to the lower 48 in 1978, Juhl and his wife started a business with wind and solar power.

"There really wasn't much technology then," Juhl said.

So he took it into his own hands.

"I designed and built my own wind turbines in the early '80s and I was hired by Aerostar in the mid-'80s," he said. "I was doing wind farms (in California) for a while, and then I came back to Minnesota in the early '90s and started working on policy and wind farms here."

He built the first wind farm in Minnesota in Buffalo Ridge in 1986.

And his work has never stopped.

Since his start Juhl is credited with developing more than 1,500 megawatts of energy.

Juhl, founder of Juhl Wind Inc., also made another large step last summer as his company went public. Retired U.S. Army Gen. Wesley Clark also was added to the Juhl Wind Inc. board of directors earlier this year.

While the reason for Juhl's interest in wind is clean energy -- "We need carbon-free energy; wind power and solar power are the sources of energy in the future," he said -- his real passion lies in Community-Based Energy Development (C-BED) projects.

C-BED projects are the result of a 2005 energy bill passed by the Minnesota Legislature in the hopes of allowing community wind projects to be successful.

Prior to legislation, the only benefits communities were seeing from the farms were monthly stipends landowners received if they leased their land for a wind turbine. The rest of the money generated by the turbines would disappear out of the state or overseas with the commercial companies who owned the wind farm. With C-BED however, the wind farms are locally owned and the money generated by the turbines stays in the community.

Juhl finds C-BED increasingly important with the current economic situation.

"There is roughly $100 million a year being extracted out of Minnesota that is going to foreign countries," he said. "Bottom line, if we are going to develop them in our state, we should leverage that into economic value for the citizens of Minnesota. If we can use wind energy as an economic development tool, that is a huge thing for us."

Juhl's current focus is on legislation to make it even easier for communities to develop C-BED projects.

"We are trying to get it so that communities can get in the game, because developers like myself, we can bid and we can work our magic to bid into the process, where a small community can't do that."

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