Eduard Ribic has been tinkering with wind power since his childhood days in Austria. He remembers building a wind machine at an early age that made a hammering noise to scare grape-eating birds away from vineyards his family owned. As the blades of the wind machine turned, small hammers would slap against a piece of hardwood.


It worked pretty good, he says, laughing. That sound could go for miles.


Now well into middle age, Ribic and his wife, Rachel, own Ribics Wind & Solar Enterprises, at 8318 W. Sunset Highway, which designs and builds power-generating wind machines to customers specifications and also sells solar panels made by various national manufacturers.


Energy stuff has always fascinated me. Ive always been interested in how to harness energy from alternative sources, he says.


Ribics passion is obvious to motorists who drive past the property his 20-year-old business occupies on the south side of U.S. 2, better known through that stretch as the Sunset Highway, just east of Airway Heights. Wind machines of various sizes and types are clustered on part of the weedy, three-acre site, amid scattered components and templates used to make the eye-catching, blade-spinning contraptions.


Ribic builds wind machines rated at a maximum 800 watts to 30,000 watts of power-generating capability, and sells them to customers as far away as California and North Dakota. Most of the buyers are homeowners who live on rural or isolated acreages, but he also sells some machines for business use.


Prices for the machines vary widely depending on size, but equate to between about $1 and $2.25 per watt, based on their rated maximum output, Ribic says. That per-watt price range doesnt include inverters that change the generated electricity from direct current (or DC, such as batteries store) to alternating current (or AC, which flows through your house), nor the towers on which the wind machines sit, since some customers prefer to build their own. Ribics also makes and sells those components, with inverter prices ranging from around $700 into the thousands of dollars and tower prices ranging from around $1,000 for a 30-foot tower to about $5,000 for a 100-foot tower.


Ribic says a typical overall price for a 5,000-watt wind machine, which is the most common-sized product he sells, would be around $12,000. That would include just under $10,000 for the wind machine and inverter and $2,200 for a 40-foot tower.


If theyve got a decent wind, a five-kilowatt (machine) can make a lot of power, he says.


The current-switching inverters allow the wind machines to be used with battery systems that store generated power and for utility interconnects. Such interconnects allow power from the local utility to take over when wind power isnt sufficient to meet a users needs, Ribic says. They also allow wind-machine owners to receive credits from utility companies when they produce excess power, which can be transmitted onto the utility grid, he says.


One-person operation


Ribics Wind & Solar Enterprises is basically a solo endeavor. In a large, well-equipped shop that sits on part of his companys West Plains site, Ribic alone designs and fabricates each wind machinerotors, generators, tails, and towersvirtually from scratch, using wood, fiberglass, and steel.


Theyre all custom-built, sized for a persons particular needs and how much wind they have, he says.


For example, Ribic says he will use rotors, or propeller systems, with as many as 20 blades for customers who live in comparatively low-wind areas, because they can begin generating power at wind speeds of as little as 3 to 6 mph. Two- or three-blade machines are more appropriate for areas with constant high winds, above 7 mph, and are capable of more revolutions per minute, which translates into a higher maximum power output, he says. Ribics wind machines use propeller systems that typically range in diameter from about 6 feet to 32 feet.


Ribic says the towers on which the wind machines sit should be at least 30 feet high, and preferably higher. The higher the better. Thats the whole key to it. The higher you go, the more wind youre going to get, he says.


To provide customers with an alternative-energy complement to its wind machines, Ribics also sells solar panels made by Massachusetts-based ASE Americas Inc. and other manufacturers. Those panels are rated at three-fourths of a watt to 300 watts, and are priced at an average of about $5 per watt they can produce, Ribic says.


Ribic came to the U.S. in 1969 at age 23, following his brother, Alphonse, who had settled four years earlier in Los Angeles. I was there (in Los Angeles) for about seven months; that was all I could handle, he says.


He and his wife moved to Pullman, Wash., where they had friends, and he operated a service station and auto-repair shop there for about five years. He then worked in the used-car business in Montana for a brief time before moving to Spokane, where he operated several auto-related businesses over a period of years. He founded Ribics Wind & Solar Enterprises in about 1981, operating the business out of his West Spokane home initially and moving it to its current location about 10 years ago.


Ribic says it typically takes him four to eight weeks to build a wind machine, depending on its size and his order backlog, and he describes demand for the machines as being off and on. He says his company had a surge of orders about two years ago when the Y2K computer-related scare spread to the energy market, then experienced a sales slowdown, and now is enjoying a resurgence in the wake of recent energy-shortage concerns. For example, he recently has been building several 5,000-watt wind machines for a customer in California who plans to use them, together with solar panels, to provide backup power to a remote radio-station transmitter.


This energy crisis has woke people up, Ribic asserts.


Despite the recent upswing in demand, wind-machine and solar-panel sales still are too unpredictable to provide Ribic and his family with a comfortable living. To supplement its income, the family also operates a computer-equipment sales and repair business called Ribics Computers, a U-Haul rental moving-equipment outlet, and a used-car lot, all at the West Plains site.


Ribic says the struggles hes endured trying to build up his alternative-energy products business over the last two decades havent dulled his enthusiasm for building wind machines.


That (passion) is basically why I continue to do it, he says. Its not a real big moneymaker. I could almost work for somebody and make better income, but if you dont enjoy it, that wouldnt help.


A growing industry globally


Though the residential market for wind machines may not be growing expansively, due to cost, climate, and other limiting factors, the American Wind Energy Association says about 3,800 megawattsor 3.8 million wattsof new utility-scale wind energy generating capacity were brought online worldwide last year. The organization predicts that more than 5,000 megawatts will be added globally this year, including 2,000 just in the U.S., pushing total worldwide installed capacity past 20,000 megawatts, and it claims the global outlook for wind energy looks very bright.


What is said to be the worlds largest such utility-scale wind facility, called the Stateline Wind Project, currently is being developed on a 50-acre site southwest of Walla Walla. The wind farm, as such facilities are called, is expected to include 450 wind turbines and to produce 300 megawatts of powerenough to supply the energy needs of 70,000 homes. Portland-based PacifiCorp Power Marketing Inc. will buy the entire energy output from project developer FPL Energy for marketing to customers in the West.


Separately, the Puget Sound Business Journal reported last month that a new Seattle-based nonprofit organization called Northwest SEED, which stands for Sustainable Energy for Economic Development, is mapping the Pacific Northwests wind patterns in hopes of accelerating wind-powered generation development in the region. The organization hopes to release its map of Washington in mid-November and to offer an interactive Web site later that will help small-scale developers calculate investment returns on wind machines.