Only 650 of Palm Springs' windmills remain. Could more be gone soon?

In Southern California, if you head west on Interstate 10 to Los Angeles, the swaying palm trees are among the region’s most iconic markers. However, if you’re on an eastbound trip to the desert, the imagery is replaced by hundreds of twirling wind turbines. 

Up close, the stoic giants in the desert are even bigger than they seem from the highway. Including the stem and blade, the tallest machines reach about 500 feet — nearly twice the height of the Statue of Liberty. The region has over 650 wind turbines, and just one can power 1,500 homes annually.

The San Gorgonio Pass in North Palm Springs, which opens into the Coachella Valley, nestled between the San Jacinto and San Bernardino mountains, is home to one of the most visible wind farms in the Golden State. While Altamont Pass in the Bay Area and Tehachapi in another corner of the Mojave Desert are also home to sprawling wind farms, the low desert landscape in the San Gorgonio Pass makes it one of the windiest places in the country — the perfect place for harnessing air currents. 

Wind energy accounted for over a quarter of California’s renewable energy production in 2019, and San Gorgonio Pass was the third-largest wind farm in the state. The cost of producing wind energy has fallen significantly since the industry took off in the 1980s, and the new Desert Peak Energy Center storage facility near the San Gorgonio Pass is considered among the world’s largest battery storage facilities. Nevertheless, wind farms in California have an outspoken critic who poses an existential threat to the longevity of these industrial landmarks. 

“Palm Springs, CA has been destroyed--absolutely destroyed--by the world's ugliest wind farm at the Gateway on Interstate 10,” President Donald Trump said in a 2012 social media post. His contempt for turbines has continued through the years, calling the Palm Springs turbines “rotting” in 2020. Since taking office for the second time, Trump has taken aim at offshore wind projects in federal waters, pausing any new leases of offshore wind farms.

Wind farms have not always been efficient. Their history in this corner of California is riddled with failures and lost dreams in the desert. But their presence has become a staple of the landscape. It began with a “wind rush” after the first commercial wind farm appeared in 1982, and soon, developers from around the world came to the desert. Most of them would not succeed, according to author Tom Spiglanin, who wrote the book “Backstories of the Palm Springs Windmills.” 

Spiglanin, a self-described “wind energy warrior,” offers guided tours — on an electric golf cart — for $55 through the San Gorgonio Pass wind farm. During a recent tour through the gyrating giants, he explained to SFGATE how even though not every investor in the area’s wind energy proved successful, their effort was not in vain. The Palm Springs turbines, he said, are proof that wind is a reliable source of power.

“My passion for wind, well, it actually started with the tours. I was in the aerospace industry for 33 years and retired,” Spiglanin told SFGATE. “... I liked teaching adults, and this was kind of carte blanche to learn something but also teach it and explain it to other people.”

Global wind rush

In 1982, Fred Noble initially envisioned a mobile home park when he purchased 150 acres in the San Gorgonio Pass, but the region’s windy character presented a unique opportunity. After encouragement from Southern California Edison to pursue wind energy, Noble followed the advice and installed his first eight windmills under his company Wintec Energy. By the following year, he had expanded to 212 windmills, kick-starting the area’s “wind rush.” 

“In the early days, the engineering was not very well understood, and most of the early windmills were failures,” Noble told the Desert Sun. “They were supposed to have a 20-year lifespan and they all failed after only two or three years, it was a very difficult time in the ’80s.”

Although many wind prospectors came to the area to capitalize on California’s lucrative tax incentives, by 1985, those tax incentives had expired, and many of those pioneers slowly but surely vanished.

Another big player in the 1980s was Carter Wind Turbines. The company used helicopter technology in its two-blade design, one of its key innovations. Still, its custom design also brought its demise because of how the metal contracted in different temperatures, causing the gears to eventually misalign. The turbines were removed by 1995.

An international influence then began to spread throughout the desert. Danish methodologies influenced the Storm Master turbines, but despite its commanding name, the design had many faults — including chucking blades across the desert. Most of the models left the area in 1995, except a select few with a modified design that was just recently removed.

The Sumitomo Corporation also came to Palm Springs from Japan to test a design, but its time in the desert was short-lived after interest in wind energy decreased. However, Sumitomo later returned to invest in a solar farm near Palm Springs.

Today’s turbines vastly outproduce energy that the old models could produce. There used to be 4,000 wind turbines operating and scattered around the desert, but because the new models are so efficient, now only 650 remain, Spiglanin says. And that number could shrink even more.

“If we look at the ones that are facing the wind right now, most of the early ones started out around 55 or 65 kilowatts. And the average California home uses 1 kilowatt at any one time. That’s just the average across the state,” Spiglanin said. “The largest that are out there now produce 4300 kilowatts or 4.3 megawatts.”

To celebrate and commemorate the Palm Springs wind turbines, a one-of-a-kind tour unlike anything else in the country allows visitors to see successful (and failed) wind energy projects on a real wind farm.

Golf cart tour guide

Like most days in the California desert, the sun beat down when pulling onto the dirt road and into the parking lot for Palm Springs Windmill Tours. 

There are two ways to tour: a ride out with one of the guides on a zippy golf cart or a self-guided tour in your personal vehicle. Guests who choose the self-guided option receive access to an app that includes information for each stop, with written and audio excerpts collected and narrated by Spiglanin.

A trip on the golf cart may include a little bit of math and a few harmless dad jokes, but it also consists of a wealth of knowledge, including artifacts of past turbine machines. Some stops are interactive, like spinning the wheel on an old gearbox from a Danish wind turbine, while others allow you to get up close (but not touch) the old, failed tech. The big sell of the golf cart tour is that a personal expert is available to answer your questions as they arise on the ride. The main con is the absence of air conditioning.

The tour ends with highlighting California’s goal to fully decarbonize its electricity grid by 2045. Even Spiglanin said the state still has a long way to go. Although he’s a bit cautious about the details of the government’s plan, Spiglanin notes that 15% of the state’s energy will come from wind power.

Since taking office earlier this year, Trump has targeted funds allocated by the federal government to support the development and adoption of clean energy technologies. However, he has not demolished energy incentive tax credits. Leaders in California wind energy remain transparent in their resolve to preserve its clean energy goals.

“Aside from Trump’s possible attempt to reverse the federal incentives, I will trust that California’s commitment to achieving its climate goals by siting new wind energy projects, and other renewable energy projects, will not be affected by our next president’s views,” Nancy Rader, executive director of the California Wind Energy Association, told SP&G Global in an email.

Adam Stern, executive director of Offshore Wind California, a trade group of offshore wind developers and technology companies, said in a statement that California’s future in offshore wind “looks bright” in meeting energy goals while benefiting the country’s economic growth and energy security.

Regardless of who’s in the White House, the wind turbines continue to turn in the California desert.