Operational since last July, ROI's Plover facility is the only one in the United States that ferments and distills cheese whey, another locally available feedstock, into ethanol. Recently the plant has begun accepting waste beets as a second feedstock.

ROI specializes in using agricultural waste streams, which have no appreciable commercial applications, as ethanol feedstocks. Plover, in central Wisconsin, is located near a number of vegetable processing plants and dairies from which an abundance of cheese whey, potato sludge and waste beets can be acquired at minimal cost.

ROI's potato-to-ethanol project will receive funding under DOE's Commercialization Ventures Program, which is designed to overcome the financial hurdles that keep technically proven renewable energy technologies from penetrating the energy marketplace. DOE received 75 applications, including three others from Wisconsin. All four project proposals from Wisconsin were forwarded to DOE by the Wisconsin Energy Bureau.

In response to a 1995 grant application from the Energy Bureau, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory will contribute $100,000 towards a statewide wind monitoring program set to begin this spring. This project, expected to cost $420,000, will identify 15 promising locations for wind energy development and measure the wind speeds there over a period of three years.

The monitoring data gathered through this initiative will provide utility planners and wind energy developers with a more complete characterization of the state's wind resource, particularly at higher elevations. The project contractor will deploy 130-foot monitoring towers to measure wind speeds and direction at three elevations, and use the data to calculate the increase in wind speeds that occur at higher elevations. With the standard hub height of a utility-scale wind turbine now at 50 meters (and likely to go higher) and the standard blade length now longer than 20 meters, a reliable estimate of wind speeds at 60 to 70 meters above ground level will be critical in characterizing the resource above the rotor, the layer of wind that actually drives the blades' rotation.

The state's electric utilities will contribute the lion's share of funding for this project. With help from RENEW, PSC Staff and the Energy Bureau, the utilities developed this program to satisfy a Public Service Commission directive arising from the most recent Advance Plan. In that proceeding, the PSC found that the utilities' previous wind monitoring efforts were not yielding the desired results and, on the strength of RENEW's testimony and briefs, ordered the utilities to develop and field a more systematic and comprehensive assessment program.