A nearly treeless stretch of northern Indiana that once produced only corn and soybeans is now dotted with 87 hulking wind turbines that harvest the region's incessant breezes, generating enough power to light 43,000 homes. The 130-megawatt Benton County Wind Farm -- the state's first commercial power station fueled by the wind -- went online this month about 90 miles northwest of Indianapolis near the Illinois state line. The $250 million project is the first of six Indiana wind farms in the works that will generate a combined 3,000 megawatts, and several other projects are in the planning stage.Indiana was once deemed unsuitable for wind farms because of the assumed lack of sufficient winds. But its wind potential was uncovered by a series of wind studies by the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The most recent, released in 2006, found that Indiana's winds could produce at least 40,000 megawatts of electricity, or more than twice the state's current generating capacity.
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