The positive experience between clean-energy advocates and utilities in this wind energy green pricing project can be replicated in other windy areas. One key to success is to identify sincere utility champions who appreciate the role that wind power or other renewables can play in enhancing the service that their utility provides. Making the connection between this activity and a future of customer-centered competition is also an important motivation for utilities.

On the advocacy side, success hinges on a willingness to work sensitively with utility champions to nourish ideas that promote common goals and objectives without letting a desire for the perfect stand in the way of the good. Advocates can enhance this type of collaboration by using their superior knowledge and understanding of environmentally preferred power resources to guide and facilitate the development of a green pricing program. In addition, advocates have direct contacts with the segment of the market that should be most interested in and supportive of clean energy. These contacts and the advocates' experience running educational and legislative campaigns are powerful contributions to any collaboration with a utility.

There is considerable value in having an "interpreter" participate in the project. In this program, Steve Smiley and the Union of Concerned Scientists played this role, communicating the goals and perspectives of the advocates and utilities to one another and providing technical expertise on wind technology and economics when it was needed early in the project.

Conventional environmental advocacy relies primarily on major breakthroughs along the lines of the NSP renewables mandate. But green pricing programs like the one implemented by Cooperative Power and the Dakota Electric Association are important incremental steps along the way to such achievements. The renewables industry needs a string of similar innovations -- sustained orderly development -- in order to build a vital and successful industry suited to meeting the critical and growing energy needs of the United States and the world.

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