Tehachapi News

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Airstreams LLC, a Tehachapi company owned by local entrepreneurs who have ridden the ups and downs of the wind industry, has announced plans for a “green” renewable energy training facility and commercial complex to be built on 33.25 acres at Jameson Road and Willow Springs-Tehachapi Road.
The complex will consist of 10 steel buildings of 10,000 square feet each, solar fields, solar roofs and wind turbines, said Airstreams Vice President Jeff Duff.
“Each building is going to be a power plant,” he said.
The complex, to be built in phases, currently is under review by Kern County planners. Airstreams will begin building within a year or sooner, Duff said. The flat agricultural acreage is on the east side of Tehachapi-Willow Springs Road just south of State Route 58 at the Tehachapi-Willow Springs Road overcrossing, on the road that leads to the GE Wind Energy facility.
“This road is the gateway” to the industry, said Duff at the site last week.
Airstreams will lease out seven of the structures to “like-minded companies.”
Duff said the complex will provide an anchor for the company, which is growing rapidly with the expansion of the wind energy industry.
“We are now in three separate offices in Tehachapi,” he said. “We were founded in 2003 with two people. Now we have over 30.”
The president of the company is Dave Schulgan, who has worked in the wind industry for 22 years.
The Airstreams commercial development, Duff said, is a direct outgrowth of state and national mandates that call for 20% of the energy needs to be met by alternative sources by the year 2030.
“We knew it was coming,” Duff said. “It has taken 20 years to get to one percent [alternative power generation] in the United States. By 2030, we expect it to be at 20 percent. That’s 19 times the effort.”
Twenty years ago, said Duff, the early wind turbines produced 65 kilowatts of electricity. Today, one modern turbine cranks out 1.5 megawatts, or 23 times the power of its primitive ancestors.
The Tehachapi hills to the east of the Airstreams acreage are home to both the early oil-derrick structures and the sleek megawatt turbines that spin slowly in the wind. The old structures, Duff said, will ultimately be replaced by fewer but more20powerful ones.
Duff said that wind farming in the United States has some catching up to do.
“Europe is a generation of so ahead of us in wind technology,” he said. “Look at what the United States is trying to do, and the demand for technicians will increase five- and six-fold.”
Duff, who has a masters degree in mathematics and developed computer models in wildfire management for the Bureau of Land Management, said he “one day looked up and saw these wind turbines on the hillsides,” and he was hooked.
He worked for Enron, which took over from first-generation wind energy developer Zond.
“Enron was a great company,” Duff said. “We were this little wind company out here doing out thing, making things happen.”
Enron, he said, was the first company to bring the 1.5 megawatt turbine to the United States, setting it up in Tehachapi.
The new Southern California Edison transmission network is a vital element in the growth of the wind energy industry in the Tehachapi area.
An announcement from the company said, “Airstreams has positioned itself to capitalize on the development of a new Southern California Edison transmission network, which will increase the renewable energy capacity in the area to 4,500 megawatts. Tehachapi is positioned to recapture the U.S. renewable market spotlight and become home to the largest concentrations of wind turbines in the world.”
Duff said his company hopes to work with the soon-to-be-opened California Wind Museum and Resource Center, now located on J street in Tehachapi.
“We’re interested in being involved,” he said. The company has “three-plus acres we could make available to them to lease.”