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On a ridge in western Minnesota stands a new breed of skyscraper -- a wind turbine that rises 365 feet from a pasture. In a stiff prairie wind Friday, the blades spun fast, generating electricity and high hopes.

Just east of the farm community of Morris, about 700 students, farmers and others gathered on international Earth Day to celebrate what this new-generation windmill owned by the University of Minnesota represents.

New industry in rural areas could come from building wind turbines and storing hydrogen that creates electricity, and from biomass plants that heat and cool schools and businesses.

Farmers could earn money from new perennial crops that could be planted in low-lying areas, slowing erosion.

"Instead of exporting about $9 billion a year for our fuel, we could reduce those exports a lot and pay Minnesota people to grow those crops," said Bob Elde, dean of the College of Biological Sciences and chairman of the Initiative for Renewable Energy and the Environment.

"We're already doing a good job with ethanol. How about the next generation of fuel beyond ethanol or biodiesel?"

This is the only large-scale wind research instrument at a public university. It's the foundation for a project that will use wind energy to produce hydrogen, which can be stored. And it's a key step toward integrating renewable energy in Minnesota.

Take the harnessed wind energy that is supplying more than half the electricity needed at the nearby University of Minnesota, Morris, with its 2,000 students. Or the cornstalks, native grasses and other biomass that will be used to heat and cool the university.

Then there's the university's advances into using hydrogen as a way to store energy.

Hydrogen is a gas, lighter than air, that scientists say could someday power our cars and replace costly petroleum-based fertilizer for the state's plentiful crops. It can be compressed and turned to a liquid that some hope could move throughout the nation in pipes.

"It's really a profound step for an agricultural college to farm the renewable resources rather than farm just the land alone," Chuck Muscoplat, dean of the College of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Sciences at the university, said as he drove to Morris Friday.

"If you think about what's going to happen when there's no more fossil fuels, we're going to be totally dependent on renewable resources," Muscoplat said. "People have already said, 'How are we going to do agriculture without petrochemicals and fertilizer?' Well, they're going to come from renewable resources like hydrogen and wind turbines."

Imagine, Muscoplat said, a countryside dotted with wind turbines that make energy for the neighboring municipalities and generate the nitrogen and fertilizers required to sustain life. And it's happening, he said, without pollution from smokestacks and refineries.

No drill required

Gov. Tim Pawlenty also was in Morris Friday, stumping for his vision of energy from the soil and wind of the Midwest rather than the oil of the Middle East or even Alaska.

"Renewable energy doesn't need a drill, doesn't need a tanker," he said. "And you can get renewable energy without disturbing the caribou."

The work now is to move from using a finite supply of fossil fuels such as coal created by photosynthesis millions of years ago to using the plants grown in Minnesota last summer. Overall, the project, partly funded now with Xcel Energy money, ultimately could cost $20 million to $25 million.

"We want to be a model, a place where other rural communities or other industries interested in using biomass for heating and cooling, or interested in using wind to produce hydrogen, can come to see how it works," said Greg Cuomo, head of the University's Renewable Energy Research and Demonstration Center.

"There's no reason why a lot of that focus can't be here. We have the wind resources in western Minnesota. We can grow the biomass crops and the biofuel crops. And this funding really gave us the opportunity to establish some national leadership in research as well."

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns, who was in Minnesota Friday, said the state already is seen as a national leader in renewable energy.

"You've done some pioneering," Johanns said. "Whether it's biodiesel, whether it's ethanol, whether its wind energy, all of those fit into the mix for our future."

The university can use its huge research base to explore technologies that are not yet economical, looking into how they can be applied in production settings. In Morris, for example, the turbine can create more electricity than the university can use.

"The problem now with energy is that we can't store it," Cuomo said. "So we're trying to use hydrogen to store energy. Instead of sending this excess energy out in the grid, we'd use the electricity we produce from the wind turbine to run the electrolizer, which is what splits water into hydrogen and oxygen."

University engineers and others are designing a hydrogen storage facility. That's part of a bigger vision by the university, companies, utilities and groups such as the Upper Midwest Hydrogen Initiative.

Cuomo said they're tackling a chicken-and-egg problem: The nation wants to build hydrogen cars. But we can't really have hydrogen cars until we have hydrogen fueling stations. And no one's really going to invest in hydrogen fueling stations until we have hydrogen vehicles.

The Upper Midwest Hydrogen Initiative is trying to develop 10 to 12 renewable fueling stations in key Interstate loops to sell conventional gasoline as well as hydrogen, biodiesel or E-85, which is 85 percent ethanol blended with petroleum.

Joy Powell is at jpowell@startribune.com.