Wind & Solar Leasing at Altamont Pass, Alameda County

One of the oldest commercial wind farms in the United States

The Altamont Pass Wind Resource Area (APWRA) began filling with turbines in the early 1980s, during the first wave of California's wind-energy tax-credit-driven boom, and grew into one of the largest concentrations of wind turbines in the world by the number of individual machines -- thousands of relatively small, first-generation turbines spread across privately owned grazing land in the hills between Livermore and the Central Valley. For decades, that made Altamont Pass a genuinely unusual land-use arrangement: ranchers continued grazing cattle on the same land where turbines stood, collecting a lease payment from wind operators on top of ordinary agricultural income.

A well-documented raptor-mortality problem, and a multi-decade response

Altamont Pass's location -- a low, windy gap that also concentrates raptor activity, including golden eagles, red-tailed hawks, and American kestrels -- made it the site of one of the most studied wind-farm bird-mortality problems in the country. Researchers and wildlife agencies documented substantial annual raptor deaths from collisions with the older generation of small, fast-spinning turbines, and the issue drew sustained attention from conservation groups including the Audubon Society and the Center for Biological Diversity over a period of many years, including litigation and negotiated settlements with operators and Alameda County.

The general response, worked out over roughly two decades, has been repowering: retiring large numbers of the old, small, closely spaced turbines and replacing them with far fewer, much larger, more efficient modern turbines, which both reduces collision risk per unit of power generated and changes the physical footprint of leased land considerably. Some agreements have also included seasonal operational curtailment (temporarily idling turbines during periods of peak raptor activity) as part of mitigating ongoing mortality.

What this means for land in or near the wind resource area

If you're evaluating a parcel in the Altamont Hills for its existing or potential wind lease income, or simply because it sits within or adjacent to the wind resource area, expect the actual terms -- which turbines (if any) are sited on the specific parcel, what repowering has already occurred or is planned, what the current lease structure looks like, and what avian-mortality mitigation conditions apply -- to vary considerably by exact location and by which operator holds the lease. None of that is something a general hub page can specify reliably; it has to be confirmed directly with the current lease-holding operator, Alameda County's planning department, and (for any new construction or repowering) the applicable permit record.

It's also worth checking whether a specific parcel's wind lease coexists with a Williamson Act agricultural contract -- combined grazing-and-wind-lease land is common in this exact area, and the interaction between an existing ag preserve contract and a wind-energy lease is a real, parcel-specific question rather than something that resolves the same way for every property in the resource area.