Dave Tobias, who lives south of Pilger, said he's had to buy additional liability insurance at $350 a year and add another electric meter at $40 a year.

It took several months to negotiate and sign an agreement with his local power company, Stanton County Public Power, to link up his 100-foot-tall windmill.

Plus, Tobias must travel today to Lincoln to obtain approval from the Nebraska Power Review Board, which typically ponders coal-fired power plants 60,000 times larger than Tobias' planned 10-kilowatt wind tower.

"The hassles of it are worse than actually putting the thing up," he said. "It doesn't make sense, because Nebraska is the sixth- windiest state."

Tim Texel, executive director and general counsel of the power review board, said Tobias may have a point.

Texel said statutes governing his board were drawn up in 1963, long before anyone thought farmers might want to generate power from small wind generators.

The rules say that anyone who wants to sell energy needs permission from the power review panel before proceeding.

"We don't have a flexibility to say it's a little (generator), it's not going to make that much difference," Texel said.

Plus, he said, his board must apply the same standards as those for a huge power plant, including determining whether the windmill is the most economical and feasible way to generate energy and ensuring that it does not duplicate existing facilities.

Tobias, who is a distributor of wind generators and also works as a metal fabricator at a plant in Wayne, Neb., was a member of Gov. Mike Johann's task force on wind energy two years ago.

While several private individuals have erected wind generators, Tobias is the first to seek permission to tie his to the state's electric grid so he can sell his excess power.

Tobias obtained a U.S. Department of Agriculture grant that will pay for $10,000 of his $40,000 project. He figures he can cover the remainder over 20 years and reduce his energy costs $100 a month.

Tobias estimates that he'll use 80 percent of the power on his farm and sell the rest.

State Sen. Don Preister of Omaha, who has pushed for wind energy incentives in the Legislature, said he's tried unsuccessfully for five years to win approval of a bill that would pay private generators more money for their power.