Festival to Blow Into Town : Tehachapi will celebrate its powerful asset--wind. Event will focus on alternative energy sources and entertainment.

In Tehachapi, many regard high winds as more blessing than curse.

Local folklore pays whimsical homage to those seemingly supersonic gusts that often whoosh through town from California’s Cen tral Valley to the Mojave Desert below:

“Does the wind always blow this way?” a visitor asks.

“No,” the old-timers say. “Sometimes it blows in the other direction.”

Not surprisingly, nearby Tehachapi Pass--in Kern County, 110 miles northeast of Los Angeles--lays claim to an unusual distinction: the world’s largest producer of wind-powered electricity.

With 5,088 wind turbines--many shaped like huge propellers, others like eggbeaters--generating enough electricity to meet the residential needs of 480,000 people, the Tehachapi-Mojave area surpassed production in 1992 by turbines in Altamont Pass, east of San Francisco, according to estimates by California electric utilities.

All of which adds up to a perfectly good excuse for a festival called--what else?--the Tehachapi Wind Fair, celebrating wind as an alternative energy source and offering family entertainment.

Organizers expect thousands of visitors between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday at Mountain Valley Airport, a popular site for glider flying, located off Highline Road south of mid-town Tehachapi.

The fair will offer exhibits of wind and solar technology, as well as wind-themed activities: sky-diving and boomerang-throwing demonstrations, stunt kite-flying, helicopter and glider rides, bus tours, a five-mile hike (starting at 9 a.m. Saturday) through local wind farms and rides in electric cars.

It’s billed as an expanded version of last year’s inaugural Tehachapi Wind Fair, which attracted 14,000 visitors--far exceeding organizers’ expectations.

“No one knew if people would drive three hours from Los Angeles to look at windmills or fly a kite, but they did,” says Paul Gipe, executive director of the Kern Wind Energy Assn., which sponsors the fair jointly with Mountain Valley Airport and the Southern California Edison Co.

Such enthusiasm, Gipe says, attests to what he says is wind’s growing appeal as a clean energy source, even though it accounts for only about 1% of California’s electricity generation.

Gipe says it’s “fully conceivable” that by the year 2005 that figure will climb to 10%, if only because California--as one of the world’s largest economies--remains what he calls “a black hole for energy.”

In keeping with the organizers’ ambitious hopes for the wind fair--and for wind energy itself--they invited Vice President Al Gore to carry his environmental crusade to the fair.

About 300 elementary students at Wells School mounted a letter-writing campaign. Gipe even hand-delivered the letters, some with drawings of wind machines, to the vice president’s office during a business trip to Washington.

One sixth-grade student didn’t hesitate to politicize her letter to Gore: “I really don’t like your politics. I like Rush Limbaugh, and so does my mother. But come anyway.”

Although the vice president sent word that he is unable to attend, the students took pride in the energy they generated--their letters huffing and puffing all about Tehachapi and its wind turbines.

Fourth-grade student Christine Riblett tried to woo the vice president with a Chamber of Commerce pitch about Tehachapi’s pastoral attributes. Unlike many places, she wrote: “We don’t carry guns, knives or deadly weapons like you see on TV.”

Where and When What: Tehachapi Wind Fair ’93. Location: Mountain Valley Airport south of Tehachapi, just off Highline Road. Hours: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturday and Sunday. Admission: Free. Parking $1. Call: (805) 822-3222 or (805) 822-7956.