On a high prairie bluff in eastern North Dakota, Blair Henry envisions a metallic forest of wind turbines that would rank among the world's largest.

It is a notion that has drawn plenty of skepticism and so far, there is no money to get the project rolling.

"It's unbelievable. It's just a gold mine sitting right there, and nobody wants to do anything," Henry said.

The 50-year-old Washington state attorney came to North Dakota last year to conduct a wind energy study with the help of former University of North Dakota President Tom Clifford.

Henry's group, including student researchers and former UND officials, has proposed marketing North Dakota's powerful wind to investors and planting more than 1,300 wind turbines in the state. The development would have a capacity of at least 2,000 megawatts.

A wind farm that big would dwarf the 300-megawatt Stateline wind farm on the border of Oregon and Washington, currently one of the largest land-based farms anywhere, the American Wind Energy Association said.

Henry, a self-described climate change activist, is finishing a stint as an adjunct UND professor. He says mammoth size is the key - a 2,000-megawatt project could afford to build its own power lines to ship the electricity elsewhere, he said.

He's asked state and federal officials to find $500,000 for a marketing study, and wants up to $5 million a year until 2010 to continue the effort. Some state officials and energy industry representatives say Henry's notion seems far-fetched.

"I don't see someone developing thousands of megawatts of wind power in one fell swoop," said Floyd Robb, a spokesman for Basin Electric Power Cooperative.

Kim Christianson, an energy programs manager for the state Department of Commerce, also has questions.

"One of the assumptions are that if you sell a large enough block of energy, the transmission lines will just fall into place. I still think you're going to have some very significant transmission issues," he said.

North Dakota's potential for wind power is well known. The state consistently ranks at the top nationally for its ability to produce electricity from wind turbines.

The state's largest wind facility, 41 turbines in LaMoure County, is owned by FPL Energy of Florida. That site and a smattering of smaller operations make up North Dakota's current wind-power capacity - around 66 megawatts annually.

FPL operates 28 wind farms in 10 states, including the two largest in Washington and Texas.

The company has said it makes sense to build wind farms in North Dakota since it is the windiest state in the nation. South Dakota is ranked the fourth windiest.

Henry envisions a project that would cost about $2 billion. The payoff for a major wind farm could be similarly grand, said Steve Palomo, a regional manager for the Department of Energy's Wind Powering America program.

"Over the life of the project, you're going to bring in about twice that amount in local economic development," he said.

The idea is not entirely new. Developers pushed a 3,000 megawatt project in South Dakota called "Rolling Thunder," but it stalled.

"There have been a number of multithousand (megawatt) proposals in the Dakotas," said John Dunlop, a Minneapolis-based spokesman for the American Wind Energy Association "It's kind of on the edge of the box, but it's not out of it."

Henry said his project likely would be focused along a 10-mile-wide ridge called the Pembina Escarpment, which runs from the Canadian border to the Valley City area.

The development would cover some 230 square miles, a territory roughly the size of Singapore.

"The sheer size tends to be a little bit of a shocker for people," said Brad Stevens, a research engineer at UND's Energy and Environmental Research Center.

"Number one, are you going to find enough landowners willing to put this on their property?" Robb said.

Henry said other states are racing to develop major wind farms. It's a contest he says North Dakota risks losing.

With his job at UND ending, Henry said he is moving to Mexico to continue working on his dream of piping huge quantities of renewable energy across the region.

"If we want to get on, we've really got to move or we're going to lose the whole shooting match," he said.

Rather than jumping from being a minor producer to a regional powerhouse, Stevens said, North Dakota is likely to build several 100- and 200-megawatt wind farms in coming years as utilities warm to the notion of wind power. Floyd Robb agreed.

"I think that the way development has currently occurred is probably how it will go in the future," Robb said.

(Associated Press writer Andrea Domaskin contributed to this report)