Geography, location play role in helping wind energy projects become profitable
Location can make or break any good business, and a wind farm is no exception.
Put one in the right location, and it’s a cinch it will be built.
But a poor choice can just as quickly kill a project.
“Make no mistake, this is all about the production and the money,” said Greg Adams, a technical consultant who develops wind farms for Edmond-based Chermac Energy Corp.
“I can build a wind farm anywhere in the state of Oklahoma. To make it profitable is another story. None of these wind farms get built unless they have a return on investment. That’s what investors are looking for.”
What makes a good location?
The first thing Adams looks for is a good, windy environment. And the developer prefers to find places with a good topographic profile and preferably somewhat elevated.
Jim Roberts, a senior project manager with Horizon Wind Energy, found one about a decade ago when he and a partner, then working for Zilkha Renewable Energy, began putting the Blue Canyon wind project together on a ridge north of the Wichita Wildlife National Refuge in southwestern Oklahoma.
The refuge surrounds the Wichita Mountains, ancient peaks made of granite — a material impossibly hard to try to build a wind farm on.
But north of there, on private ranches, a limestone ridge runs from northwest to southeast. And between it and the Wichita Mountains is a low valley that heats up fast. So the wind — usually blowing from the south or southwest — picks up speed as it passes over and through the mountains, moves fast through the valley and then bursts over the ridge.
“Absolutely, geography helps enhance the wind we have here,” Roberts said. “It gives you a gigantic acceleration factor.”
From idea to construction
But investors won’t be sold on investing in a wind project just because an area is windy, the developers said.
Plenty of work must be done before projects can happen. For example, Roberts recently was busy preparing to put meteorological towers on a planned expansion of Blue Canyon that is expected to be built next year.
Adams, meanwhile, already had more than two dozen towers out earlier this summer on lands involving a variety of projects he was working on. In both cases, those towers couldn’t be built until leases had been negotiated with landowners for the projects.
Both said the towers take wind measurements at an elevation of 33 feet — the same as towers used by weather forecasters in their daily observations. But these towers are taller and take wind measurements as high as 180 feet. They aren’t just looking for wind. They want to find the sheer that adds that extra kick to wind speeds.
“I try to put four or five of these on a 200 megawatt development and spread them across the project,” Adams said.
“Then I use that data to develop a wind map that tells me how the wind is blowing on any 50-square-foot area within the entire project.”
Then the data must be verified by an independent meteorological firm before it can be trusted.
Adams said you can live in the windiest place in the world.
“But until you can document it and prove you have that wind, no one is going to invest $20 (million) or $50 million on you saying, ‘Yeah, the wind blows out here.’”
By Jack Money
Business Writer
6 September 2008
The copyright of this article is owned by the author or publisher indicated. Its availability here constitutes a "fair use" as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law as well as in similar "fair dealing" exceptions of the copyright laws of other nations, as part of National Wind Watch's effort to advance understanding of the environmental, social, scientific, and economic issues of large-scale wind power development. For more information, click here.
Blog it:
Tags: Wind power, Wind energy
|
