January 3, 2013
New York

Copenhagen Wind Farm developers seeking second test tower

By STEVE VIRKLER,, TIMES STAFF WRITER THURSDAY, JANUARY 3, 2013, watertowndailytimes.com

DEER RIVER – Developers of the proposed Copenhagen Wind Farm are seeking permission to erect a second test tower in the town of Denmark.

OwnEnergy Inc., Brooklyn, under the auspices of Copenhagen Wind Farm LLC, plans to install a 197-foot-tall meteorological tower on the south side of Roberts Road on a parcel owned by Gene Bolton, Timothy Sullivan, Harold Sullivan and Bruce Stephenson.

The Denmark town Planning Board will hold a public hearing on the proposed tower at 7:30 p.m. Monday at the town municipal building, 3707 Roberts Road, Deer River.

The Lewis County Planning Board was slated to review the application at its December meeting, but that board was unable to meet due to the lack of a quorum.

OwnEnergy about a year ago installed a similar tower at the Lyndon W. and Patricia F. Moser farm on Wilson Road and has been collecting data from it since.

The proposed test tower would be at the northern end of the project area, while the one on the Moser property is at the southern end.

The Copenhagen Wind Farm project proposes up to 49 turbines, generating a maximum of 80 megawatts, on as many as 62 private parcels in the town of Denmark just to the north of the 195-turbine Maple Ridge Wind Farm.

The Brooklyn developer is also proposing to construct a substation off Plank Road in the town of Denmark and run a 115-kilovolt overhead power line roughly nine miles through the towns of Champion, Rutland and Watertown to connect the wind farm to a National Grid substation near Burrville.

OwnEnergy officials this month are completing a draft version of an environmental impact statement for the project and will be working with the Planning Board, which has been named lead agency in the state Environmental Quality Review process, and Town Council to make sure that document addresses all the issues identified in a scoping document prepared last year, wrote Christine M. Karlovic, senior business manager at OwnEnergy, in an email.

The scoping document suggests studying the project’s impact on such items as water, animals, birds and bats, air quality, visual and historic resources, sound, public safety, television signals and transportation, including flight patterns at nearby Fort Drum.

At a November 2011 public hearing on the initial meteorological tower siting, both Kathleen M. Amyot of Tug Hill Commission and Carl A. McLaughlin, director of the Fort Drum Regional Liaison Organization, encouraged town officials to contact officials at the Army post to discuss the impact of any potential wind farm sooner rather than later.

The project has also been entered into the New York Independent System Operator generation interconnection study queue to ensure the proposed wind farm could be added to the electrical grid, Ms. Karlovic wrote. A feasibility study on that is expected by the end of March.

The Denmark town Planning Board at Monday’s meeting will also hold a public hearing on an application from Rick Babcock to install a sign advertising Babcock’s Campground, East Road, on Route 26 between East and Station roads.

Copies of the two applications are available for review at the Denmark town office.