March 20, 2013
Wyoming

New date set for Chokecherry state permit

By Kate Snyder | Rawlins Daily Times | March 20, 2013 | www.rawlinstimes.com

The Power Company of Wyoming plans to submit a state permit application for the Chokecherry and Sierra Madre wind farm project by this time next year.

Roxane Perruso, vice president and general counsel for PCW, told the Carbon County Commission during its meeting Tuesday that representatives from the PCW met with the Industrial Siting Council, a state board, to figure out a date to apply for a project permit.

The anticipated date for filing is set for March/April 2014.

PCW originally planned to file the application on Jan. 21, but decided to wait to apply to see what would happen with Senate File 49, which, if passed, would have required projects requesting a permit from the ISC to spend 25 percent of anticipated project funds during the first two years of the project.

That could have caused PCW to reconfigure the anticipated construction schedule for the wind farm because most of the funds are slated to be spent during the back half of the project.

But the state legislative session has concluded, and SF 49 appears to have died in committee.

Perruso said rescheduling the application filing wouldn’t have an effect on the rest of the project schedule.

“This is actually a very aggressive schedule,” she said.

In the next few weeks, PCW is submitting specific designs of the Sierra Madre area to the Bureau of Land Management, and engineers and architects will conduct more research on the site to make sure there won’t be any issues with the specific turbine locations, Perruso said.

That research will take place from March 2013 to June 2014.

BLM is scheduled to conduct a site-specific analysis on the Chokecherry area from November 2013 to September 2014.

In January 2014, PCW plans to apply for county building permits for the Sierra Madre wind area, and then in August/September 2014, the company will apply for permits for the Chokecherry area, Perruso said.

If all permits get approved and all dates are met, initial construction should begin by fall 2014, Perruso said.

“We will do our absolute best to meet this schedule,” she said.

The Chokecherry and Sierra Madre wind farm would consist of 1,000 wind turbines in 229,076 acres of public and private land in two sites south of Rawlins. The project is expected to generate a total of 2,000 to 3,000 megawatts of renewable power.

URL to article:  https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2013/03/20/new-date-set-for-chokecherry-state-permit/