Dry Lake Wind Project ahead of schedule

Dry Lake Wind Project ahead of schedule

By: Donna Rescorla, The Independent
05/08/2009

NAVAJO COUNTY - From a distance, the windmills look like garden ornaments, something to add a little whimsy to the backyard.

It's only when you get closer that the enormous size of the structures become obvious. Pickup trucks parked below one of the structures appear to be about the size of a Matchbox truck.
"When the (blade) is at the 12 o'clock position, the whole thing is more than 400 feet tall," Iberdrola Renewables Communication Director Jan Johnson said. "That's about the size of a 30-story building."
On April 29, Johnson conducted a tour of the Dry Lake Wind Project on State Route 377 which will be operated by the company, for members of the media and representatives of Salt River Project including an SRP film crew.
A contract, already signed between Iberdrola and SRP, calls for the delivery of power to SRP for the next 20 years. Each of the 30 wind turbines will generate 2.1 megawatts of electricity and the total of 63 megawatts from the project will provide about enough energy to power more than 15,000 residential homes.
Despite several days of unusually high winds, the project is "a little ahead of schedule," Johnson said, adding that they will be up and running by the end of 2009, probably sometime in the fall.
The 30 windmills are divided into three groups. Eleven turbines will be on the Rocking Chair Ranch, private land owned by the Elkins family, 10 will be on Bureau of Land Management federal land and the final nine will be on Arizona state land.
It has been a long process to get to the construction phase. The company got the building permits in 2006, secured all the rights of way in 2008, and Blattner Construction began constructing the windmills early in 2009.
As of April 29, a total of 21 windmills had been built. It takes about a day and a half to construct one under normal conditions. Power from each windmill (turbine) is sent to an underground cable system which carries the electricity to the substation to be added to the grid and sent to SRP. The underground conduits are about 12 inches in diameter and carry three electric cables and one fiber optic cable.
"Deciding where to construct a wind farm is done by a wind prospector who is part scientist and part artist," Johnson said.
"We never consider building in an area unless there is at least one year of data, with readings (of the wind) done every 10 minutes," she said. "It's an investment of hundreds of millions of dollars so it's an enormous undertaking."
The Elkins installed their own monitoring tower and collected three years of data before approaching anyone about the use of their land. Billy Elkins said the family invested their own money to build that tower.
"He has to be given a huge amount of credit for bringing wind power to Arizona," Johnson said.
Although an area may be deemed acceptable for wind power production, it has to be topographically studied to determine the best placement for each windmill. Even the way the trees grow is studied to determine the best site.
Because winds in Arizona usually blow in the same direction, the windmills are constructed in a line. In other states that have more varied wind patterns, the windmills are in any number of patterns, Johnson said. The blades on the windmills can rotate to catch the best wind speed.
For perfect energy production, the wind speed needs to be between 17 to 20 miles per hour. If the wind speed reaches 57 mph, the blades will feather down. When the wind speed decreases, sensors allow the windmills to begin rotating again.
There has to be critical space between each tower. That is not less than 1,000 feet between each windmill and it's not unusual to see them very far apart, Johnson said.
Even when all the wind turbines are constructed, there are a number of things that have to be done before they become operational. The final stage of construction is commissioning, a very specialized operation in which the commissioners check off many different wind conditions and that takes quite a while.
A press release from SRP states the Dry Lake Wind Project will be Arizona's first major commercial wind development. "The purpose of the project is to use wind energy to operate a renewable electrical generation facility that will help meet the growing demand for electricity in Arizona," SRP states.
"The need for renewable sources of energy is recognized at both the national and state levels. This project will help SRP meet its stated renewable energy goal of 15 percent by 2025."
Under the contract's conditions, SRP has first option to buy additional power from the Dry Lake project if Iberdrola chooses to expand the site within three years of the contract's execution.
SRP Spokesman Scott Harelson said the demand for energy is high and most expensive to produce in the peak periods. Replacing older generators with wind power is great, he added.
Although there is a way to store excess electricity, it can't be done with wind power, at least at the present time. There is a process to collect heat during the day into molten salt. This salt will be used to create steam to generate more electricity during the night but that's very expensive, Harelson said.
Although the cost of constructing the wind farm is expensive, once they are up and running "the beauty is that there is no fuel costs," Johnson said. "For utilities, they can lock in the price for 20 years. "The beautiful thing about renewable resources is that they're renewable. We can continue to harvest them forever."
The average life on a windmill is about 30 years, she added.
The operations manager for the Dry Lake Wind Project is John Sherman who has been on site during construction and will remain for the project's operation.
About 200 people worked on the construction, but there will only be five to 10 permanent employees. The manager is usually someone brought in with a knowledge of the industry but they try to hire locally whenever possible.
A Snowflake company constructed the roads and provided the batch plant needed to make the huge concrete bases on which the towers are placed.
Iberdrole was started in 2001 with 12 people and no megawatts of power. Now they have more than 800 wind farms in the United States and Canada, generating more than 3,000 megawatts of wind power and 55 megawatts of biomass energy.
In 2008 alone, they built projects to generate 1,400 megawatts of power. Plants are located in 29 states and in Washington, D.C., and are in 23 countries around the world.
Iberdrole now employs 40,000 people. North America, especially the United States, has the fastest growing renewal energy industry in the world.
Although the Dry Lake Wind Project won't employ very many people, it is a benefit to the area, especially to the county, because it will increase the value of the land and, therefore, increase the property tax collected from it.
Johnson said she would like to thank the communities in the area that might have been inconvenienced by the large trucks carrying pieces of the towers.
The trucks came through Show Low, Snowflake/Taylor and Holbrook, carrying various pieces of the towers and blades and sections of the large crane needed to build the windmills. They plan on having an open house sometime in the fall to which everyone will be invited.

*Reach the reporter at lupre2@yahoo.com