Spinning Green: Energy and Dollars

October 17th, 2008 by Joe Bartmann

Wednesday some colleagues and I attended the opening ceremony for a new wind farm on a ridge just south of Wessington Springs, SD. The Wessington Springs Wind Farm includes 34 towers and will produce 51 megawatts of electricity. Officials said they have about one month of work left to get those turbines spinning.

According to keynote speaker SD Governor Mike Rounds, here’s what that will mean:

The project will produce enough energy to power 17,548 average homes.
Producing this energy with wind as opposed to other sources will save 230,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year, and conserve 11.2 million gallons of water every day.
South Dakota’s two largest universities, SDSU in Brookings and USD in Vermillion, will become “green.” The Governor signed an agreement with Heartland Consumers Power District (one of the partners in the Wessington Springs project) to provide all of the two universities’ power (above their WAPA allocation, anyway) from green sources in South Dakota–which will initially be supplied by the Wessington Springs farm.

It was really interesting to hear about the process of completing the wind farm from Chris Shugart, project manager with Babcock & Brown (B&B is the other primary partner in this project). He said three ingredients are required to look at building a wind farm:

You need plenty of wind (most rural South Dakota communities have that covered),
You need high voltage power transmission lines (a major line runs right through the Wessington Springs site),
And you need a group of partners to fund the project (construction for this project was about $100 million).

Chris, along with one of the project landowners and other local officials, also talked about the local economic impact the project will bring. Landowners receive annual lease payments, construction crews are in the area spending money, property and other tax revenues spill into local entities, and–at least in this case–new families are moving into the community as long-term workers at the wind farm.

I don’t know any details about the land leases in this project, but we’ve heard numbers like $6000 or more per tower per year in other parts of South Dakota. If you know about the local economic impacts of wind, please share in the comments!