Posts Tagged ‘Willmar MN’

Community Wind: What’s a guy to do?

December 22nd, 2009

With wind farms popping up across the countryside, Midwesterners are becoming much more familiar with wind energy.  Yet few are aware of the type of wind development called “community wind.” That should change, however, thanks to a new publication called “Lessons & Concepts for Advancing Community Wind,” which was recently released by the Minnesota Project. 

 

What is Community Wind?

Without drawing much attention to it, I’ve talked about community wind before.  In a nutshell, community wind involves local ownership of wind turbines.  The electricity produced by the turbines is usually sold to area utilities. 

This model flies in the face of traditional wind farms, where a company builds and operates large wind farms.  Because wind energy is the focus of their business, these companies develop both the expertise and economy of scale that drives down the cost of production. 

But the downside to the traditional model is that it is dependent on the development of new transmission lines and causes a greater share of the financial impact from the turbines to bypass the local economy. 

 

Why aren’t there more community wind projects?

A simple answer to the question is that people who try to develop their own wind projects don’t know how to overcome the barriers that pop up in the development process.  “Lessons & Concepts for Advancing Community Wind” attempts to address these issues by providing case studies of three community wind projects:  City of Willmar, MN; Winona County MN; and Miner County, SD.  These three projects were selected for review because each took a very different path to completion.    

I’ve written about both the Miner County and Winona County projects before (see here and here).  The “Lessons & Concepts” guide, however, digs in much deeper.  It would have been nice to have had this guide back in 2001 when we developed the Miner County Wind Project.   

And that’s the value of the guide.  It’s intended to help people with little background in the energy industry build their capacity and understanding. 

We’ve fielded a lot of calls at the Rural Learning Center through the years from people asking how we developed the Miner County Wind Project. We’re always happy to help. But time is so short that we often hang up having only scratched the surface on the subject.  

That’s why the next time I receive such a call, I’m going to recommend the caller read “Lessons & Concepts for Advancing Community Wind” first.  I’m confident doing so will make our conversation more productive. 

Update:  David Tidball from Windustry offers some great advice in the comment section to this post.  For instance, he pointed out the “Communit Wind Toolbox” that Windustry has developed, as well as other great information on community wind (found here).  Thanks David.

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