Farm to harvest power of state's incessant wind
Published: March 9, 2003
Towering more than 300 feet above the Slick Hills northwest of Lawton, 38 giant windmills soon will produce enough electricity to meet the needs of 20,000 homes.
The turbines will be turning by the end of this year and will comprise the state's first wind farm.
While people have been using wind as a source of energy for centuries, they have only recently figured out how to use it as a profitable way to generate electricity.
Renewable energy advocates and western Oklahoma communities hail the Slick Hills project and hope the Blue Canyon Wind Farm project will be only the beginning of the wind power industry for Oklahoma.
"The economic development opportunities for the state are tremendous," said Tim Hughes, director of the Oklahoma Wind Power Initiative. "You get revenue for the landowners, new jobs and tax revenues for the counties and communities."
But while the technology has improved significantly over the past two decades, power companies say it is still not perfect.
Wind turbines provide clean, economical electricity, but utilities and their customers cannot count on having that energy at all times. The electricity is only produced when the wind blows, and the utilities cannot turn the power on or off.
Wind has been harnessed for thousands of years and used for tasks ranging from tilling fields to powering naval fleets. But wind has been used to generate commercial electricity for only about two decades.
Wind generators were relatively small when they became popular in the 1980s -- 100 feet tall with a diameter of 40 feet and a maximum production of about 30 kilowatts. The largest turbines in use today are more than 300 feet tall with a rotor diameter of more than 200 feet and can each produce between 1,500 and 3,000 kilowatts, enough to power up to 900 homes.
"We've been in this business for more than three years, and things have changed quite a bit," said Wayne Walker, director of project development for Zilkha Renewable Energy, which is developing the Blue Canyon Wind Farm. "The blade diameters are growing slightly each year, and the turbine sizes are growing slightly each year. But we're no longer seeing them double or triple like they were in the early '90s. And the turbines have certainly gotten more reliable."
Wind farms comprise a series of large turbines connected by a power grid and underground wires. As the wind turns the blades, the blades spin a shaft, which connects to a generator and makes electricity. The electricity is relayed to transmission lines that carry the power to communities.
The turbines being erected in Blue Canyon are not the biggest power producers available, but they will still generate 1,700 kilowatts, enough energy to serve 500 homes. The power generated by the Blue Canyon Wind Farm is already under contract to be sold to Western Farmers Electric Cooperative, which supplies electricity to distributors throughout western Oklahoma.
In Oklahoma, the turbines usually will be lined up about six or seven to a mile along a ridge running east to west, allowing them to better catch the wind, which usually blows from the north or the south.
"It's no surprise that if you go up on top of a ridge or a hill, it's going to be windier there," Hughes said. His Oklahoma Wind Power Initiative mapped the state's best locations for wind generation.
"If you go in the Panhandle areas, the general terrain is windy. It produces good wind there even down in the areas where there are no ridges. The problem with the Panhandle is that transmission is lacking."
The Blue Canyon Wind Farm is being developed in one of the windiest areas of the state. Although the site is in southwestern Oklahoma, Hughes said the Slick Hills area has potential to produce up to 500 megawatts of electricity a year.
There are 1,000 kilowatts in a megawatt and three kilowatts would be more than enough electricity to power an average size home for a full year.
The 64 megawatt project Zilkha is developing for Western Farmers Electric Cooperative is only the first phase of a project expected to eventually produce 300 megawatts with 200 turbines, Walker said.
"Because of the way the hills are arranged, we can build the phases next to each other," he said. "We feel very fortunate to have secured it."
Construction is expected to begin this spring on Phase I with a completion date by December.
Wind farm construction is a relatively quick process, but it must be preceded by nearly two years of research determining the exact location for each turbine.
The Blue Canyon site is in one of the few locations that has strong winds and is near large transmission lines.
Most of the windiest parts of the state -- and the country -- are in isolated locations far from towns and cities. Although ideal for wind-power generation, high- capacity transmission lines do not connect those areas to populated regions.
Securing proper permits and permission from landowners to build the transmission lines can take several years.
"I can build a wind farm a lot faster than it can take for someone to bring transmission lines to it," said Rick Walker, director of renewable energy business development at American Electric Power Energy Services Inc. "But it doesn't do much good to build a wind farm if you can't move that electricity somewhere."
Rick Walker's company has developed three large wind projects in Texas. It has secured rights to land in western Oklahoma, but has not yet developed the areas.
"We put up wind monitors. Some didn't work out real well, and some were real windy," he said. "But once you get further in the western part of the state and especially in the Panhandle, you can almost just throw a dart on the map and hit a pretty windy area."
Besides providing clean energy, wind farms are also being hailed for their economic potential for western Oklahoma.
Zilkha is expected to spend more than $80 million to develop the Blue Canyon Wind Farm, with much of that money being pumped into the local economy. More than 100 construction workers will spend about six months assembling the turbines and generators and about six people will work full time to maintain the facilities and keep them operating.
While the developer would not say how much the permanent jobs would pay, Walker said they are "highly-skilled jobs."
"They are people who have good skill sets and good education," he said. "They are high quality jobs."
Besides creating jobs, the wind farms also help the local communities by paying between $2,000 and $4,000 per year in rent per turbine.
While wind energy technology continues to develop and the generators become more popular, it is unclear whether wind will ever rival the dominance fossil fuels hold on electrical generation.
"Once utilities and cooperatives get comfortable with it, I think they will realize that it is economical," he said. "It's not as economical as the lowest-cost fuels like coal or nuclear power, but it is certainly economically compatible to natural gas, and it hedges against the volatility of natural gas."
