Ryan Wolf’s new wind farm development isn’t making any big headlines. He’s one of about 16 landowners and other local participants investing in a project called Pheasant Ridge, 27 turbines that will go up near Adrian in southwestern Minnesota. Wolf expects the 2.1 megawatt turbines to be generating electricity by spring or summer next year. Pheasant Ridge will be able to produce 56 megawatts when it’s working at full capacity, which he estimates will be a little more than a third of the time.
“In our area, we have a higher wind regime than the rest of the state,” Wolf says, “so we hope to get basically a 40 percent capacity factor.”
Meanwhile, the headlines have gone to bigger projects. Xcel Energy, the Minneapolis-based utility that provides electricity to 1.2 million customers in Minnesota, announced in January that it will build a 100 megawatt wind farm in the state (its location yet to be announced in early May). Xcel estimates that its $210 million development should go on line sometime in 2009, generating enough power for 100,000 homes.
It will be Xcel’s first wind farm in Minnesota, but it won’t be the state’s biggest. A California developer made news for that distinction. EnXco will build a 205 megawatt, 137 turbine farm near Fenton that should be on line this fall. Xcel will purchase electricity from the Fenton project.
Utilities in Minnesota are eager to buy up more wind-generated electricity than ever before. With increased concern over global warming, more customers want power from clean, renewable sources. Xcel’s Windsource program, in which customers can choose to buy wind-generated electricity and pay higher rates, had a little more than 11,000 participants last October; by March, it had 20,000.
At the same time, the state is raising the bar on renewable energy, which can include solar-, hydro-, and biomass-based power, though wind is by far the most prevalent source. Until recently, Minnesota asked its utilities to meet an objective of providing 10 percent of the state’s electricity needs from renewable energy sources by 2015. During this year’s legislative session, that was changed to a mandate and increased to 25 percent by 2025 for most utilities, and 30 percent by 2020 for Xcel, the state’s largest provider of electricity. Xcel, which buys more wind-generated electricity than any other utility in the country, says it was on track to meet the 10 percent goal, currently filling 3 percent of the state’s needs with wind.
Pheasant Ridge seems dwarfed by big wind energy projects and big demand to come. And it’s true that by itself, it won’t do much to help utilities fulfill their mandates. But Wolf’s path into wind energy is being followed by others. With encouragement from the state—which sees in wind energy an economic development tool for rural Minnesota—Wolf is being joined by a growing number of farmers and other landowners who are finding that wind can be a very profitable crop.
