“There are two things we look at when considering an area for wind farm development,” Aron Branam, senior development project manager for EDP Renewables North America, said during a June interview with The Telegram.
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GOSHEN COUNTY – In real estate, as the old saw goes, it’s all about one thing.
“Location, location, location.”
It’s something like that when talking about generating electrical power from wind.
“There are two things we look at when considering an area for wind farm development,” Aron Branam, senior development project manager for EDP Renewables North America, said during a June interview with The Telegram. “First is a good wind resource, which Wyoming and Goshen County has.”
EDP Renewables is looking at locating a wind-power generating farm in Goshen County sometime in the future. The company met with county planners and commissioners in May and is currently working through the particulars of such a project with the Goshen County Economic Development Corp., said GCEDC CEO Ashley Harpstreith recently.
But what’s involved in using Wyoming’s abundant wind resources to power modern life? That was one of the questions local representatives hoped to have answered during a visit Friday with officials with Rocky Mountain Power, a division of PacifiCorp, at the company’s wind power control center in Casper.
“We do have entities interested in wind power here,” Harpstreith said. “To understand the nature of it, the capacity, just how big a project (RMP) are was kind of mind blowing. Once you get next to those big windmills, they’re huge.”
RMP currently operates a 14,000-acre wind farm north of Glenrock on the site of a former, reclaimed coal mining operation that once fed the furnaces of the nearby Dave Johnson generating station. With 158 towers generating 237 megawatts, the Glenrock wind farm generates enough electrical energy to power some 66,000 average American homes for a year.
Buffalo Bluff
The proposed Goshen County project, dubbed Buffalo Bluff, was first conceived by the then-Horizon Wind Energy company in 2006. That company was sold in 2007 to EDP Renewables and, in 2011, rebranded into EDP North America, the entity pursuing the project here.
Branam said the Buffalo Bluff project is projected as a 100 to 300 megawatt production facility. As of June, there wasn’t a set date for construction to begin, he said. But the project must start building by 2020 to take advantage of current production tax credits that make generating electricity using renewable resources even more attractive – and profitable.
The company already has lease agreements for the project with Goshen County landowners. Harpstreith wouldn’t specify precisely where in the county the wind farm may go in the future, but she would say that, while there is support for the Buffalo Bluff plant, there’s also been some push-back from others who don’t want the wind farm in their back yard.