Part of the LiveOAK Network

About Us:

We are a new media company publishing websites that focus on energy, the environment and sustainable living. By leading the conversation about green issues, LiveOAK aims to advance the principals of sustainability by making them meaningful and accessible to a mainstream audience.

GE Lands 845-Megawatt Bid for World’s Largest Wind Farm

GE_2Germany_windfarm2.5

The 845-megawatt Oregon wind farm–larger than any wind farm currently in operation–will sell its power to renewables-hungry Southern California.

While Danish wind energy giant Vestas Wind Systems is issuing furloughs to some 500 workers at the company’s Colorado blade plant, GE Power & Water is celebrating more positive news with the announcement of its involvement in the $1.4 billion, 338-turbine Shepherd’s Flat Wind Farm in Oregon.

Because the proposed Shepherd’s Flat wind farm is located in the Columbia River Gorge area, where cheap, abundant hydropower is hard to compete with on a cost per kWh basis, the power produced at Shepherd’s Flat will–in theory–travel nearly the length of the West Coast of the U.S. before reaching the end-users of Southern California Edison (SCE), the nation’s largest purchaser of renewable energy.

Like other investor-owned utilities in California, SCE is racing to meet the state’s renewable energy requirement of 20% by 2010 and having to look out of state for new renewable capacity.  But try as they may to make the mandate, making that target is going to be unlikely, Edison CEO Ed Craver told me when I spoke with him at the company’s Electric Vehicle Technology Center in November.

“Transmission is creating the bottleneck to twenty percent by 2010, not the actual projects,” said Craver.  However, those California utilities that are unable to meet the targets because of transmission bottlenecks will be eligible for a waiver until those bottlenecks are cleared, Craver added.

SCE currently serves 16% of its customer load with renewables every day, well above the national average of 4%.

North American debut of GE’s 2.5-megawatt wind turbine

The $1.4 billion contract awarded from independent power producer Caithness Energy to supply wind turbines and provide services for the project, marks a huge step forward for GE’s growing wind turbine division.

845-megawatt Shepherd's Flat wind farm will be located near Arlington, Oregon.

845-megawatt Shepherd's Flat wind farm will be located near Arlington, Oregon.

Should everything be approved by state regulators, the Shepherds Flat wind farm will be the first in North America to deploy GE’s 2.5xl wind turbine. The 2.5-MW builds upon the success of GE’s 1.5-MW wind turbine–the world’s most popular–which has been deployed over 12,000 times in Europe and Asia.

Economic impacts of the wind farm are nothing to be sneezed at, especially in an area that has been hit by fickle agricultural markets and a crumbling timber industry.

Caithness Energy estimates that the $2 billion project will employ 400 workers during construction and 35 during operation, injecting $16 million annually into the Oregon economy.  Construction will begin in 2010 and will be completed in 2012.

Image courtesy of GE

    • Share:
    •  
    • More:

This post was written by: Timothy B. Hurst

Timothy Hurst is the founder of ecopolitology and executive editor of LiveOAK Media. He mostly covers energy and environmental politics, clean tech and green business; but has a tendency to cover music festivals in the summer. When not reading, writing, or talking about environmental politics to anyone who will listen, Tim will ski, hike with his aging lab and get dirty in his Colorado veggie garden. Follow Tim on twitter at @ecopolitologist.

4 Responses to “GE Lands 845-Megawatt Bid for World’s Largest Wind Farm”

  1. Uncle B says:

    Now: feed that power to rechargeable electric hybrid plug in cars and cut foreign oil imports to strengthen the dollar! Buy Tesla, Aptera, even the “Volt” if it ever gets produced, and make the conversion away from foreign oil dependency for transportation – even follow these plans with electric bullet trains in intercity networks to cut foreign oil costs and strengthen the dollar! We do so have the resources, Wind and Solar , Hydro and Tidal do so count! Whats more they are perpetual – never require refueling, and have no waste products to worry about!America is out of oil! Drilling for Geothermal makes more sense! Hunting the far side of the world for oil does not! America needs Power independence This is the way to get there.

  2. Timothy B. Hurst says:

    Once again, I Couldn’t agree with you more, Uncle B.

  3. Caleb Dwiggins says:

    Do the math guys… Wind is great it is good but it can’t hold a candle to what coal fire NG and other petrol energy sources are doing now. I want to see more so called green in this country to but electric cars would only shift our need for carbon fuels from petrol based cars to coal, NG, and nuke based electricity. The answer is to conserve and innovate and learn to live different.

  4. It’s definitely time we start looking more seriously into conserving energy rather than just finding new ways to produce it.

Trackbacks/Pingbacks


Leave a Reply

Additional comments powered by BackType


Newsletter:

Further Reading...
Greening Brownfields: Remediation Through Sustainable Development

Strategy for Sustainability: A Business Manifesto







Climate Change: What's Your Business Strategy?

The Green Collar Economy