Red Lily Wind Farm could be just the first

[ NOVEMBER 23, 2009 - KEVIN WEEDMARK ]

Assuming financing falls into place and the Red Lily Wind Farm project goes ahead as planned at Red Jacket next year, it could be just the first wind farm in the area.

SaskPower has announced plans to add 200 megawatts of wind power to the system over the next few years, and Algonquin Power, one of the partners in the Red Lily project, says it would be interested in talking to SaskPower to find out how its plan to add the additional wind capacity will work.

A year ago, SaskPower signed a power purchase agreement with Red Lily Wind Farm LP to purchase power from a 25 megawatt facility just north of the Trans-Canada Highway near the Red Jacket power substation. Red Lily is owned by Algonquin Power and Gaia Power.

Algonquin Power spokesperson April Meyer said that project is planned for construction next year.

“We’re proceeding with finalizing the financing,” she said in an interview Thursday. “Assuming that goes as anticipated, we will do construction in the spring, summer, and fall of 2010.”

She said some of the preliminary work on the project has been done.

“We’ve got some preliminary design work done,” Meyer said. “One of the first things would be to finalize layouts with the landowners.”

A meeting with landowners will likely be held in February.

This fall, SaskPower announced a new initiative, the Green Options Plan, under which it will purchase 200 megawatts of power from private producers, including an additional 25 megawatts of wind power. Meyer said Algonquin and Gaia would be interested in supplying some of that power. “We’re watching closely what SaskPower is doing and hoping that Red Lily will be fi rst of many projects in the area,” Meyer said.

Brian Mohr, manager of SaskPower’s Sustainable Supply Development Group, said the Crown corporation is interested in wind power for a number of different reasons. “Wind power also offers an electricity product with a low environment impact and zero emissions,” he said.

Mohr said SaskPower has done a thorough investigation into how to add more wind power to the system.

“In 2007 we established a technical group on wind power,” he said. “We looked at a whole host of issues with adding another large block of wind, we looked at what transmission infrastructure would be needed, the capacity benefit of wind power, how much can we rely on it, looked at using our hydro facilities to help manage the non-dispatchability and variability of wind power.

“You can only accept wind power when the wind blows, and you don’t have the ability to control the unit. It’s not like a gas fired unit we can run at a certain capacity.

“We looked at forecasting of wind power deliveries, we looked at any practical limits and we looked at wind power integration and development.”

The company’s conclusion? "The conclusion was we could add up to 200 megawatts of curtailable wind power with manageable operational impacts and costs,” said Mohr.

“Another conclusion of the studies was that it’s more economical to build large-scale wind farms. Larger wind farm creates significant economies of scale. We also looked at cost of infrastructure and determined we would be much better off economically to build larger wind farms.”

SaskPower doesn’t plan to build its own wind farms, but to ask private power producers to submit proposals to meet the 200 megawatt need.

Mohr said SaskPower is on track with its work to prepare for the Red Lily Wind Farm coming on stream in 2011.

“Our role is to build the transmission to connect that to the SaskPower grid and to buy energy from the plant, he said. “We’re on track with our work to accommodate Red Lily.”

SaskPower will issue a call for proposals to qualified bidders to supply the 200 megawatts of new wind power. Once the new power is online wind will be a significant part of SaskPower’s power supply mix.

“Wind will be about 8.5 per cent of our generating capacity in the province, which is a relatively high percentage of wind power compared to most jurisdictions,” he said. “We will be right out front among jurisdictions around the world.”