Palouse wind farm keeping up with expectations

For more than a year now, First Wind has been utilizing one of the Palouse’s most plentiful resources: wind.

So far, the energy produced at the site has been pretty close to estimates prior to construction.

“Our first year we fell a little bit short of our projection, while this year, we’re slightly ahead,” Shawn Elston, a senior wind farm support specialist for First Wind, said Thursday during a presentation to the Palouse Environmental Sustainability Coalition at the wind farm’s on-site office.

Elston said the operation hasn’t been underway long enough to properly determine how close the estimates made before construction were, but he said it’s a promising start.

Each of the 58 turbines produces 1.8 megawatts, and together they generate enough energy, on average, to power a city the size of Pullman.

While it’s hard to miss the wind turbines spanning the Naff Ridge halfway between Spokane and Pullman, it’s also hard to grasp how massive the Vestas V100s are from the highway.

Each blade is 160 feet long, the length of four school buses lined up end to end, while the towers are more than 260 feet tall, close to the length of a football field, and each one is anchored underground with 1.4 million pounds and 2,000 feet of anchor bolts.

The turbines reach their full output in 20 mph winds, and shut down to prevent damage in sustained winds in excess of 44 mph. Once they get going, the blades spin at a rate between nine and 16 revolutions a minute, which out at the tip of the blade means speeds of up to 160 mph.

Each turbine has its own individual computer and monitoring system and are all monitored remotely from control rooms in California and – along with the 16 other wind farms the company owns around the nation. It also has specialists on-call who can respond to problems, even during the middle of the night.

For the most part, Elston said, the turbines’ components are expected to last 20 years, though regular maintenance from the 10 full-time employees is sporadically required to keep them operating as they should.

The wind farm, which contracts with Avista to distribute its energy, makes a good partner to the utility provider, he said, because it gets much of its energy from hydroelectric dams.

“First Wind production complements Avista energy well,” Elston said. “Production at their hydro dams goes down during the winter months. Meanwhile that’s when we get the most wind here.”

He said it also works well for Avista to be able to use the wind when it’s available, and the energy from water when the wind dies down, because hydroelectric dams are the most efficient way to store up large amounts of power.

The Palouse Environmental Sustainability Coalition, which organized the presentation in coordination with First Wind, is a local organization that aims to promote awareness of environmental concerns to the Palouse and increasing the discussion around alternative energy sources available to the region.

“Our group has been looking at sustainable energy for about a year now,” said Pat Rathmann, co-chair of the coalition. “We’ve had speakers on coal mining and solar research. Since we live right next to these wind turbines, we thought it would also be a great topic to look at.”

Several members expressed curiosity about the effect to both local landowners and wildlife.

“When the wind industry first got started in the U.S., they had machines that were very low to the ground with very fast turbines … right along migratory routes,” Elston said.

It was a situation, he said, that created a lot of bad publicity. Since then, environmental impact studies are conducted to ensure new sites have minimal effect on wildlife, particularly birds.

In the first year, 13 birds and 66 bats were confirmed killed by the rotors, numbers Elston said are reasonable.

While the site covers a total of about 9,000 acres, he said the turbines don’t actually affect land use much.

“They have a pretty small footprint. Farmers and landowners are able to keep 95 percent of their land in the exact same use they had it in before the wind farm came along,” he said.

It’s a good deal for landowners, he said, because they get a guaranteed income, royalty payments twice a year, and they get to keep their land, for the most part, engaged the same as it was previously.