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Jun 17, 2009

Amarillo Globe-News: Parmer eyes world’s windiest wind farm

By Kevin Welch
kevin.welch@amarillo.com
Publication Date: 06/17/09

Huge losses in oil and gas investments have downsized T. Boone Pickens' plan for the world's largest wind farm, but U.S. and European groups want to build an even bigger one in Parmer County.

Scandia Wind Southwest, led by Parmer County resident Jim Swafford, Danish company Alpha Wind Energy APS and Havgul Clean Energy AS of Norway, are working to pull a deal together that would involve 454 owners of 204,000 acres in the northwest corner of the county.

The wind farm is named the Mariah Project for the song in the Broadway musical "Oklahoma," Swafford said.

Those landowners are evaluating contracts that call for them to give up the usual $2 to $4 payments per acre annually during the development phase. In exchange, they would get a 10 percent stake in Scandia Wind Southwest, the company owned by the three partners, said Harald Dirdal, project director for Havgul Clean Energy.

The estimated total cost of the Mariah Project is $10 billion.

"That's where the challenge is, but that's where the opportunity is," Dirdal said. "We as developers couldn't put up that much, so we will split the wind park into subsidiaries to be sold to large industrial companies like Xcel Energy or Florida Power & Light."

The lack of transmission lines in the area is dictating the scale of the project, which has a capacity goal of 5,000 megawatts. That's enough electricity to power 1.75 million homes if it operated at maximum capacity all the time.

"We're going to make it so big, the grid will come to us," Dirdal said.

But it will be expensive to connect to the grid.

The transmission plan would have to include switches to convert the electricity, because the national grids, which come together near Texas' western border, are not synchronized. That would make for huge costs to move the electricity to market.

"All those costs have to be spread out over a lot of installed megawatts," Dirdal said.

Currently, the largest wind farm is Horse Hollow near Sweetwater at 735 megawatts, according to the American Wind Energy Association.

Alpha Wind is finishing its installation this week of equipment to take detailed measurements of the wind in the county for about one year, Swafford said.

Transmission line deadlines
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas recently submitted to the Public Utilities Commission proposed dates to complete transmission construction. ERCOT's plan is based on the PUC's goal of having all the lines connecting West Texas wind to the population centers to the east by the end of 2013.

• First line runs from the south through Briscoe, Swisher and Castro counties to Randall County by Sept. 30, 2012.
• Connect it to the ERCOT grid by Dec. 31, 2012.
• Second line through Childress to Donley, Gray and Carson counties, across the Palo Duro Canyon in Armstrong County to Randall County by March 31, 2013.Large wind farm proposals
• Scandia Wind Southwest, 5,000 megawatts in northwest Parmer County
• Shell WindEnergy and partner Luminant, 3,000 megawatts in Briscoe County along the Caprock
• E.ON Climate & Renewables, 2,100 megawatts in southern Carson and Gray counties
• Mesa Power Pampa, 1,000 megawatts, originally proposed as 4,000 megawatts in Roberts, Gray, Hemphill and Carson counties

The Amarillo Globe-News Online

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