Green Light for Wind-Energy Project
A plan to build the largest wind farm in New England has received final approval.
Brittany Sauser 01/07/2008
- 10 Comments
On January 3, Maine's Land Use Regulation Commission approved the final design of the Stetson Wind Project--a 38-turbine wind farm to be built on Stetson Mountain, in Maine's Washington County. The $100 million project is headed by UPC Wind of Newton, MA, and will be the biggest source of wind energy for New England.
 An illustration of the Stetson Ridge with wind turbines. Credit: Natural Resources Council of Maine. |
The wind farm is expected to generate 57 megawatts of electricity annually, a number comparable to the yearly electricity use of roughly 27,000 Maine households. Each turbine tower will stand 262 feet tall with a blade diameter of 253 feet. Power from the wind farm will flow into the New England Power grid.
A 42-megawatt, 28-turbine wind farm already exists in Mars Hill, ME, but with rising oil prices and the push toward renewable energy sources, the Stetson project proposal received little resistance from residents and lawmakers. Additionally, the largest wind farms in the United States can be found in Texas, California, and the Midwest. According to the American Wind Energy Association's annual U.S. wind-power rankings (as of December 31, 2006), Texas has installed 2,763 megawatts of wind energy, California follows with 2,361, and Iowa with 936.
Overall, the United States ranks third in the world, behind Germany and Spain, with a total installed wind-power capacity of more than 11,600 megawatts.
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robert.hargraves
39 Comments
Megawatts are a rate
You wrote "The wind farm is expected to generate 57 megawatts of electricity annually". MIT folks should know that magawatts are a rate of energy flow, not an amount of energy. The sentence is nonsense.
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doteman
6 Comments
Re: Megawatts are a rate
Yeah, this is a technical semantic in the generation industry. What it means is that averaged over the year this wind farm should be good for 57MW of power. Energy generally isn't used to describe the size/rating of a plant. It would also be useful if they quantified the crest factor of the plant (eg, pk/average) power characteristics, which is especially relevant to the economics of a wind plant.
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mtbrown
2 Comments
Re: Megawatts are a rate
Yes the general megawatt rating does not give the total energy production without a capacity factor to go along. But, the wind industry usually achieves a CF of between .25 and .4. It can be assumed that such a large investment would have a good site to utilize and will be at the higher end of the spectrum. So you could get about 200,000 MWh for this plant. The real factor is what PPA price they got. Wind can sell for as low as $50 per MWh and ive heard of as high as $150. This is likely a high PPA project so it works out well, but the future lies in high altitude projects that can get capacity factors of .9 and up.
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