Xcel Energy First Wind Farm in Minnesota

The Grand Meadow Wind Farm - the first wind project Xcel Energy will own and operate in Minnesota - was ready to top off a turbine looming over her Mower County farm. Minneapolis-based Xcel is stitching together a wind farm roughly six miles long and four miles wide just south of Interstate 90, about 27 miles southwest of Rochester. Eventually Grand Meadow will hold 67 turbines, capable of producing 100 megawatts of power, enough to supply 33,000 homes.

The company now gets less than 5 percent of its energy from wind in Minnesota, but by 2020, must produce 30 percent of its power from renewable sources to reduce dependence upon dirty coal. At least 25 percent of that clean energy must come from wind. That translates into roughly 3,000 megawatts of wind-produced energy that Xcel will have to buy or build in the next 12 years.

Put another way, that's roughly 2,000 wind turbines. To begin to meet that need, Xcel put out a request for proposals last December for 500 more megawatts of wind energy that could be available by 2011, and got responses for 22 projects in Minnesota, North and South Dakota and Iowa. The proposals add up to more than 3,000 megawatts of wind from which Xcel can choose, according to a plan it filed with the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission.

Southeast Minnesota and the region called Buffalo Ridge on the west end of I- 90 are rich with wind energy potential but there's a bottleneck getting that electricity to urban areas that need the power such as the Twin Cities. Xcel is proposing changes to speed up approval for new transmission lines, but in the meantime will add five 34.5 kilovolt power lines in the Grand Meadow area.

The five lines will carry power from the 67 turbines to a substation, where a single 161-kilovolt line will run to another substation that plugs into the region's power grid, said Nathan Svoboda, Xcel's plant manager. EnXco, the U.S. arm of a French energy company, will run the farm for its first two years, as it teaches Xcel employees wind farm maintenance. Then it will hand it off, said Svoboda.

Construction of the farm has been quick. The gravel access roads and concrete foundations were laid before the workers, from Mortenson Construction in Minnetonka, topped off 37 turbines in six weeks. On some days they finish three or four. The site is a hive of heavy equipment, pickup trucks and spindly cranes.

Total US installed wind power capacity stands at 19,549 megawatts this year, with new capacity of 2,725 megawatts added so far, according to AWEA, but the pace slowed in the second. The association says the country could add up to 7,500 megawatts of wind energy this year.

Source: Pioneer Press, Leslie Brooks Suzukamo, 8/31/8