| Last updated at 9:10 AM on 17/03/07 |
Winds of change 
P.E.I. looks to alternative forms of energy
RON RYDER
The Guardian
|
 |
| Adam Sandler, an engineer with Frontier Power Systems, was part of the team that designed the provincial government's wind energy project at East Point. Guardian photo |
|
"They should be starting now,” David Stewart says. “We’re calling for wind.”
Eighty metres above Stewart’s head a trio of massive blades begin to turn in a rotation that looks deceptively slow.
A minute later the air is filled with a slicing sound, like a knife going right though paper.
The Vestas V-90 windmill is starting to produce power at East Point.
The machines looked almost frail from the highway, but up close they are massive. A tower with a span wider than outstretched arms supports a 12-tonne generator and an equally large gearbox in a work cell the size of a trailer.
From the cell extend three blades 45-metres long. They have to turn at least 16 times per minute to generate power, a speed that looks hypnotically slow at the windmill’s hub and blindingly fast at the tip of each blade.
Stewart, a resident of Fortune, works as a service technician for Vestas. After 30 years in the construction business, he’s clearly happy to find such a challenging project this close to home.
“I think five years ago nobody would have ever thought this would be here, not even two year ago,” he said. “But when they decided it came up pretty quick.”
The 10 towering turbines at East Point are lined up so that they form a row perpendicular to the prevailing northwest winds, a direction determined after engineers analysed a year of wind-speed data from the site, compared it with a decade of environmental records and came to the conclusion that they could produce wind profitably.
At peak production, the $56-million project will produce 30 megawatts of power.
It’s just the latest part in what has sometimes seemed like a pattern of windmills blossoming from the Island soil.
Prince Edward Island first became a wind power pioneer during the energy crisis of the 1970s, when the federal government established the Atlantic Wind Test Site in North Cape, using its as a proving ground for windmills and wind-generation technology.
In the 1990s the P.E.I. Energy Corporation established what would become more than 13 megawatts of wind generation capacity at North Cape and Maritime Electric responded by giving Islanders the chance to support the project by buying blocks of premium priced “green power” on their monthly bill.
Environment Minister Jamie Ballem compares the Island’s abundant wind to natural resources like oil or gas. He see a growing opportunity for P.E.I. to move from complete reliance on imported energy by maximizing such available opportunities.
Government’s big picture includes the eventual development of plants that produce diesel-like fuel from plant sources, that produce pellets of wood or straw that can be burned in home furnaces or produced ethanol fuel by fermenting alcohol from cash crops.
On a smaller scale, they talk about farmers burning methane from their manure storage or small companies operating on power from their own windmills.
“What we are looking at is getting to the point where we will be as self-reliant as possible,” said Ballem.
“Let’s say private developers are going to generate 200 megawatts from wind, well that’s our peak load in the province. Now they’ll sell a lot of that to customers elsewhere and we’ll be buying power for our utility from other sources, but that’s trading credits. In reality we’ll be producing power here to meet our own needs.”
The business case for local power gets stronger as the cost of oil or natural gas rises. At the same time the environmental case for renewable energy has gained support from public concern about global warming and the role oil, gas and coal-fired generation may play in adding to the greenhouse effect.
“There’s a lot of reasons, economic and environmental, why this province wants to develop its own renewable forms of energy,” Ballem said.
“P.E.I. has been leading on this a bit, but now we’re hearing the same kind of concerns from the federal government and it could be our chance to really move forward.”
The windmill business is an international affair. The Vestas windmills, of which the V-90 is the goliath, are built in Norway and shipped across the Atlantic.
A maintenance depot at East Point has enough spare parts on hand, including the generator itself, to keep the windmills turning. Waiting for a key piece to sail from Scandinavia isn’t really an option when Islanders are waiting for power; neither is paying to fly a 12-tonne machine via overnight courier services.
A crew of Vestas technicians flew to the Island to help fine-tune the windmills once they were built. Their itinerary included another major wind farm in California, new projects in Colorado and work in Hawaii and the Caribbean.
“It’s quite a job and it’s growing,” one of the Souris workers remarked. “But these are almost all young guys who don’t have to worry about family.”
Adam Sandler, an engineer with Frontier Power Systems, was part of the team charged with seeing if wind would work at East Point.
“It’s not unusual for wind to go up and down 10 per cent from one year to the next so you have to be sure your calculations are right,” he said in a tour of the site. “That kind of difference could be a major economic problem for the operator.”
The East Point wind site began producing energy in January, but even before that start-up the project produced a lot of buzz.
The wind farm hadn’t even begun production Dec. 11, 2006 when government surprised even itself with the successful launch of a series of bonds, open only to Island residents, that let people earn a five per cent return on their investment.
By the end of December more than $1.9 million worth of the bonds had been sold. Optimistically, perhaps, the province has reserved for itself the right to put a stop to sales when the total number of bonds exceeds $20 million in value.
Government expects the plant to produce 7.5 per cent of P.E.I.’s total electricity, powering 12,000 homes and displacing the equivalent of 75,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.
The Island is attracting wind developers whose business model takes them past the local marketplace.
Ventus Energy of Toronto went public in December with a $25-million share offering giving investors a piece of the 99-megawatt West Cape wind energy park under construction.
When the project’s 55 windmills are ultimately set in place the company hopes to sell its power into the New England Power Pool and its renewable energy credits through the Massachusetts REC market.
Ventus has its eye on more than the Island and its wind offerings. The company is in the development stage of projects that could lead to 5,000 megawatts of power coming from 25 sites in Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador.
Don Bartlett, Ventus’s vice-president of development, is a Newfoundland native who recently moved to Halifax after making a career in the United States. He said wind represents an opportunity for cutting edge technology on the East Coast.
“Atlantic Canadians have a long tradition of moving away and going where the jobs are,” he said.
“To have this kind of development happening in the Maritimes is going to be a new opportunity for our young people to be educated in an emerging field and still find their work close to home. The projects that we are talking about on P.E.I. alone are worth $250 million. That’s huge.”
|
1
