Duke Energy Leveraging Wind Farm Business

Charlotte-based power company Duke Energy said Monday that it is borrowing money against five of its commercial wind farms so that it can continue to make investments in renewable power. Duke Energy Generation Services, a Duke Energy Commercial Businesses unit that owns and develops renewable energy, financed the wind farms through an affiliate, Green Frontier Windpower Holdings.

Three of the farms are located in Wyoming, one in Pennsylvania and another in Colorado. Green Frontier has secured a 15-year loan of approximately $325 million and letters of credit for about $50 million. The projects are fully contracted for terms of at least 20 years.

Duke will have nearly 1,000 megawatts of generation by the end of the year. It has committed more than $1 billion since 2007 to build its wind power business.

Campbell County Wants Stricter Wind Regulations

Campbell County wants wind energy regulations that are more strict than what state law requires — and soon. Wind farms in Campbell County would add yet another piece to the county’s energy industry and would provide jobs and tax revenue, but the county also wants to make sure the fields of turbines are acceptable to county residents.

The Campbell County public works department has come up with a set of zoning regulations it believes is fair for wind farms as part of a comprehensive re-write to the county zoning regulations. Some the regulations are more stringent than statewide regulations passed earlier this year by state lawmakers.

One important difference: The financial assurance for decommissioning and reclamation of wind farms, called a bonding requirement, is different from state rules. The County Commission wants companies to pay the bond requirement before starting construction. It’s basically insurance in case the company abandons the wind farm without taking down the turbines and reclaiming the land. Coal mines and drilling companies have similar bond requirements.

“The state has it set up where they don’t have to do that until 15 years into the project,” County Commissioner Dan Coolidge said. “If a company is going to have financial problems, it would probably happen in the first few years, not 15 years down the road. So we want to see bonding right up front.”

 Energy Self-Reliant States Get A Boost From New Federal Study

A new study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) reinforces the findings of a 2009 report by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR). The ILSR report, Energy Self-Reliant States, concluded that all 50 states could generate at least 25 percent of their electricity needs from in-state renewable energy while 31 could generate over 100 percent.

NREL’s Western Wind and Solar Integration Study (WWSIS) approached the issue from a transmission perspective and answered the question: is it preferable to rely on in-state renewable energy generation and existing transmission lines or to build extensive interstate high-voltage transmission lines to send renewable energy from states with somewhat better renewable resources to those with poorer resources?

The WWSIS examined five southwestern states - Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Wyoming. It found that each state could generate at least 35 percent of its electricity from local renewable resources (5 percent from solar, 30 percent from wind) without negatively impacting the electricity system. Moreover, it found the additional cost of state-level energy self-reliance to be trivial, a 1.5 percent increase over the cost of building over 10,000 miles of interstate high voltage transmission lines, while the additional benefits to individual states would be quite substantial