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CIRI moving ahead with phase 2 of Fire Island wind farm project
Cook Inlet Region Inc. is moving ahead with construction of phase two of its wind farm on Fire Island, offshore Anchorage, Alaska, Suzanne Gibson, the Native regional corporation’s senior director for energy development, told Petroleum News in a Nov. 5 email. Gibson said that the corporation wanted to start construction in time to qualify for a federal renewable energy tax credit program that expires at the end of 2013.
“We decided to go ahead and start construction of phase two because we can still qualify the project for the tax credit if we start this year and complete construction by 2015,” Gibson said.
In October CIRI began clearing roads and pads on Fire Island for the installation of 11 additional wind turbines on the island, doubling the number of turbines and hence doubling the farm’s existing 17.6 megawatts of generation capacity. The existing power transmission system from the island will be able to handle the additional power output, thus enabling fuller use of both the transmission system and the island’s wind resource, Gibson said.
CIRI originally permitted 33 turbine sites on the island.
Completion in 2015 Having started phase two CIRI would like to continue construction in April 2015, to enable project completion in October of that year, Gibson said. The phase two project may cost around $50 million, with a tax credit of around $15 million — the tax credit would reduce the cost of power from the wind farm by well over $40 per megawatt hour, she said.
“That’s too much money to leave on the table for a project we know we can build and Chugach Electric Association has proven can be integrated into the (generation and transmission) system,” Gibson said.
CIRI does not yet have a customer for the extra power from the expanded wind farm but is in discussions with a couple of utilities over the power purchase, Gibson said.
Phase one of the Fire Island wind farm went into operation at the end of August 2012. Between then and September of this year the farm produced about 51,800 megawatt hours of power, a little more than the facility’s anticipated output of 51,000 megawatt hours, Gibson wrote in a CIRI newsletter.
The startup of the farm came after a lengthy debate, acrimonious at times, with Southcentral Alaska power utilities over the cost of the wind power and, in particular, the potential cost and difficulty of integrating power that fluctuates with the strength of the wind into the Alaska Railbelt power grid. CIRI has argued that wind power, with no fuel requirements, offers long-term price stability. The corporation has also said that, with Fire Island power output only constituting a small fraction of total power generation in the Railbelt, integration of the wind farm’s intermittent output into the grid should not present any significant problem.
In the event, CIRI ended up implementing a scaled down 11-turbine version of its original wind farm concept, with just one customer, Chugach Electric Association. And after several months of operation, CIRI said that output from the farm had exceeded expectations and had not resulted in any problems with power grid stability.
—Alan Bailey
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