Juhl Wind, www.juhlwind.com – the leading developer of community-based wind farm projects throughout North America, in conjunction with development partner Suzlon Energy Limited’s North American subsidiary Suzlon Wind Energy Corp., reported today the successful sale of a 20 MW community wind power project.
The Grant County Wind Farm, operational since March 2010, is located in Southwestern Minnesota and utilizes ten Suzlon S88’s to produce the 20 MW that powers some 7k area homes.
The purchaser, Morristown, New Jersey-based Olympus Power LLC, was eager to get into the wind power generation sector with this Community-Based Energy Development (C-BED) project which is owned in partnership with local Minnesota farmers. The revolutionary C-BED initiative in Minnesota optimizes local and regional agricultural/economic resources to spur renewable development, thus enabling seamless interconnection of smaller localized renewable systems into the larger grid and cost sharing, helping to foster a stable renewable market.
Chairman of Olympus, Dean Vanech, commended the capability and commitment of both JUHL and Suzlon, as evident from the exceptional quality of the project, calling the acquisition a bold move forward for Olympus’s strategy to develop a solid clean energy portfolio.
CEO of JUHL, Dan Juhl, expressed his pleasure at teaming up with Suzlon and Minnesota farmers to once again push the envelope of wind energy development, citing the vast benefits of community wind farms for farmers, from revenue stream diversification to localized production of energy.
CEO of Suzlon, Andris Cukurs, was similarly pleased to be working with JUHL again, who was Suzlon’s first US customer and with whom Suzlon has worked for several years. Cukurs touted the S88 wind turbine, calling it a workhorse that has routinely produced 98% availability all across the US, expressing confidence that Olympus and the people of Southwestern Minnesota have a first-class, “strong-running facility” on their hands.
Northern States Power, a subsidiary of Xcel Energy and Otter Tail Power Company, are purchasing the clean energy produced by the project under terms of a 20-year power purchase agreement and the project will join other renewable providers on the Otter Tail grid, while NSP offers electricity to its wider service area across Northern Minnesota.
Just more exciting news for JUHL, which has developed 16 wind farms and projects to date, now providing full scale sales and services to smaller wind/solar projects since the acquisition of Next Generation Power Systems.
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