Largest Wind Farm in Kansas (250 MW) Built by Italian Energy Firm
by Matthew McDermott, New York, NY on 10. 3.08
photo: Brent Danley
It may not be a world record beater, but a new wind farm in the Great Plains does take the blue ribbon on two fronts: The largest by Italian renewable energy developer Enel and the largest so far in Kansas. Enel’s press release is fairly terse on the development of the Smoky Hills wind farm, but this is what it’s all about:
Operational by End of 2008
Located about 19 miles west of Salina, Kansas, the 250 MW project consists of a mixture of 1.8 MW Vestas and 1.5 MW GE turbines. When fully operational at the end of this year, Enel says that it will produce enough electricity to supply 85,000 homes and avoid the release of 750,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions annually.
Enel says that five utilities will purchase the electricity generated at Smoky Hills: Sunflower Electric Power Corporation, Midwest Energy Inc. and Kansas City Board of Public Utilities, the City of Independence, Missouri, and the City of Springfield, Missouri.
For Those Not Up on Enel
Enel distributes and sells power and gas to more than 52 million customers in 22 countries in Europe, North America and Latin America. It has about 30,000 MW of renewable energy power generation capacity using hydro, geothermal, wind, solar and biomass.
(A bit) More at :: Enel SpA (press release)
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Since Kansas currently generates most of its electricity from coal, this project is going to have a much bigger positive impact than a similar project would in, say, California, which already generates most of its electricity from carbon-neutral power plants. Every kilowatt-hour of wind power this project sends into Kansas's grid will more or less result in that much less coal being burned.
The prairies need more turbines!
Curious - how many US energy companies are building projects like this in other countries?
This is a perfect example of what is right and wrong with America. We have the need for renewable energy, and we have the technology, expertise,resources, talent and money to build these. Why aren't we doing it?
Renewable energy...GREAT!!! This, however, doesn't do much for our foreign energy dependence problem.
Wow, they have 30GW of renewable capacity?!? That's huge! I didn't realize they were so big.
I'm all for wind farms, but why is a Italian company building it? That is dumb. They should have gotten GE. Keep the money in country.
We need an american company to start making these wind farms all over so we can save energy and stop using coal.