ST. JOSEPH -- In the coming weeks, 60 huge wind turbines will power the equivalent of 50,000 homes and swell local municipal tax coffers, but the company behind the province's biggest wind farm plans to soon more than double its production in Manitoba.
Mike Garland, chief executive officer of San Francisco-based Pattern Energy, said tough economic times and the U.S. financial crisis caused the St. Joseph Wind Farm project to be downsized.
Pattern once eyed a 300-megawatt wind farm in this community just west of Letellier and clearly visible from Highway 75, but the project was eventually scaled back to its current 138 megawatts. But now that the project is nearly completed and the company has demonstrated "that we do what we say we're going to do," Garland said, Pattern wants to sit down with the province and Manitoba Hydro to talk about the next phase.
"I'd love to start construction (by) the end of 2011," Garland said in an interview during the official opening of the wind farm on Tuesday.
Although not as ambitious as once envisioned, the St. Joseph Wind Farm will be the largest in the province once it is fully operational in mid-March. Only seven of the 60 gigantic turbines, mounted on towers 80 metres high, were running on Tuesday, but the company's local manager Ian Cunningham expects they will now come on stream at the rate of roughly one per day.
A second Manitoba wind farm at St. Leon, which opened five years ago, produces 99 megawatts of power.
Read more : http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/mixed-news-in-renewable-energy-113339099.html
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