ALLETE Clean Energy, the company building a 300-megawatt wind site in southern Oklahoma has another wind farm project in North Dakota that will be online this month.
The $200 million wind farm near Glen Ullin, North Dakota will provide power for more than 50,000 customers in Morton and Mercer Counties. It is also the first wind farm in North Dakota to be built and operated by Allete Clean Energy. The wind farm will consist of 43 wind turbines that sit on 30,000 acres of land.
Construction started this past summer and energy production is expected by the end of November.
“They’re all excited about being a part of a project like this, not only from a financial stand point but just seeing it, and they know the area is coming and the turbines are going to be area,” said Scott Monroe, construction manager.
The energy center, which began as an idea in 2008, is in its final stages of completion.
“Now the general electric technicians are carefully fine tuning each piece of equipment and bringing them online one at a time, very safely and efficiently. We have a portion of the farm, three quarters of the project is already full electrified and turbines are coming on every day,” said Al Rudeck, president of Allete Clean Energy.
“The whole site would produce enough power for about 55,000 homes over a years’ time. Of course that depends on the wind regime too. The power is constantly up and down depending on the wind,” said Blue Nalder, wind site manager.
With a plan for future expansion.
“We have more phases of Glen Ullin that could be built in the future if we get the transmission and the customers and also other projects around the state,” said Rudeck.
However, there’s more to the project than what meet the eye.
“We’ve put in about 14 miles of road for this project, we’ve got 47 miles of underground cables that actually take the electricity from each tower and take them back to the substation,” said Monroe.
ALLETE’s Oklahoma project is the Diamond Spring wind site where the company has already contracted to provide electricity to Walmart, Starbucks and Smithfield Foods.
The 300 MW wind farm is in Murray, Johnston and Pontotoc Counties and is about 25 miles northeast of the city of Ardmore.