Delaware County wind farm repowering to take 4-6 months

EDGEWOOD, Iowa — Following the recent approval of construction permits by the Delaware County Board of Supervisors, the repowering of the Elk Wind Farm is on track to begin in June.

Greenbacker Renewable Energy, owners of the wind farm located between Edgewood and Greeley, first proposed repowering the turbines at a meeting with the supervisors in November 2020. The farm consists of 17 turbines and 21 landowners.

The work will focus on the inside of the turbines, as well as the nacelles on top. Plans call for the Nordex turbines currently being used to be replaced with General Electric turbines.

Justin Fike, an investment consultant with Greeenbacker Capital, said the company only will repower turbines where real estate agreements are in place with landowners.

“There are still a couple of landowners that if they decide they don’t want to move forward, we will leave those as Nordex machines, but we are still actively working with those two landowners,” he said.

Fike said a Self-Propelled Modular Transport (SPMT) will transport cranes along public and access roads, limiting damage to cropland.

“That was a pretty big shift on our part and a pretty big selling point with the landowners to use the SPMT,” he said. “We just wanted to make sure this was received well by the community. Those machines are going to cut down significantly on any sort of impact on cropland in the area and any sort of compaction in the fields. That is a key component of the repowering.”

In November, county supervisors approved a request for nine variances for the wind farm, with seven of them being setbacks from public rights of way and two being setbacks from above-ground power lines.

Fike explained that with the projects calling for rotors with diameters of 127 meters, the variance on the setbacks was needed. The turbines currently have 100-meter-diameter rotors.

“The setbacks grew because of the bigger blades — we weren’t able to meet the setbacks while keeping the turbines in their current locations,” he said. “However tall the turbine is, all have setbacks of at least 1.0, meaning the setback is greater than the distance the turbine is from the road.”

Fike also addressed a noise study requested by the supervisors.

“We want to make sure the expectations are clear on what we do and how the county received that,” he said. “We prepared a post-construction noise monitor and protocol. It was sent to the county, reviewed and approved by the Board of Supervisors.”

In the approval of the permits recently, noise monitoring was referenced.

“We have to build the project and then, within 18 months of the project being up and running, do noise monitoring in the field in compliance with the protocol and give the results to the county,” Fike explained. “Part of that protocol is that the results be hourly results and not an average over a month.”

Construction is scheduled to take four to six months.

“Our base phase is June to October,” Fike said. “That could push out if we run into weather delays like large rain events or windy days.”