MORGAN TOWNSHIP – Many people commuting through the wide-open farmland of Ashtabula County during the winter understand there’s a significant amount of wind moving at higher rates of speed.
Apex Clean Energy, based in Charlottesville, Va., is in the early stages of exploring how to harness that wind and using its force to generate electricity with a wind farm in eastern Ashtabula County.
Station Wind is a projected 300-megawatt wind farm using between 50 and 70 wind turbines stationed across much of the eastern portion of Ashtabula County.
“It’s an area with sustained winds that we believe would lead to probably on the order of a 35- to 40-percent net capacity factor, which efficiency-wise for a wind farm is very good,” Robert Gee, senior development manager for Apex Clean Energy, said during a meeting with the Morgan Township trustees open to the public at Morgan Hose Fire Hall on June 9. “They probably average in the low thirties.”
Ashtabula County was selected for a number of reasons.
“We have a new markets team that looks at every nook and cranny of the entire country to try figure out where are appropriate places to pursue wind development,” Gee said. “When they do that, they’re looking at where is there available existing transmission infrastructure? Are there high-voltage powerlines running through this area and are there nearby load centers and is their existing generation, especially are there areas where there is retiring generation from outdated or obsolete technologies, places where there is load going offline that creates opportunities for us to come in and put new generation onto the grid?”
Apex Clean Energy is looking to lease land from private property owners in Williamsfield, Wayne, Colebrook, New Lyme, Cherry Valley, Andover, Richmond, Dorset, Lenox, Morgan, Pierpont, Monroe, and Sheffield townships.
“There’s not a whole lot inside of that area that we can really mark at this point,” Gee said. “We’re at a fairly early stage in our development. In fact, it’s been almost exactly one year to the date from when we created Station Wind. We spent a few months out here prior to that doing some prospecting, talking to landowners, and we got enough positivity from those experiences that we decided to jump in with both feet and start leasing land.”
Turbine locations have not been selected, but they are proposed to be spread out over the entire target area.
“That is also across this vast (area of interest),” Gee said. “Where you’ve seen these older-style wind turbine farms, very often, you drive along the highway and see one turbine after another after another. They’re lined up all in a row and they’re spinning. The idea is if you look out your window, you’re going to see 47 turbines right out in front of you. That’s not the kind of project that we’re envisioning. Our turbines are going to be at least a half a mile apart. The turbines are not going to be stacked particularly close together.”
Prospective sites were chosen for the economical wind resource, existing transmission infrastructure and capacity and interested private landowners.
“It starts with us looking at the map and identifying target landowners,” Gee said. “To be frank, we kind of start with the larger landowners and then we try to build connectivity around them. We went out and tried to decide, ‘OK, who are some of the larger landowners that we can pick up the most acreage by leasing them and then we start some conversations.’”
“One of the things that makes this area more attractive than it would’ve been 10 years ago is that the turbines are much higher and we’re harvesting the wind flows at an upper level of the atmosphere where they are a lot more steady,” Gee said. “The turbines are actually designed to spin a lot slower than they would have been 10 or 15 years ago when a fast-moving turbine was an indication of a turbine generating energy. A modern turbine generating energy is moving very slowly.”
He explained the process once a property is identified.
“We identify the landowner and we stop out and talk to him, sit at kitchen tables and look at some maps and look at some term sheets and try to get them comfortable with the concept, the term of the lease with the financial terms and then we encourage them to see an attorney and we work through some of legal mumbo jumbo in the lease itself and, hopefully, we come to an agreement,” Gee said.
Apex leases whole parcels of land from the property owners, but develops just small portions of the property.
“If we leased 100 acres, the wind turbine occupies three acres of it,” Gee said. “We lease the whole thing because the lease contains the access rights. We have to study the whole parcel to figure out where to put the turbine. We need to have some access to people’s land so we can appropriately figure out where we can site things and where we can’t.”
Station Wind has leased roughly 12,000 acres in the target area.
“We are continuing to talk to landowners to try to garner more acreage,” Gee said. “One of the first steps in our process is to try to get enough acreage in order to enter the PJM (or regional transmission organization) queue. The PJM is a highly-desirable market to be in. Power purchase agreements within PJM are highly lucrative, and we believe this is a great energy market to try to sell electricity into.”
Though Apex leases entire parcels of land, once the turbine is built, a farmer can still use the land right up to edge of the structure, he said.
“We encourage them to use the land,” Gee said. “Then part of why we like wind is because it doesn’t profoundly alter the land use that exists. If we use a portion of it, it’s a small portion. If we’re leasing 100 acres for solar, we’re going to put solar panels over the whole thing, so if you were farming 100 acres, you’re not anymore. With a wind project, you’re farming 97 acres and we have a wind turbine. It takes three (acres) to build, but only occupies a half-acre when it’s done and you can go back to farming the two acres right around it. We feel like it’s a compatible land use that supports and actually strengthens the agricultural acreage of the area.”
Property owners are forecast to receive between $30,000 and $45,000 per turbine per year through leasing their land for the project.
“On top of that, we have a per acreage payment, a flat rate, for every single landowner that is $60 per acre during the operations term,” Liam Kehoe, project developer for Apex Clean Energy, said.
As much as $70 million in new tax revenue for Ashtabula County, local school districts and township governments is anticipated.
The Blue Creek Wind Farm in Van Wert and Paulding counties has paid $2.7 million per year in PILOT (Payments In Lieu Of Taxes) payments since the project became operational in 2012.
Gee believes landowners should not have to worry about contamination in their fields.
“The most likely source of contamination would be from construction vehicles,” Gee said. “There are standards of protocols within the OPSB. They will issue us our permit, and it will come with a huge series of conditions, and one of the conditions is that we will have to have an on-site environmental monitor monitoring certain aspects of our construction procedures to ensure that vehicles are fueled and refueled in certain places and they’re maintained such that there is not any (contamination).”
“In other places, we work with a lot of organic farmers and that is a big concern,” Gee continued. “If there is fuel spillage or any kind of lubricant or whatever that is leaked onto the property, that can cost you your organic certification, which in the best of cases takes you into three years after it’s fully cleaned up to retain. In those cases, we will very often include crop damage provisions in our leases if you have organic property that says that we will cover the reduced price that you get for crops that is on acreage where what we’ve done has cost you your organic certification.”
Gee said Apex Clean Energy has a policy that it cleans up any mess that is made and compensates farmers for income lost because of its messes.
Apex Clean Energy will have turbines that experience failure back up and running as quickly as possible.
“We’ve had turbines damaged by tornadoes, there have been lightning strikes, we’ve had to replace a blade here and there,” Gee said. “I don’t think we’ve had a turbine collapse. We have maybe 3,000-4,000 turbines that we operate across the country, and I don’t know that we’ve had a catastrophic failure.”
“We have maintenance issues,” Gee continued. “We certainly have maintenance issues. We have shutdowns and repairs and turbines taken offline, repaired and brought back online. Because those things generate electricity, and electricity is sold for monstrous amounts of money, we have every incentive to repair a turbine when it is inoperable. We don’t just leave them sitting there.”
Wind turbines generate approximately 40 decibels of noise and, in residential areas, are placed no closer than 300 meters from the nearest house. In comparison, a mid-sized window air conditioner generates 50 decibels, a vacuum cleaner generates 80 and a blender generates 90.
Apex Clean Energy hopes to have the turbines completed and operational by 2031.
“This project wouldn’t go into construction for another, ideally, five years, possibly a little bit longer than that,” Gee said. “It’s hard to tell where the turbine technology takes us between now and then.”
The turbines to be constructed in the Station Wind project will be approximately 650 feet tall to the tip of the blade. The turbine foundation will occupy between a quarter and a half an acre and an access road will be built to each turbine.
The electricity generated by the turbines may or may not be used in Ashtabula County.
“Basically, the electricity goes onto the grid, and it comes off of the grid at the most at the most efficient spot,” Gee said. “It is ultimately serving load centers in urban areas, but it also serves the distribution network in this area. The grid operators recognize that the further that energy travels, the more of it is lost, and so, in order to manage the grid efficiently, and this isn’t what we do, this is what they do, they know where the demand centers are, and they know when the peak periods of production are. By and large, the grid functions such that it serves load as locally as possible.”
Back on June 1, the Ashtabula County commissioners sat down with local township representatives at A-Tech to present the process to implement state rules for siting wind and solar energy facilities and to ask townships for input in deciding whether and where they can be built.
At that meeting, Commissioner J.P. Ducro IV said the county wants to give townships a say, rather than making decisions “in a vacuum.”
Ohio Senate Bill 52 is a 2021 state law that significantly altered the approval process for utility-scale renewable energy developments by granting the county commissioners veto power over wind and solar projects. The law overrides the public utility exemption, giving boards the authority to prohibit or limit the size of large wind and solar facilities.
Counties can proactively designate restricted areas where wind and solar developments are entirely banned or establish energy development districts where they are permitted.
Rather than make the decision from Jefferson, Board President Casey Kozlowski said the board wanted to inform townships on what SB 52 calls for and get the trustees’ input before assembling a map for Ashtabula County.
SB 52 governs “economically significant” projects of between 5-50 megawatts, giving local townships the option to decide whether the entire township is open for renewable energy development, part of it or to close it altogether.
Projects of 5 megawatts or less are governed by local zoning codes, according to meeting materials.
The county can also have a project-specific response, according to Kozlowski. Until the county’s restricted area map is finalized, the county will operate on a project-specific basis, he added.
