EDP Renewables North America LLC has announced an 80 MW, 15-year power purchase agreement (PPA) with cloud computing company Salesforce for the Bright Stalk Wind Farm in McLean County, Ill.
The PPA is a part of a 405 MW PPA announcement EDPR issued on July 3.
The 205 MW Bright Stalk Wind Farm, located near Salesforce data centers, will produce enough clean electricity to annually power more than 71,000 average Illinois homes. Through its life, the project is also expected to pay up to $2.6 million in local taxes each year, as well as millions of dollars to local landowners, notes EDPR.
The wind farm, expected to be up and running by the end of 2019, will be EDPR’s third operational wind farm in McLean County. EDPR also owns and operates the 398 MW Twin Groves I and II wind farms, which have been operational since 2007 and 2008, respectively.
“At Salesforce, we are committed to doing our part to step up to the challenge of climate change – the biggest, most important and most complex challenge humans have ever faced,” states Patrick Flynn, vice president of sustainability at Salesforce. “This agreement is a huge step toward our goal of powering our operations with 100 percent renewable energy by 2022, and we are excited to work with EDP Renewables on this urgent initiative.”
“EDP Renewables is proud to partner with Salesforce to help in meeting its commendable commitment of powering its global operations exclusively by renewable energy sources,” adds João Manso Neto, CEO of EDP Renewables. “This agreement is a major milestone for EDP Renewables and paves the way for our company to expand our presence as a wind industry leader in the state of Illinois.”
To date, EDPR operates 797 MW of wind energy projects in Illinois, representing a capital investment of approximately $1.7 billion in the state. The addition of the Bright Stalk Wind Farm, as well as the Broadlands Wind Farm in Douglas County, will further increase EDPR’s footprint in Illinois, surpassing 1.2 GW of operational capacity by the end of next year.
The Radial Bladed Wind Turbine Rotor concept has become a standard approach to design Utility Scale Wind Turbine. One major problem in this approach is, the rotor becomes very massive. For example, the rotor mass for the DOE anticipated 50 MW rated unit, would be @ 400 tons/blade. This leads to an impossible task to achieve DOE goal. Thus, it remained at 12 MW/unit. We at ATI, looked into several other possible rotor concepts and arrived at an Axial Flow Helical Bladed Rotor (US 9,537,371 B2, Jan 3, 2017). This rotor is seen to be ~1/3 – 1/5 mass vs… Read more »