Community Renewable Energy Success Stories: Wind Energy in Urban Environments Webinar (text version)
Below is the text version of the Webinar titled "Community Renewable Energy Success Stories: Wind Energy in Urban Environments," originally presented on September 18, 2012.
Sarah Busche:
Good afternoon everyone and welcome to today's webinar sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy. This is Sarah Busche and I'm here with Jimmy Jones. We're broadcasting live from the National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, Colorado. We'll give folks a few more minutes to log on and call in but while we wait Jim is going to go over some logistics and then we'll get started with today's webinar. Jimmy?
Jimmy Jones:
Okay. Well good afternoon everyone and I want to go over
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a couple of logistics on how better to, or how best to enjoy today's webinar. So we have two things and that is the first is dealing with audio devices. So you'll notice in your — when you log in in the right hand column you're going to see the go-to meeting panel and you'll get to choose whether you want to have your audio come to you via your phone. And if you select phone of course you have a dial-in number and that is a toll number. So keep that in mind. If you want audio to come over your computer just select mic and speakers. In general if you listen to music on your computer you should be able to listen to this webinar just fine on the computer using the same settings.
If by any chance you get a bad connection or whatever we have a couple of hundred people on the line right now and on a typical webinar we'll have one or two with a bad connection. Just go ahead, log off and dial back in, or if you have a bad connection with your phone hang up, just dial back in. Ninety-five percent of the time that'll take care of it.
All right, during questions we're going to have presenters present two presentations today and Sarah will introduce them in a minute, and then we'll ask questions. So the way that you can do that is to select the questions selection or bar in the right-hand panel. So if you select that type in your question, type in that question at any time. We'll collect — Sarah and I will collect those questions and give them to the presenter after the presentation.
Finally please fill out the survey about the webinar after it's over. So we pay a lot of attention to that survey, how to make this better for you and there are suggestions for presentations in the future.
Sarah Busche:
Great. Thank you very much, Jimmy for going over that. We want to make sure everyone here's everything clearly.
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Today's webinar is the third in a series of Department of Energy community renewable energy, or what we call CommRE success stories. Each of our webinars features communities that successfully implemented renewable energy technologies covering lessons learned, challenges and also successes, of course. The COMM-RE project is more than $20 million efforts funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to promote investment in clean energy solutions at the community level and provide real-life examples for other local governments, campuses and utilities to replicate.
There are five community-based renewable energy projects that receive funding under this program in Vermont, Wisconsin, Colorado and California. The webinar series is a part of the broader support to communities provided under this project and provide success stories from both the COMM-RE grantees as well as other communities that didn't receive grants but are just leading the way across the country.
Today's presentation will feature information on two communities that have built wind turbines in urban areas to meet a portion of their community's energy needs. Today we'll be hearing from Hull, Massachusetts and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. So I think we should probably get started. I'd like to introduce our first speaker, his name is Andrew Stern. Mr. Stern is president of New England Wind Power, an executive director for the non-profit action for clean energy. He was 20 years' experience in clean energy and was the founder of Citizen's Advocates for Renewable Energy which led the project in Hull, Massachusetts. Andrew, go ahead and take it away.
Andrew Stern:
Great. Thank you very much, Sarah and Jimmy. As Sarah said my name is Andrew Stern and I've been very fortunate to be involved with a community project in Hull, Massachusetts.
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I am an electrical engineer and design-built, raced a solar car in the 1990 GM Sun Race, a solar car race that went from
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Orlando, Florida to Detroit, Michigan in 11 days, 32 collects and about 1650 miles. I design-built the solar array as well as designed the battery storage which was five kilowatt hours of silver zinc batteries. And most recently for the Department of Energy I helped
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MIT build a solar house and that computed in the 2007 Department of Energy solar decathlon and one of the other activities I also enjoy is I am a teaching fellow in the environmental management program at Harvard University. So I'm going on my fifth year of doing that and that's been great and it's a an undergrad and grad program. And what we're here to talk about today is the
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wind project that was developed with the Town of Hull in their municipal electric company Hull Municipal Light.
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Hull has been using wind energy since the 1800s. Back in the 1820s there was a mechanical wind turbine on this site.
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It's called Windmill Point at the end of Hull and the mechanical wind turbine pumped water for a salt works that would boil off that water that's sea water and harvest the salt for packing fish before refrigeration. And as recent as 1984 to '96 it was a much smaller 40-kilowatt Enertech which was a behind the meter project at the high school. Early in '97 myself, Malcolm Brown and a few other citizens from the Town of Hull approached Hull Municipal Light Plant which is the town's electric company to repower the site, so to do a feasibility study and analysis to monitor and measure the wind resource as well as the economic feasibility of repowering the site.
And early in 2000 the decision was made to — there were three bids that were submitted: Avestis, GE and Furlander, and it was a turnkey installation and the town, after town vote on approval of the project decided to move forward with Avestis. It's a V47
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660 kilowatt machine and the machine was commissioned on December 27th 2001. And it has a capacity — it's been running for ten years, has a capacity factor of about 27 percent and generates about 1500 megawatts a year or 16,311 megawatt hours to-date. For the town it's about 3 percent of the town's energy utilization; the town uses about 51,000 megawatt hours a year. So this is about 3 percent of the town's energy. And again that energy has offsets as far as CO2, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide. The town paid about $780,000 turnkey at the time and that's about $1100 per kilowatt installed. Today's costs are about double that, maybe 2.2 to 2.4 million megawatt or 2200 to 2400 1000 kilowatt. The machine paid for itself in under five years through energy costs saved and incentives. Since Hull is a municipality and not subject to taxation they had to, instead of qualifying for the production tax credit qualified for a parallel program under the federal — under federal guidelines called REPIs which is Renewable Energy Production Incentive and as well they are able to participate in the local market for wind, what is known as RECs, Renewable Energy Certificates and sells those certificates to a local organization called Mass Energy.
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Shortly after installing Hull 1 and with great feedback from the town, the citizens in the town, and the town leaders the town started looking at additional sites for other machines.
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And that was early in 2002. In May of 2006 a second machine was constructed. This machine as well was Avestis, or is Avestis. This is a V80, a 1.8 megawatt machine and it has about a little lower capacity factor, maybe 25, 26 percent capacity factor. It generates roughly three times the output, it's three times the boilerplate capacity as Hull 1, 1.8 megawatt versus a 660 kilowatt. And it generates about 4200 megawatt hours per year or 22,967 megawatt hours to-date which is about 8 percent of the town's utilization and between two machines they generate over 11 percent of what the town needs on an annual basis. Through ratepayer surveys there's been a 95 percent support within the town for the onshore wind machines and a tremendous amount of interest to put an offshore facility — I don't know if you folks can see my cursor but in this general vicinity — and I've got some slides to describe that.
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Hull 2, as I mentioned, is a V80, about $3 million to install and one of the unique partnerships that occurred was that Hull and Harvard University, which has — Harvard has an appetite for these renewable energy credits _______or came under a contract for a ten-year deal to supply just the credits, the renewable energy credits to Harvard at a cost of $1.5 million. So in essence Hull sold its "greenness" of this second turbine to Harvard. And the town keeps the electrons but essentially, as I mentioned, the green or renewable energy certificates are owned and retired by Harvard.
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So as you can see here at the bottom how Hull plans on four offshore machines, at that point based on the capacity of the offshore facility, approximately 100 percent of the entire town load. And they started looking at this in 2009. Last year I was very fortunate to be asked by the town to organize and run an offshore wind workshop to the Department of Energy. We had a full day of presentations and panels; we had about 30 panelists and we covered siting, permitting, construction, technology, finance and operations and maintenance of offshore wind and it's still very high on the list of priorities for the town as well as other technologies, solar and also tidal energy which we've started a few projects on. And those are still under development.
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I'm just going to continue here on the offshore just to provide a little glimpse to the future perhaps
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and that's the project, the two onshore projects and potential offshore.
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There's a photo simulation — machines would be just over a mile offshore, certainly visible and perhaps even swimmable for some folks.
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We won several — or the town, we have to give 99.9 percent of the credit to the town — has won several awards from the DOE and EPA, Mass Municipal Association and the American Wind Energy Association.
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So I've listed a few challenges for community wind and we'll just go over these quickly because want to get to Matt's presentation as well as provide plenty of time for questions. So I've listed a few here. Again, this presentation, along with additional resources will be made offline and folks can certainly contact me regarding any and all of these issues or subjects.
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Typical community support and leadership. It's very helpful to have local champions and educated leaders work with the community with number of fun outreach meetings, a lot of coffee and donut type meetings, save the wine and cheese parties until after you are installed and operating.
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The site can always be a challenge: is it municipally or town-owned? Do you have access to roads and to the electric grid? And try to avoid sensitive wildlife, wetland areas, also areas that might be difficult to site due to proximity to neighbors, etc. Although both of Hull's machines are within perhaps 400 or 500 feet of residence.
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In Hull we ensured that our resource was at least an industry standard of 6-1/2 meters per second annual. And this you want to do — a need, in order to get a project financed typical lending institutions such as banks really need quality wind data, so a year of wind data at hub height, and typically you'll need a met tower that has at least three instruments at different heights so you can measure wind shear and speed and direction. Again this is a requirement typically for lending institutions and the manufacturers.
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And again I've got a few slides here on the development process. Sounds like a lot of the folks in the audience are probably well into the process;
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the big thing is make sure you have a feasible site with measured and properly analyzed wind data. Those are going to be crucial when you prepare your economics for your pro forma or economic analysis.
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And basically I want to make sure I covered some of those steps as things to avoid not having. So make sure you have a qualified wind study, someone that can run detailed economic numbers and also feasibility studies for siting in harmony.
That is where I'd like to end and turn it back over to Sarah.
Sarah Busche:
Great. Thank you so much Andrew. We've had a number of questions come in so we'll jump right into those. One of our listeners asks, "Can you describe who the local utility is and how the project works with utilities for the two wind turbines and this is Dan asking this.
Andrew Stern:
Sure Dan, that's a great question. It turns out out of the 351 cities and towns in Massachusetts 41 of them are municipal — have municipal electric or electric plus, so electric and sewer, electric and water. The Town of Hull just has a municipal electric company called Hull Municipal Light Plant. Basically once the project moved forward from a technical or feasibility standpoint to a point where the budget was actually going greenlighted for developments the electric company then took the project over and acted as the developer. They're able to do things like approach the town for permission and authorization to use town land. They're very familiar with the town's transmission distribution system because they run it. So as far as interconnecting to the system they were the body that managed that.
I have to just follow up a little bit about the Hull project versus probably 98.5 percent of the projects out there are going to be not of this kind, both with the development and ownership as well as the financing. Hull paid for the project essentially with a cash reserve that was rate stabilization funds and that's why they had to get it — they did get both projects approved in a town meeting, not only for the project's sake but to utilize those rate stabilization funds. They just couldn't raise their own coffers without approval.
I hope that answered the question.
Jimmy Jones:
Thanks for that. We have a question from Paul about how have the Hull turbines changed the cost of electrical power in Hull. How does this cost compare, how do the effect on the rates compare to what other residents of Massachusetts are paying?
Andrew Stern:
That's a great question, Paul. Hull, again, because it's a municipal electric company, has a little different rate say structure or they pooled their resources with the other municipal electric company in a larger conglomerate called MMWEC, the Mass Municipal Wholesale Electric Company. And so what they're able to do is leverage their buying power to keep their electricity costs low. So it might not be a good reflection on how wind has helped keep the prices low, although it's shown that it has. Their electricity costs in the town are about 6-1/2, 7 cents in town. That's the numbers that I'm aware of right now.
Sarah Busche:
Great. Thank you. We have a couple questions that have come in that are focused on any concerns that the project had with being so close to neighbors. So I was wondering if you could answer maybe two of them. The first one is: "Did Hull do sound and flicker analysis and simulate the noise for the nearest neighbors?" And that's from Chris. And then the second one is was there any concern about ice throw?"
Andrew Stern:
So the first one we did not do any flicker or noise, although there were simulations of what the turbine would look like visually. That's different — I want to acknowledge that it's different. With Hull 2 we've had a flicker problem, or let's say a flicker scenario where one of our close residents during the fall actually, this time of the year, and having southeasterly winds and the machine operating has a flicker issue with very elongated shadows near sunset. So, to mitigate that the light plant bought some heavy duty curtains for the resident to use. The resident actually is a big supporter of wind and her daughter, funnily enough, has written a book about Hull 2 called Our Neighbor Millie which is available, it's published. So there was a little flicker issue that was mitigated. But the neighbors around both Hull 1 and Hull 2 don't generally get the flicker problem. You do see the flicker effects however; you could definitely be at Hull 2 on a sunny day during different times of the day and see how the shadows really crisscross the landscape. So there's going to be flicker.
Ice throws — we didn't do an ice throw analysis but the only icing problem that has happened in Hull has been not with the blades but with the anemometer, the measurement device at the top of the machine which tells the turbine which — these are very active turbines; they actually turn themselves into the wind active yaw and active pitch. So the blades will pitch on the nose and the turbine will rotate 360 degrees on its base. And what happened after a cold rainstorm is the anemometer, the wind cups and weather vane at the top froze up a bit and the ice buildup slowed the speed of the cups where the energy or wind speed that was measured at the hub versus the anemometer was different, the machine shut down. It has the ability to understand the differences and then has a cold weather package that has some ability to thaw out the anemometer. That's how you solve that: you have a cold weather package. But no ice throws.
And just so we can bring it up as well, you know, both areas are fairly active; the second machine is on a 20-foot — excuse me, 20-meter close-capped landfill with an active transfer station at the base. Hull1 is at the high school literally ten yards from a football field and goal posts. I'm down there with 20 tours per year and there has not been any, to my knowledge, and believe me we would hear about it, any bird kills or wildlife problems or issues.
Jimmy Jones:
Okay we have another question about the turbines, this one from Nash: "Could you tell us what the hub heights of the Hull 1 and 2 are, and then what are the proposed hub heights for the all four offshore units?"
Andrew Stern:
Certainly. That's a great question and Hull 1 is a 50-meter tower. It has a 47-meter rotor diameter and Hull 2 is a 60-meter tower with 80-meter rotor diameter. And it's on a 20-meter high landfill. The interesting part about Hull 2 is it was on I guess the precipice of being economically feasible not because the expense of the turbine but because the foundation, the supporting structure to support such a large machine needed to have some unique construction techniques, basically putting 70 pilings 20 meters in the ground and then screwed with big rebar screws into bedrock filled with concrete. And that's really the functional base of the turbine's foundation.
Offshore would have very similar perhaps height restrictions. One of the challenges with siting the offshore, or siting a specific machine for the offshore installation is the hub height limitation due to FAA restrictions and proximity to Logan International Airport. And again, I don't know if it's a hub height or to blade tip, apex of the blade tip but that's going to be a big limitation for offshore, we found. I don't have that number right off the top of my head.
Jimmy Jones:
That's a terrific answer. Well we have another somewhat technical question, this one from Michael. It's about the energy capacity calculations: "What is the percentage of uptime do the Hull turbines have incorporated?" I know you gave the capacity factor so maybe you could give us a brief explanation of how that works.
Andrew Stern:
Sure. Capacity factor and uptime: different numbers. Capacity factor, you look at what a power plant or generating piece of equipment would generate over the 8,760 hours per year; that would be a 100 percent capacity factor. Because wind is so variable everywhere you're going to get some sort of curve between 0 and 100 and where that fits or what you generate over the course of the year based on that flow output is what your capacity factor is. That's the best kind of way I can break it down.
Now there are times, for example, in the middle of the winter that your capacity factor's going to be higher, your winds are more sustained, higher winds for longer time. And then in the middle of the summer in Massachusetts oftentimes you'll find when the wind is not blowing that your capacity factor drops to zero.
As a follow-on answer, because I have a feeling someone might ask this, do the lights go out if the wind stops blowing at Hull? And the answer is no. The way they manage their grid it's kind of like filling up a pool with water: some of the energy coming in is coming in from a big fire hose versus what's being added by these wind turbines — are a little bit bigger than garden hoses but certainly not a big fire house. And then as the pool is being drained a little bit by the residents and commercial users you've got to keep that pool at a certain level in order to keep all your swimmers happy. So Hull does that — that's Hull Municipal Light Plant's sort of
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job is to keep
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the energy and power levels high, or within the guidelines.
Sarah Busche:
Andrew I'm probably going to steal that analogy
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sometime. That's great. I like the pool and the fire hose and the garden hose way of thinking about it.
So it looks like you might have a few more slides here. Did you want to go through those or do you want us to jump onto the next presenter?
Andrew Stern:
I think folks would benefit by going through some of these, you know, the AWIA Siting Handbook is great. It was put together with Nixon Peabody and Tetra Tech, two of the industry's leading firms in wind and solar, certainly renewables. There's a few other handbooks and pretty decent economic analysis but I think I'd leave this to the participants to review. And I'd really like to catch what Matt's been up to.
Sarah Busche:
That sounds great. We'll just remind everyone that we'll have these posted online — our goal is to have the Power Points themselves online tomorrow and then we'll have the recording up in about a week. It takes us a little bit of time to get it coded. We'll send an email out once everything is up so everyone should have this.
Andrew Stern:
Make sure that folks have my contact info, whether it's onsite visit here at Hull or anything else we can help with. Want to see more of these successful projects where folks want them.
Sarah Busche:
Definitely. Thank you. Well thank you so much Andrew.
We're going to —
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and everyone thank you for your questions; they've been excellent. Keep them coming; we'll do a general Q&A at the end so if you have more for Andrew we can ask him then.
So I'd like to now introduce you to our second speaker; his name is Matt Howard.
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Mr. Howard is the environmental sustainability director for the City of Milwaukee where he leads the city's sustainability effort. In his previous life at the U.S. Department of Commerce Mr. Howard created a national sustainable manufacturing initiative. Matt, I'll go ahead and turn it over to you right now.
Matt Howard:
All right, thank you. Good afternoon everyone. Again, I'm Matt Howard, I'm with the City of Milwaukee, the environmental sustainability director. I'm just going to talk a little bit this afternoon about
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the process that we went through and some decisions that we went through in order to reach a final determination on where to site a small-scale wind turbine. Just a couple things I wanted to pick up from Andrew's presentation which I definitely appreciated where number one, doing your research and homework in terms of the site and really knowing where the best wind resource is.
And the second thing, and I'll run through even more best practices but the second thing was really the engagement with the community. And I'll get into all that in a minute here and I'm actually going to lead with our best practices. But just a couple things — again, I'm going to focus more on the process that we went through and some challenges that we faced and then I'll use some specific examples as I go through the presentation. And this is probably going to be less technical of a presentation in nature.
So just right off the top: for those of you that are out there in municipalities or wherever, a company thinking of siting a wind turbine on your property or somewhere in your municipality be transparent and provide as much information as possible upfront about what you intend to do and where you intend to do it. I can't stress that enough: transparency and information.
Again, I'll go back to the site issue: find the most appropriate site. We have this conversation over and over in the City of Milwaukee about renewable energy, that these decisions, whether it's solar or wind or some other form of energy, that it is really site specific. And so we didn't have a site really in mind and then we're going to try and build a turbine on it? We went the other way around and said, "Look, if we're serious about doing a wind project what's the most appropriate site? And does the City of Milwaukee own or have access to such a site?"
So we spent a lot of time on doing research in terms of wind profile resource and looking at the city and trying to strike a balance between potential impacts on residential areas in areas of the City where there was more open space. So again, we just really spent a lot of time upfront on looking at the most appropriate site.
Stay away from neighborhoods; I think that should be somewhat obvious. I know it's not always possible and in fact our wind turbine is about half a mile from the nearest home and probably about 300 to 400 yards from an apartment tower. So single family homes are somewhat far away but there's an apartment tower that's near our wind turbine. So there was a lot of concern right off the bat from neighbors about the impact of a turbine on their neighborhood.
The other thing: in my third bullet I say stay away from iconic civic sites. People don't want you to mess up their view. Milwaukee, it's on Lake Michigan and about 95 percent of our lakefront is publicly-owned and has parks and access to the lake. So people get very concerned when any sort of development is considered near or on the lakefront. And so when I talk about the site that we picked, which happened to be near the lakefront that immediately was on the radar screen of any number of advocates and organizations in Milwaukee who protect the viewshed, if you will, of our lakefront. So avoiding the lakefront was almost unavailable for us, just because that's where the best wind is. But in general if you can kind of avoid those iconic civic sites it'd probably save you some headaches in the long run.
For anybody who works in local government you should know by now, no surprises for your mayor or your locally-elected officials so we really spend a lot of time just making sure that the mayor and that our aldermen were informed about where we were in the process. And obviously that was helpful; the mayor was a supporter right off the bat. So having his support was a huge hurdle at the beginning and the local alderman who represented the neighborhood where the turbine was ultimately sited, while never coming out publicly in support of it, was very helpful in terms of being an intermediary between the city and the neighbors. And so having those locally-elected officials onboard, or at least knowledgeable about your intentions and what you intend to do is extremely helpful.
Active public engagement: again I think you heard some of this from Andrew. Reach out to the neighbors, reach out to neighborhood associations, try and identify the individuals or the groups which may have a stake in where you're planning on siting your turbine. And so we did a lot of active outreach and engagement, in particular with neighborhood associations but also with the Audubon Society, lakefront groups, developers, etc. So just really trying to keep the public informed, going back to that first bullet point.
This is really important, this third to last bullet point: know the facts, kill the myths and control the narrative. We had a little bit of a misstep right off the bat and somehow information got out there that we were going to construct a wind farm off the shores of Lake Michigan. So I spent probably a month trying to pull that back in. So control the narrative right off the bat; be very clear about what you're proposing. In our case we were only proposing one turbine but for some reason it got out there that this was going to be a larger development off the shores of the lake.
And know the facts about renewable energy, obviously in general but particularly the technology that you're dealing in. And going back to the second bullet about most appropriate site: know the facts as it relates to the energy production of the particular model of turbine you're looking at and then the building load or the site load for what you'll be supplying with energy.
And again kill the myths, and that goes back up to information. We just sent out a lot of information about the safety record of small-scale wind turbines, about the impact on birds; that was a big issue which came up because we do have a lot of migratory birds flying across the lake. So again, getting information out there, factual information, hopefully objective information was very important.
One thing that we really wanted to do with our project was to tie it to local economic development. Obviously it was about demonstrating our commitment to renewable energy and supplying a building with energy, and I'll get into some of those specifics in a minute. But we also really wanted to tie this to broader economic development issues in our region, and Milwaukee has a number of wind turbine manufacturers and suppliers in the city and in the surrounding region and also across the state. And we were able to work with the turbine manufacturer to actually source a high proportion of parts and components from the State of Wisconsin. So that went a long way in winning people over to supporting the project because there was a local jobs or regional jobs impact. And in fact we were able to end up getting almost, a little over ten Wisconsin companies supplying parts to the turbine, including a manufacturer of airplane fuselages who, for the first time, constructed a wind turbine tower. So they constructed the tower for this, whereas the manufacturer in the past was sourcing from China. So that was a huge win for us and just a big boost for that company because now they're in the wind supply chain and they're now making towers for other turbine manufacturers. So tying a local development was really big.
And then lastly on the financials: the cost-benefit analysis, knowing your budget, working the payback and continuing to do that over and over again to make sure that you've always got the latest and best numbers and estimates. Besides the impact on the neighbors, the impact on the lake and on wildlife people really focused on how much this is going to cost, what's your payback, how are you financing this, what sort of cost-benefit analysis has the city done. So we spent a lot of time doing that, refining those numbers and making sure they were as accurate as possible.
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So just in terms of the project basics we were looking to site one small-scale wind turbine, so commercial-scale turbine, which is obviously a lot different and a lot smaller than the whole turbines that Andrew was talking about. So we're looking at really a 100kW wind turbine in the city.
The site that we ended up selecting was down at the Port of Milwaukee, which is south of downtown, an industrial-zoned area of the city but which is immediately surrounded by neighborhoods. And so the turbine really fit in with the industrial landscape and uses that were currently happening down at the port so it was a good fit for that neighborhood. And again we were pretty far away from the nearest neighbors although there was one apartment building which was relatively close.
We were able to find at this site a city facility, so it's the port administration building to power. So the turbine itself will power all of that building's energy needs and in fact we'll probably be looking at somewhere between 150 and 180 percent of its needs, and I'll get into some of that payback stuff in a minute.
In terms of the cost of our project, we had a budget of $600,000 max and we brought into it, the City of Milwaukee brought into it $400,000 from an energy efficiency and conservation block grant from the Department of Energy but we were also able to leverage two additional grants, $100,000 each from our local utility as well as from our state energy efficiency program called Focus on Energy.
Just a note about our local utility because there was a question about that in the previous presentation. Our utility in Milwaukee and the surrounding area is a shareholder-owned utility, private utility, so it's not in any way associated with the municipality, the city or the county. And despite that though we had a really good working relationship and in fact obviously they provided an incentive of $100,000 for this project. So we didn't really incur any hurdles really with our local utility, both in terms of securing incentives siting as well as the interconnection agreements and things of that nature.
Because of the fact that we were in the fortunate position of being able to finance this through grants the city didn't obviously incur any debt or financing and so that was a big bonus for people who are interested in obviously how we're paying for this but also for us. But nevertheless people were still interested to know about payback issues and cost-benefit analysis. So even though again the city wasn't incurring any debt financing there was a lot of interest on this issue from the public.
In terms of the project itself, I kind of mentioned this at the beginning: the mayor in my office really believed that because of all these things, because of the appropriate site, because of the funding, because of the power that would be generated that we had a smart, viable demonstration of our commitment to renewable energy. One of the things that, you know, you get the mayor out front and the city out front like that you want to make sure that obviously it's a smart project. And because renewable energy issues unfortunately tend to get political no matter where you're at in the country we wanted to make sure that we had a project that was going to produce for the taxpayers, was going to be a smart use of their money and that was really going to demonstrate, again, that in addition to the environmental and the energy impact there was also for us this local economic development impact bringing in Wisconsin companies.
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So this is just a flyover of the site itself. To the right of the picture is Lake Michigan and there's a car ferry parking lot right there. So it's literally right on the edge of the lake; you can see a little bit of a marshland there on the top of the picture and the blue teardrop in the middle is where the turbine itself is sited. Just below that there's a facility there — that's the port administration building. The port administration building itself, if you look down to the bottom of the picture here is surrounded by a Coast Guard facility. So again, it's not a residential are per se, and if you look towards the top left of the picture you'll see the beginning of the port grounds. However, just outside the picture at the bottom of the picture there's neighborhoods begin on a bluff. And again, there's an apartment tower that's about 300 or 400 yards on the other side of the Coast Guard facility. So that sort of gives you a little bit of a sense of how close we are to neighborhoods. And I'm not sure if I've got another picture in here that might show that a little bit better.
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Just in terms of the total electricity use: now this isn't the analysis; we began doing our analysis in 2011 and this is probably about an eight-month long process from proposal to actually beginning construction. And so the analysis that we did was based on 2010 rates. And so you've got a building that's using about 100,000 kWh a year electric bill at 2010 rates was about $12,000 to the GHG emissions and our projected 2011 bill.
An important point I think for everybody on the phone here, and especially for those of us that are proponents of renewable energy or are involved in renewable energy projects is we have to remember to let the public know when we're engaged in these projects that we're essentially locking in our energy costs in the long run.
We did an analysis of electricity rates in our region in Milwaukee over the preceding ten years and rates had gone up 70 percent and rates are going to jump again, in the 20 percent range in the next year. So obviously that's going to impact your payback. And it's important to talk about that when you're talking with the public, when you're talking about finances that I can give you a payback number now but those rates are more than likely going to accelerate and in fact we're pretty certain we're going to cut our payback in half, if not 60 or 70 percent as rates continue to go up in our region. So I just wanted to make that point about rates.
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Again, it's a 100 kilowatt wind turbine. To the top of the tower is 120 feet to the blade 154 feet. This is our estimated annual production right now is somewhere between 109 and 150,000. Now that was based, again, on calculations that we did back in 2011 and obviously now we've got a turbine that's been in operation since February and we're seeing a lot greater wind production. And again, I think we're going to be somewhere between 150 and 180 percent, so up to even 180,000 kWh for the year and we've still got five months left on our first year and actually we're at about 81,000 kWh and we're getting ready to get into obviously our very windy winter here in Wisconsin.
So for this particular building we're in this situation where we're going to be essentially generating revenue. And this is one of the more fun things I got to say at town hall meetings over and over again was that this is a city project that was actually going to end up generating revenue. And that really began winning people over. So as the turbine itself produces excess electricity it sends that directly to the grid and we get a rebate check from our local utility every month in an appropriate amount.
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One of the things we wanted to do was just to provide the public some perspective in terms of how tall this thing was. And so we used some local buildings and what-not just to provide some perspective. All the way to the left you see a utility-grade turbine probably more in the line of in terms of what Andrew was discussing in the Boston area. In the port there was a smokestack there for the metropolitan sewage district that was 350 and that's the tower next to it, the Bay View Terrace, the apartment tower that was the closest residential units to the turbine and there was a bridge there which connects the port with downtown. And then of course, we've got the turbine that we were proposing circled. Just to give people a sense of scale, a lot of people were really afraid that we were going to construct 400-foot tall towers just on the edge of downtown, and it was just going to, again, destroy the view into downtown and of the lake. And so we really wanted to try and put that —
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into perspective for people and felt that was particularly helpful.
Obviously photos are helpful. We were fortunate to have a couple of the same model wind turbines in local communities not far outside Milwaukee. And this one was in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, just outside Madison and the turbine itself, the picture on the left, that is in a field that's surrounded by a high school and a technical college. And then right across the street, which is the picture on the right, there was an elementary school and some residential areas started. And this is really to point out to people in Milwaukee that this exact same model turbine has been operational in semi-urban environment but certainly in a residential area an excellent safety record and no complaints from residents. So that really helped allay some fears for people to know that there was something like this in another town not too far away in Wisconsin.
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We did our own wind turbine rendering — that's the view looking north. On the left you can see the port administration building there, and it's pretty accurate of this rendering in terms of the way the turbine looks now. So that was helpful for people to see as well too.
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I talked again about the view, again the fact that people were really concerned — there's a popular park just south of where the wind turbine was and people get married there and have their pictures taken and it's across the bay from downtown and it's a great view. So people were really worried that this turbine was going to be in the view so I actually went down — that's a lovely Wisconsin winter right there on Lake Michigan, looking north into downtown and again just showing people that from this park
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you know, this turbine wasn't going to be in their view. And then there's another popular park north of where we were and in fact if you look right in the middle of the picture you can see that apartment tower; you can't even see the rendering of where the turbine is, it's so faint from just north of downtown. And so again we took two of the most popular parks in the city on the lakefront and tried to have some visuals to demonstrate to people what it would look like.
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And again, this goes back to my first bullet point about information and transparency and then later bullet points about killing the myths. You know, people get this picture in their head of this giant mechanical device and it's generating noise and who knows what else it's doing and it's just ruining our view. And so we really spent a lot of time really trying to sketch out as best as we could visually for individuals what the impact would be.
Someone had a question about shadow and flicker. I wasn't going to take the chance on shadow and flicker so we paid for an analysis from a local engineering firm. And what you can see here is basically those shaded in areas are the areas where shadow or flicker is going to fall over the course of a year. And as it so happens it doesn't hit a single building, which is really quite circumstantial and lucky for us. And so that was great. So clearly there was no impact on residences, and you can see the residence areas off to the left of the picture and then down at the bottom of the picture.
There is, as you can see it falls over a highway, 794. I live in the neighborhood where the turbine is and I commute to work on that highway and it's basically not noticeable. You can see a shadow but obviously because you're driving and it's off to your right or left-hand side depending on which way you're coming from you pass it in a split second. And we haven't had any complaints to-date on shadow or flicker.
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We also did a noise map, which again, we really felt was important. As you can see off to the right — again, putting this in context for individuals, for residents, you know, quiet bedroom, about 30, somewhere in the 30 decibels at night, your average home, during the day about 40 decibels at night. The nearest residence, which is the cross streets East Conway and South Superior it was at 42 decibels. So this was a silent drive turbine; it's built to be operated in urban environments and from this noise analysis it really, again, alleviated some concerns that residents had. And again, to-date we haven't had any complaints about noise from the turbine itself. And it really does operate at a near silent mode.
Just one more thing before I conclude. Again, just want to talk about the importance of really helping residents in particular understand the impacts, what renderings of what the turbine is going to look like, really getting into the issues that they care most about, which is really their impact on their everyday life: are they going to hear it? What's it going to look like when they see it? Is there going to be this shadow or flicker issue and how's it being paid for and what other impacts on wildlife or birds are there? So we really spend a lot of time, you know, trying to run through these issues with residents.
And again, in the end we had any negative complaints, in fact just anecdotally we probably — to the feedback to me personally again, I live in the neighborhood, it's been about 99 percent positive. And in fact the neighborhood association just recently designed a t-shirt which they do every year — they have a design contest and it features the wind turbine. So there was a lot of just consternation at the beginning and through the process of being transparent and providing information and really doing outreach with the community, elected officials, neighbors, etc. it's been a pretty positive experience and it's really become now part of the neighborhood and I think neighbors now feel a sense of ownership and pride in the turbine.
So I think I'll conclude there and leave the remaining time for questions.
Jimmy Jones:
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Okay. That's a great presentation. Thank you so much. And we have a few questions so people if you have your questions type them into that box on the right-hand side and we'll start with a couple here, one from Mark: "How long was the development process? So what kind of time was involved from start to finish?" And then from Fiona: "How much did the feasibility environmental studies cost?"
Matt Howard:
The total development time I would say was about eight months and that was until — I'd mark the end of that at literally groundbreaking. And I'd say four of those months were really spent — let's say three months were spent internally, basically getting our ducks in a row: doing the site assessment, the wind profile, the cost-benefit analysis, all that sort of stuff. And then about four to five months out in front of the public answering questions, doing town hall meetings, things of that nature. So yeah, so about eight months in total.
And in terms of the cost for the shadow and the noise it was under $10,000, but I can't remember off the top of my head; that's a number I'd have to go back and look and I can email that out. But it was — you know, compared to the $600,000 cost of the turbine itself and the fact that the tower has a rated life of 100 years and the turbine, the engine itself, the drive somewhere in the four-year range. We felt the extra few thousand dollars would be worth it for a clear head in the long run.
Sarah Busche:
Definitely helps you communicate better, I'm sure. And along those lines Kelly has asked: "You've talked about the importance of communication to the public and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the amount of effort that that communication has taken and you mentioned eight months for the development process. How much of that was spent communicating?
Matt Howard:
I would say, again those first three or four months a lot of the time was spent internally doing research but we were doing some communicating during that point in time, primarily obviously to the mayor and to locally-elected officials but also to some civic leaders because we didn't want to — we wanted that civic support when we came out to the public. So some behind the scenes discussions. But once we actually went public with the proposal we had two large town hall meetings and probably in total between those two meeting probably had 400 or 500 residents in attendance. And in between each of those town hall meetings I probably did somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 to 15 smaller focus group sessions or neighborhood association meetings, etc. So it was pretty labor intensive and time intensive in terms of the outreach. We were also able to get some information out through some articles in the local newspaper so that was helpful as well too. But it got to be pretty intensive there in terms of the communication. So be prepared for that, especially if you've got a community that's interested and cares about what's happening in their neighborhood.
Jimmy Jones:
Okay Matt, I have a question from Steve and here I'll read it to you: "Since the city has made an agreement to sell power back to the grid were there any special arrangements required for the allocation of the revenue?"
Matt Howard:
So essentially we signed an interconnection agreement with the local utility and the revenue itself — we'll call it a credit that we receive back from the local utility goes directly to the Port of Milwaukee and those funds that credit essentially is there for them to reallocate and use as appropriate. So I hope that answers the question. And I should clarify the Port of Milwaukee is an agency of the City of Milwaukee so it's technically part of the City of Milwaukee government.
Sarah Busche:
Okay great. Thank you. Heidi asks if you could talk about the selection process for the Northern Power wind turbine and if there were any other candidates that you considered?
Matt Howard:
Good question. Yeah, I should have covered that. We focused on probably four different manufacturers right off the bat. We did research and knew that we were looking for a commercial scale turbine and so we were going to be in the 100 kW range, or thought we would be in that range. And I think we identified three or four manufacturers that made 100 kW turbines and then one, a local manufacturer that made a 20 kW model. We ruled the 20 kW out right away because that would have required multiple turbines in order to power the administration building and we didn't want to do that. So that one was ruled out.
And then we wanted to go with American-made turbine and so we ruled out a couple more manufacturers and in the process of looking at American made and trying to get around 100 kW we also had some pretty detailed technical specifications because of the winter that we experienced here in Wisconsin and particularly along the lake. So we really needed a turbine that was able to withstand those winters that was built essentially for cold weather. And so that's how we really ended up getting down to the Northern Power 100. Sort of the production and design history of that was that it was originally built for use in Alaska so it had a great safety and track record of use up there and because of that sort of original design and production history we didn't really even need to buy a cold weather package. So we didn't in fact buy a cold weather package. It was commissioned and operational at the end of February and unfortunately winter can last forever in Wisconsin and so we had a couple of good months of winter right at the beginning, including a couple ice storms and it did just fine. So we've been really happy with that. So the combination of energy production, technical specifications and American-made model.
Jimmy Jones:
Okay great. Matt, we've had several people ask about maintenance costs; in fact we want to ask both of the speakers — Andrew if you're still online. So Matt could you address — do you have enough data to address cost per kilowatt-hour yet or can you describe how does your maintenance agreement work with just one turbine?
Matt Howard:
Sure. I can't give you any numbers yet in terms of a cost like that. We did purchase a flat multi-year maintenance agreement and I believe it was $15,000 for five years. One of the things that I'm exploring right now and going to continue to explore is tying in the maintenance costs to our local technical college which has renewable energy courses, maintenance courses, etc., installation courses and seeing if basically through use in the technical college teaching that the maintenance costs will be covered by students learning from professionals basically on the job. So that's something that we're looking into right now and we think we've got a pretty good lead on that. But I can tell you that we spent $15,000 for a five-year maintenance agreement and I believe they come out twice a year.
This particular model is monitored 24/7 online by the manufacturer and so they basically if there are any sort of warnings or issues or whatever they're on top of it immediately so that's sort of a fail-safe backup in terms of its maintenance.
Andrew Stern:
And Hull has a very similar agreement with the manufacturer where initially there's a five-year O&M agreement for flat annual fee. I think Hull 1 was about ten grand a year; Hull 2 was a little more. And there's also warranty costs involved which are highly suggestive, especially when you have one or two machines you're working with. You don't want a machine down because of a warranty-able issue, something that could be addressed by the manufacturer under an extended or a warrantied situation. That might change when you go to a larger wind farm installation when you have so many machines, spare parts, equipment to install, technicians. But very similar to Hull, it's monitored 24/7/365 and there's a crew outside Albany, New York that's the rapid response.
And there have been warrantied work on both machines and that's why they're on warranties. Machine has — Hull 1 has a 98.6 percent availability, so when the wind's blowing 98.6 percent of the time the machine's available and generating. Hull 2 is a little bit lower than that, maybe a 96, 97. And once you start getting into dealing with manufacturers, some of the miscellaneous but yet still important aspects of a project O&M warranty work all becomes differentiators between manufacturers and installers. So be mindful that perhaps turbine costs alone or construction costs alone, although a very large part of your overall project costs also have other aspects or elements that should be taken into consideration. So once you start peeling back the layers of the onion.
Sarah Busche:
Well thank you both for answering that one. We definitely have a lot of people interested in that.
Andrew this question's for you: "Why do you believe there was so much support from the residents of Hull?" And this comes from Jennifer.
Andrew Stern:
That's interesting. I believe the town, first of all, has a pretty long history and somewhat recent history from '84 to '96 with a much smaller machine, larger than the 20kW that Matt explained they were looking at or at least took a peak at at the same facility. As a matter of fact the foundation for that machine is still there and part of a tour I give we go and take a look at the old technology lattice tower, etc.
I have to say it was the transparency, the engaging in outreach done by a lot of the local champions. I was very fortunate to work with a town resident, Malcolm Brown, who I mentioned earlier. He had just moved to town the year before and opened a small health food store and was doing a lot of outreach from there. But it was a lot of working with neighbors in the neighborhood and meetings at the senior center or at the high school, secondary school.
One thing I have to say that I think was quite crafty of Malcolm early on was tying the requirement of the street lights and the traffic lights within the town on how much — or the converse: how much the turbine would generate annually based on the requirements of the street lights and the traffic lights. Not everyone in town has a school in the neighborhood or perhaps a police station but if you can understand that this turbine can offset, or in the case of Hull, offset by a factor of three the street lights and traffic lights — well everyone has street lights or everyone, you know, there's traffic lights throughout the town.
So it was understanding that installing this device had a benefit for the town. Visually what the machine would look like, the backing of the electric company and the town leadership, and again just a whole lot of public outreach, and accurate timely information: things weren't held back, we underestimated, or kept the energy projections low or actually about 10 percent better than our best projections. So just really being upfront and transparent.
Sarah Busche:
Well thank you. And that sounds like it ties in really well with what Matt was talking about and the importance of communicating to the community the benefits and the cost and the impacts of these types of wind turbines in urban areas.
So with that I really would like to thank both of you, Andrew and Matt, for presenting on Hull, Massachusetts and Milwaukee and the wind projects there.
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We're going to be posting the presentations online, like I mentioned, hopefully by tomorrow afternoon. And we'll be sending out a link once everything is up so you can access them for eternity. And please take the questionnaire at the end. We do read the feedback and it helps us determine what other topics we're going to focus on on future webinars.
Thank you so much for your questions everyone and we look forward to having you join us on our next COMM-RE webinar which is on October 16th and it's focused on net zero energy communities. Have a great afternoon everyone.
Andrew Stern:
Thank you.
Matt Howard:
Thank you.
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