A 38-turbine wind farm on the Thurston-Lewis county line recently started producing electricity, its owners say.
Southern Power, the majority stakeholder of the 136-megawatt Skookumchuck Wind Facility located south of the town of Rainier, made the announcement in a Tuesday, Dec. 1, news release.
The wind farm is the Atlanta-based company’s first in Washington state. The project’s energy and associated energy credits will be sold to Puget Sound Energy under a 20-year contract.
The project reportedly went live on Nov. 7, according to minority owner TransAlta.
“Skookumchuck Wind Facility is our first wind project in the state of Washington, and we are pleased to see this project achieve a commercial operation,” Southern Power President Bill Grantham said in a statement. “The addition of this facility showcases our commitment to the development of wind energy and is an excellent addition to our growing renewable fleet.”
The Skookumchuck project is the company’s 12th wind facility in the U.S. Southern Power closed on the purchase back in October 2019, purchasing a majority stake from Renewable Energy Systems-Group, a U.K.-based renewable energy company, for an amount not disclosed to the public.
The turbines, which sit on 22,000 acres in Thurston and Lewis counties, are expected to power about 30,000 homes.
The spinning of the turbines marks the end of a tumultuous construction period, which has wrapped up nearly a year late from when it was originally expected to start producing clean energy.
Officials with RES-Americas, the RES-Group subsidiary constructing the project, told the Nisqually Valley News in September 2019 that they expected the project to begin producing energy in just a few months.
At that point, contractors had begun work on the laydown yard off Vail Cut Off Road and were reconfiguring the log roads leading up the Skookumchuck Ridge to the site.
Last January, with work still underway to install the infrastructure needed to start hauling turbine sections up the ridge, a 24-year-old Chehalis man, Jonathan Stringer, died after two trench collapses buried him and another worker. The other worker lived, though he was transported to a nearby hospital.
In April, additional delays of the project’s completion were announced, and Stringer’s family filed suit against the companies in May, requesting an unspecified amount in damages.
The state department of Labor and Industries later fined three companies associated with the project more than $500,000, including RES-Americas System 3 LLC.
An injured worker approached the Nisqually Valley News in September with claims that the construction leaders had fostered a reckless culture, though his claims were later countered by RES-Americas.
The former contractor, who was a safety and health manager, “never raised any type of safety complaint to RES Construction or Southern Power before or after the January 2020 incident,” RES-Americas officials said in a statement.
In addition to Southern Power announcing Skookumchuck had gone online, minority owner TransAlta Corporation announced on Tuesday it had closed out on its 49 percent equity investment on the project.
“Our investment in Skookumchuck furthers our ambitious objectives as outlined in our Clean Energy Investment Plan and is another step towards meeting our, and our customers’, E2SG (energy to smart grid) needs,” President and Chief Executive Officer Dawn Farrell, of TransAlta, said in a statement.
The energy produced by the 500-foot tall blades will be directed through Puget Sound Energy’s Green Direct program, a portfolio of clean-energy producing facilities aiming to aid the state in reducing planet-warming greenhouse emissions, according to the program’s website.
The program also helps with PSE’s commitment to move to clean energy by 2045.
“Green Direct is a ground-breaking initiative designed to provide PSE corporate and governmental customers the ability to purchase 100 percent of their energy from a dedicated, local, renewable energy resource, while providing them with a stable, cost-efficient solution,” the program’s website reads.
The Skookumchuck facility is just the first facility included in this project portfolio. A 150-megawatt solar project is currently in development in Klickitat County.
