With wind-turbine farms in heavy construction in Klickitat and Sherman counties, it was only a matter of time before a large project surfaced in Wasco County.
That was the case Thursday at the Discovery Center, when a small contingent of local people turned out to hear a presentation by UPC Wind, a Newton, Maine-based company.
UPC’s project, Cascade Wind, would place 40 General Electric 1.5 megawatt wind turbines in a seven-mile footprint on (appropriately enough) Sevenmile Hill.
Power generated along the ridge would be brought to a new substation and connected to an existing 115 kilovolt line that runs from The Dalles to Hood River. The total capacity of the project would be 60 megawatts.
“You have a world-class resource in the gorge,” UPC’s Krista Kisch told the audience. She characterized the winds in the proposed Cascade Wind project area as “good to excellent, at 8.5 to 9 meters a second.”
She called the terrain in the project area “complex,” requiring calculations of wind shear so that placement doesn’t cause turbulence for the next tower downwind.
Most of the land in the project area is zoned A-2 Agriculture and F-2 Forest Zone. Kisch said 85 percent of the towers would be located in open fields.
UPC’s American headquarters are in Maine, but the company originally began in Europe 10 years ago, and has been in the U.S. for the past seven years. Kisch said the company currently has 3,600 megawatts planned in 35 projects under development.
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