Wind farm planned in Allegany is scrapped

Noble Environmental is scrapping plans to build a 67-turbine wind farm in Allegany County, company officials said Thursday.

The cancellation of the 100.5- megawatt Noble Allegany wind park was blamed on low wholesale electricity prices, which have made it more difficult to justify the project’s costs at a time when the economy is weak and financing remains tight.

Maggy Wisniewski, a Noble spokeswoman, confirmed the cancellation of the project, which would have installed 55 turbines in the Town of Centerville and another 12 in the Town of Rushford.

“Noble has concluded that the ongoing carrying costs are not justified,” given the current anticipated price of electricity and the value of the renewable energy credits that Noble would be able to sell, demonstrating that the power came from a renewable energy resource, the company said in a statement.

Noble Environmental officials also cited development and construction costs in Western New York and the “nature of the market for long-term power purchase agreements” as additional factors that affected the viability of the Noble Allegany project.

At the same time, Noble Environmental said it is “evaluating future development” plans for its 94.5-megawatt Noble Ball Hill Windpark in the Town of Villenova in Chautauqua County.

Construction on the Noble Allegany project was supposed to begin last year but had been delayed as the recession made financing difficult.

The Noble Allegany wind park, first proposed during 2007, would have generated enough electricity to power about 33,500 homes.

The Allegany County project was dropped at the same time that Noble officials also canceled plans to install an additional 13 turbines at its 71-turbine wind park in Chateaugay, Franklin County.

Noble previously had dropped plans to build wind farms in Farmersville and Freedom, Cattaraugus County.

“We continue to assess our development portfolio,” said Walt Howard, Noble Environmental’s chief executive officer, in a statement. “Our resources are currently focused in New Hampshire, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Maine and Texas, where we have been moving forward with other projects and adding land to our development portfolio.”

Noble Environmental generates 612 megawatts of wind power from a handful of wind parks in New York, including 126 megawatts at its Noble Wethersfield Windpark and 100.5 megawatts at its Noble Bliss Windpark in Wyoming County.

Average electricity prices in New York dropped almost by half last year as the cost of natural gas plunged by more than 50 percent. Natural gas is used to generate as much as half of the state’s power, either at plants that burn only natural gas or both oil and gas.

“The recession and the disruption of the financial markets resulting from the credit crisis significantly impacted investment in the development of new power resources,” the New York Independent System Operator, which manages the state’s power grid, said in report issued earlier this week.

The state currently has 1,300 megawatts of wind-powered generation in place, with plans for another 7,000 additional megawatts on the drawing board, the ISO said.

“While wind power capacity tripled in [2008], the start-up of new wind power projects slowed to a crawl in 2009.”