Turbines, turbines, turbines

Today's wind turbines are tall, about 351 feet tall in fact out at Puget Sound Energy's Wild Horse Wind and Solar Facility. I took the pictures here on Monday, and they show some of the 22 new wind turbines going up.

Each turbine blade is about 120 feet long, or longer than the wing of a Boeing 747. Made out of carbon fibre composite, they are hollow and are lifted one at a time with a crane and fitted into the hub of the three-blade rotor. And, as you can see, the hub itself is huge, taking one oversized semi truck to carry it. It's so big, workers climb inside to bolt in each blade.

Each of the new turbines, which are adding to the 127 turbines already at Wild Horse, has a capacity of 2 megawatts -- or about the equivalent of the energy needed to serve 225 to 300 average U.S. households, according to the American Wind Energy Association. We opened Wild Horse in 2006, and are expanding now with an eye toward full commercial production from the new turbines by the end of 2009 or early 2010. With this 44 MW addition, Wild Horse will have a capacity of 273 MW, or what AWEA equates to just under 70,000 average American homes.

Impressive as this all looks in photos, it is even
more amazing in person. To see wind power up close, come and spend an hour or so at our Renewable Energy Center at Wild Horse. It's free and open every day now through November 30. It's about 2 hours east of Seattle on I-90 near Ellensburg.

The green jobs impact is pretty impressive as well, with about 150 people being employed during construction at Wild Horse, and some two dozen working full-time for operations and maintenance. The turbine makers are also increasingly turning to U.S. production for key components, which is good for our economy, and helps stabilize the prices of the units for us as a utility, by removing the swings of the exchange rate between the dollar and the Euro.