World Wind Watch | Green Energy News

January 1, 2006 – Vol.10 No.41

WORLD WIND WATCH.

While this section was on vacation last week the world of wind energy didn’t stop.

Xcel Energy announced it plans to become by 2007 the largest provider of wind energy in the U.S. By then the company plans to have more than 2300 megawatts of owned or purchased wind capacity.

(FPL Group currently is the largest wind power generator in the U.S. owning more than 3100 megawatts in nameplate capacity. They own the machines. Others, like Xcel, sell the output from wind turbines, but not necessarily the machines themselves.)

One of the projects Xcel will be selling power from is the 300-megawatt Cedar Creek Wind Energy project planned for northeastern Colorado. Greenlight Energy will buy all the output of Cedar Creek and the $480 million project will be built, owned and operated by Babcock and Brown.

Babcock and Brown is also part-owner of the now completed 50-megawatt Kumeyaay Wind project on the Campo Indian Reservation near San Diego. Kumeyaay feeds power into the San Diego Gas & Electric grid and the Campo tribe will receive income from the 25-turbine installation.

GE Energy, under the company’s Ecomagination initiative invested more than $50 million in Kumeyaay.

Babcock and Brown which has six more wind projects in the pipeline in the United States, has also purchased the Eifel wind farm in Germany. Eifel is actually four sites with a planned expansion to 35-megawatts.

Also in Germany, GE Energy has provided 5, 2.3 megawatt turbines for the Windpark Okeler Bruch in Okel, Lower Saxony. Germany, by the way, leads the world in installed wind power capacity - 17,132 megawatts as of the end of June 2005. By 2012, 28,871 megawatts could be installed in the country.

To help inch closer to Germany’s expected 28,871 wind megawatts, Vestas has received an order for 102.75 megawatts of wind turbine capacity for projects in the area of Brandenburg and Sachsen Anhalt in the eastern part of Germany. The order is with Global Wind Power A/S in Thisted, Denmark .

Vestas also received an order for 30, 3 megawatt turbines from Edison Mission Group of California for an unnamed 90 megawatt project in the northeast the U.S. That project could be the Redington, Maine wind project being developed with Endless Energy Corp. of Yarmouth, Maine. Redington would be just west of the Sugarloaf ski resort.

Finally, Catamount Energy has announced that it has completed construction of its Sweetwater 3/ Cottonwood Creek Wind Farm 135-megawatt windfarm in Nolan County, Texas.

Again, Babcock and Brown’s name appears, this time as advisor, investor and co-developer. The project is Catamount’s third in the U.S. GE provided the turbines.

Visit Xcel at http://www.xcelenergy.com/ , Babcock and Brown at http://www.babcockbrown.com/ GE Energy at http://www.gepower.com/ Vestas at http://www.vestas.com/ and Endless Energy at http://www.endlessenergy.com/ .