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By Joe Boomgaard | MiEnergy
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Rich Vander Veen’s excitement shows as a long, complex wind farm development in Gratiot County begins to take shape. Vander Veen stands beneath a composite turbine blade already fastened to a hub and ready to be installed to a gearbox. PHOTO: JOE BOOMGAARD

BRECKENRIDGE — New plants are sprouting up across mid-Michigan’s Gratiot County, but they’re not the kind typically associated with the region’s many farming operations.

Instead, they’re a distributed network of power plants — 133 GE 1.6-megawatt wind turbines for a total of 212.8 megawatts in all, the largest wind farm to date in Michigan — that will provide power for some 50,000 Detroit Edison customers.

The project is the culmination of a project initiated in 2006 by Rich Vander Veen, president of Wind Resource LLC, a company he started with Bruce Barget.

Vander Veen was no stranger to the process, having developed the project that led to the construction of Michigan’s first commercial wind turbines at the Straits of Mackinac as part of Mackinaw Power LLC. He’s also worked with various partners on potential wind energy projects in West Michigan, including in Oceana County near Hart.

While many proposed wind farms run into hurdles with Michigan’s patchwork of local zoning ordinances, Vander Veen said the Gratiot County project succeeded in the mostly farming community of Breckenridge, about 30 miles west of Saginaw, because the project was open to the entire community from the beginning.

Vander Veen, a member of the Michigan Wind Working Group, became interested in the project as early government data indicated that Gratiot County appeared to have sufficient wind for a wind farm. The cards aligned further when MET tower tests showed the region had the predicted proper wind speeds. A further analysis found there was a nearby interconnection possibility with the state’s power grid. Armed with that data, Wind Resource decided to pursue the project, he said.

“It’s a process whereby we keep learning about the community and the people and listening to them about what makes them tick,” Vander Veen told MiEnergy during an exclusive tour of the wind farm construction project.

Listening tour yields results

When he listened to what the community was saying, he realized the residents were used to working within many agricultural cooperatives, so he applied that thinking to developing the project. Rather than be secretive and all of a sudden show up on the community’s doorstep with a grandiose project, he said the first thing he did was invite everyone to a conversation.

“We invited everyone to participate in the project,” he said. “We asked, ‘How can we all work together to make this the best project?’”

The tact seems to have worked. As a result of the initial meeting and after more than 20 subsequent public meetings, Gratiot County was the first in the state to adopt a countywide wind zoning ordinance that included all of the county’s 16 townships. The measure passed unanimously each step of the way.

Assembling a workable plan

The wind turbine towers are assembled in five, 50-foot sections. Crews can access the top of the tower and the nacelle via a ladder running inside the length of the tower. Towers for this project were shipped in from Texas. PHOTO: JOE BOOMGAARD

Vander Veen said the effort required a great deal of legwork and meeting one-on-one across the kitchen table with various residents and affected property owners. With the zoning in place, he worked with the various county agencies to develop a process for building permits and inspections, as well as plans for how to move the wind turbine parts and construction equipment throughout the community.

For example, plans called for 52 cuts on road corners to be installed temporarily to allow the turbine parts and equipment to pass through, and each must be returned to as good or better condition as it was before the project.

He likes to joke that he’s had about 15 cups of coffee per megawatt approved for the project.

“It’s been very satisfying to go from the test to the zoning agreements to earning the support of the community to make this happen,” Vander Veen said. “We invited everyone from the beginning — with emphasis on from the beginning. It’s hard to invite them once they’re unhappy.”

In all, 256 landowners signed leases involved with the project. Each owner receives compensation based on the amount of land affected by the wind project — whether for power lines or access roads — and each owner with a turbine is paid a separate sum, about $1,000 per year, to host a wind turbine.

Partners key to project

Based on 15 months of data collected across the county and by comparing that information to the various available wind turbines, consultants determined that 1.6-megawatt, 82-meter rotor GE turbine would produce the most power because its cut-in speed was lower. That meant the turbine could operate at capacity more frequently than other turbines, so Wind Resource went to GE only to find that its turbines were sold out for a period of years.

Two companies had secured the rights to all of the capacity for GE turbines. Chicago-based wind developer Invenergy paid GE over $1 billion for a frame agreement, basically a down payment for Invenergy to secure the rights to a select number of GE’s turbines.

In 2009, Invenergy bought the assets of Gratiot County Wind LLC, a company Vander Veen set up to develop the project. The deal included the studies, leases, and strategic proprietary information the company developed in the years leading up to the project. The sale included stipulations that Invenergy honor all the promises made to the landowners and to the local officials, Vander Veen said.

Around the same time, DTE put out a request for proposal for a renewable energy project to help the utility fulfill its 10-percent renewable portfolio standard, enacted in 2008 by the state. In the end, Invenergy got the deal, known as a build and transfer agreement, which went beyond just a power purchase agreement. In essence, DTE owns the turbines and has a management agreement with Invenergy.

Windmill wonders

Blades are bolted to the hub and the entire piece is raised and connected at the nacelle. A 620-ton crane is required to lift the section, and, curiously, crews have to pay close attention to the wind in the construction process. Wind days – when the conditions are too windy for construction workers to safely work – are built into the project schedules. PHOTO: JOE BOOMGAARD

The team selected Livonia-based Aristeo Construction Co. for all civil, concrete and erection duties in the project. Over the last 10 years, the company has worked on wind energy projects across North America, including Maryland, Indiana, New York and Saskatchewan. At peak, the project will have about 350 people total on site, including about 150 skilled construction workers.

Each of the turbines is erected on top of a mostly buried, reinforced concrete platform each weighing about 350 tons. The platforms are 12 feet deep and spread out at the bottom to 40 feet across. A circular pattern of bolts 16 feet in diameter and embedded in the concrete is lined up with the base of the tower. The tower is constructed in five, 50-foot-long sections, each of which is lowered into place by a 390-foot, 620-ton crane, which takes two days to disassemble and move between platforms, although crews have found ways to move the assembled crane for short distances.

On top of the final tapered tower section, crews must then install the nacelle, which houses all the gearboxes. While still on the ground, three composite turbine blades are bolted to the hub, and the whole assembly is then raised and connected to the nacelle.

A small concrete pad for some of the generation equipment must also be poured, under which run all the underground wires. The wires are completely underground until they reach one of two substations, where the lines come above ground and travel on six miles of transmission lines to the state’s grid.

The GE turbines blades for the project are manufactured in facilities in Iowa, while the towers are made in Texas. Vander Veen said he’s helping connect GE with Holland-based Energetx Composites, but the project may be too far along for the company to get involved at this point. However, Vander Veen is hopeful that the two might develop a relationship for future projects.

Labor of love

The Gratiot project uses GE turbines with blades shipped in from Iowa, however, West Michigan-based developer Rich Vander Veen is helping connect GE with Energetx Composites of Holland for potential future blade orders. PHOTO: JOE BOOMGAARD

For Vander Veen, the Gratiot County project has many different meanings. The wind energy produced by the plant is helping to gradually wean the state off fossil fuels. It’s helping to preserve farmland by providing a new income stream to help keep family farms in business. The project in effect doubles the tax base going to local schools, and because the additional revenues are being applied to debt, it will result in taxes going down for the whole community. In essence, they’ve found a way for everyone in the community to potentially benefit from the project, he said.

Moreover, he said it’s a success that demonstrates a new model for how to get complex, potentially controversial projects off the ground by focusing on people and relationships.

“We needed to earn their trust and confidence and work with the best possible team to integrate new practices,” he said. “I give credit to the community for developing the first countywide ordinance … that demanded a lot of cooperation. I credit the landowners for designing a business plan that works and … (for seeing this) as a product that can be profitable. And I credit all the people who worked so hard (at the local government) and continue to improve through best practices. … This was the result of bringing the right people at the right moment.”

Vander Veen’s company also continues to work on the project in a consulting capacity.

“We’re continuing to work with the companies. We want to see this succeed and to ensure that for DTE and Invenergy, the promises made are promises kept and that they deliver all the values we said we’d do — that they respect and honor the landowners and continue to earn their trust and confidence,” he said.

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TAGS:

• aristeo construction
• breckenridge
• gratiot county
• invenergy
• michigan wind working group
• rich vander veen