Alta Wind Energy Center will Power 600,000 Homes in Southern California
27 July 2010 | Wind Power | 2 Comments
After temperature, one of the most significant weather phenomenon in the Mojave dessert, is wind. Windy days are common across this region so, considering this advantage Terra-Gen Power has planned to build there, the largest wind power project in the country(Alta Wind Energy Center). A huge area of thousands of acres will be mobilized to generate energy for 600,000 homes in Southern California. At a distance of about 75 miles north of Los Angeles, in the Tehachapi Pass, they will install hundreds of towering turbines which will generate, as they say, three times as much energy as the country’s largest existing wind farms.
Alta Wind Energy Center is actually an older project which seemed to some like just another ambitious dream. It was originally started in 2000 and it had a tortured history due to ownership changes and disagreements with local properties. But in 2008, when Terra-Gen bought control of Alta for $325 million, things started to change.
California Center for Sustainable Energy have made many studies, saying that this project will have a pretty large impact on the wind industry. Within a decade, the company wants to produce 3GW of power from the wind farm, which means much more than current production of green energy.
“Alta’s an absolutely enormous project in probably the most promising wind resource area that remains in the state…It’s the single biggest investment in California wind project assets in decades and is likely the largest the state is ever going to see.”, said Ryan Wiser, a renewable energy analyst at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Terra-Gen started building the first group of five wind farms ( Alta Wind Energy Center is a collection of wind farms), consisting of 290 turbines scattered across 9,000 acres. Then, another group of 300 turbines will be installed by the end of 2015. In this way the company will create hundreds of local jobs and moreover they will produce enough power to boost California’s wind energy output more than 25%.
Tags: alta wind energy center, awec, california wind power, largest wind farm, mojave dessert, mojave wind power project, Terra-Gen Power, towering wind turbines, wind power
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