Citizens Wind manages all aspects of the wind development process — from landowner relations, wind assessment and environmental permitting — all the way through engineering, project financing, and construction.  At each stage in the development process, staff members work closely with partners and local communities to ensure local participation and support.

Developing a successful wind project typically involves the following steps:

• Prospecting for good wind sites
• Negotiating land-lease agreements
• Measuring wind speeds
• Project design
• Environmental review and permitting
• Transmission/interconnection
• Negotiating power purchase agreements
• Arranging financing
• Turbine procurement
• Construction

The first step in developing a wind project is identifying attractive potential sites. To do so, the development team examines approximate wind speed data, availability for interconnection to nearby transmission lines, compatibility with local land use, the ability to permit the project, the likely environmental impact of a project, and power pricing in the area.



When an attractive site is identified, the development team contacts landowners in the area to obtain the rights to develop a wind project on their land. The landowners are compensated in a number of different ways, with the most common agreements involving either annual lease payments or a percentage ownership stake in the project. The development team then has the right to put up meteorological towers to measure wind speed, conduct permitting on the land, and eventually build turbines. 



An essential element of developing a wind project is ensuring that the wind will actually blow. An accurate measurement of the site’s wind speeds is thus vital to the success of the project. Wind developers put up meteorological towers at wind sites at the same height as the future wind turbines. These towers measure wind speed, wind direction, temperature, air pressure, and other measurements. Meteorological towers collect data for a year or more, as the wind often blows at different speeds during different seasons. The more data collected, the better, so meteorological towers are often left up throughout the development process. In addition, developers look for other sources of wind data, such as data from nearby weather stations, to compare the current year to previous years to ensure that the wind speed is consistent.



Next, the development team takes the wind data and uses it to design the project. The developers choose the turbine best suited for the project and create a turbine layout to best utilize the site’s wind. Turbine brands have different strengths and weaknesses, and some are more ideally suited to certain locations than others. Developers design the turbine layout to maximize the amount of energy generated at the lowest cost and the least environmental impact. Developers can predict how much energy a project will generate over time by its capacity factor, a measure of the turbine’s efficiency at a specific site. For example, a 100 megawatt wind farm with a 30% capacity factor would produce, on average, 30 megawatts of electricity. Good wind sites typically have capacity factors of 30-40%.



Wind projects must undergo extensive permitting to meet strict federal, state, and local guidelines for wind projects. Permitting requirements vary from location to location, but wind projects everywhere require very strict permitting to ensure that wind projects have minimal impact on the environment and on people living nearby. To satisfy permitting requirements, developers must complete at least the following studies:

     •  Visual impact study
     •  Noise level study
     •  Environmental impact study
     •  Avian impact study across all seasons
     •  Breeding bird survey
     •  Bat study across all seasons
     •  Archeological resource assessment
     •  Historic cultural resource assessment
     •  Site assessments for summit and access roads, including wetland delineations, summit vernal pool surveys, and soils evaluations
     •  Construction feasibility analysis

The permitting process typically takes about a year and a half.  Developers try to begin a project’s permitting as quickly as possible, so that they can complete the rest of the development work while the permitting process is underway.



In order for the power from a wind project to reach people’s homes, it must become interconnected to the electric grid.  Wind developers must secure interconnection agreements from whoever owns the transmission lines that pass nearby, which are often utilities.  To get this agreement, developers must conduct engineering studies to ensure that the grid can accept the additional electricity.  Developers often have to build new short transmission lines between their project and the existing transmission lines, and sometimes have to make upgrades to the transmission system itself to accommodate wind’s intermittency.  Lastly, for a utility-scale wind project, developers must make sure there are transmission lines that will take the electricity to population centers, where demand for electricity is much higher.



In some states, where the electricity market has been deregulated, it is possible for the owner of a wind project to sell electricity directly to customers.  However, wind developers usually sell their electricity to electric utilities, which sell the electricity to customers. T his is usually done by negotiating a power purchase agreement, which is a contract requiring a utility to buy the electricity from a wind farm at a certain price over a certain period of time.  In some cases, an alternative arrangement is reached, in which the developer owns a share of the project long enough to make a specified amount of money.  After this point, the ownership in the project “flips,” and the utility ends up owning the project.



Wind projects are expensive — they generally cost between $1.9 and $2.3 million per megawatt of capacity.  For example, building a 100 megawatt project would cost about $200 million in total.  As most wind development companies have nowhere near that amount to invest in a project, finding outside financing for development and construction is vital to a project’s success.  Financing is found through a combination of two sources: Loans from banks or the government, and investors who become partners in the project, which can include utilities that will end up owning the project after completion.  In addition to finding financing for development and construction, developers also must find separate sources of financing to take advantage of tax incentives for renewable energy.

The biggest federal incentive for wind energy is the production tax credit (PTC).  The PTC is a 2.1 ¢/kilowatt-hour tax credit for renewable energy over the first 10 years of operation.  It is intended to make renewables cost-competitive with fossil fuel and nuclear generation (which have tax incentives as well).  Because the PTC only replaces taxes that would otherwise be paid, companies can only use it if they have large enough tax bases.  Small development companies without large tax bases get around this problem by finding large companies to be tax equity investors, who finance the project in exchange for receiving the tax credits.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 gave wind developers the option to convert the PTC into an investment tax credit (ITC) instead, which allows developers to get the equivalent amount of money at the beginning of the project instead of on a per-kWh basis.  This allows developers to use the ITC money to finance the project’s construction.  The ITC has the same criteria as the PTC, and developers still must find an equity tax investor in order to utilize it.



Turbine procurement has been difficult in recent years, due to high growth in the US wind industry and bottlenecks in supply.  During the high-growth year of 2008, most turbine manufacturers had waiting lists up to a year and a half long.  To ensure turbine supply, many developers have opted for exclusive contracts with turbine manufacturers.  However, this approach limits developers’ flexibility and takes away developers’ abilities to select the best possible turbine for a project.  By choosing a turbine on its merits, developers without supply contracts can ensure that they pick a reliable turbine appropriate for the site’s specific conditions, which will produce more power for less money.  It also is becoming easier to procure turbines, as the economic downturn has reduced demand and many turbine manufacturers are building new factories in the Midwest, which will increase supply in the near future.



Once developers obtain land leases, complete the permitting process, finish a final turbine layout, and secure transmission, turbines, and financing, construction can begin.  The construction of a wind project is very labor-intensive and creates hundreds of temporary jobs throughout the 6- to 12-month process.  Construction involves the following steps:

     •  Creating access roads to each turbine location
     •  Clearing and grading the land at each turbine location
     •  Building a collection substation
     •  Constructing electric collection lines to connect turbines to the collection substation
     •  Constructing an Operations and Management building, from which the turbines will be operated
     •  Building transmission lines to connect the project to the power grid
     •  Transporting the turbines, putting them up, and connecting them to the substation

After construction, the wind project is ready to begin supplying renewable electricity to the grid.