Del Mar firm is building facility in Washington state
A Del Mar company is getting $170 million in federal stimulus funds for a massive wind project it is building in Washington state to power municipal utilities in California.
Cannon Power Group plans to use the money in the next few months to complete the second phase of a 400-megawatt project on the Columbia River Gorge about 120 miles east of Portland, Ore.
The Klickitat County project is designed to supply power to 250,000 customers of municipal utilities in California.
It is bigger than all the wind projects built in the Golden State in the past two years, said Gary Hardke, Cannon's president.
“We've been going at warp speed,” he said.
The 30-year-old company specializes in wind and solar projects it can get built quickly.
That would seem to work in its favor in its home state, where state officials have been pushing utilities to provide more power from wind, solar and other nonfossil-fuel sources.
But regulations, community opposition and the difficulty of assembling big tracts of land have made the state a hard one in which to build projects big enough to be profitable, Hardke said.
So Cannon has focused on projects near the state's power-hungry users, but outside its land-use controls.
The biggest example is Windy Point/Windy Flats, the 90-square-mile wind farm it is now building in Washington state cattle country.
“It's 26 miles from one end to the other,” Hardke said.
The first phase was finished earlier this year and consists of 62 turbines capable of producing 137 megawatts of wind power.
Read more: http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2009/nov/07/del-mar-firm-is-building-facility-in-washington/?businessWant to help with Global-Warming? Please visit http://www.whiteearth.org
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