NECO Wind announces that Phillips County, Colorado, was recently awarded a $2.5 million Community Renewable Energy Grant by the U.S. Department of Energy to help finance its community-based wind energy development. The grant, part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, will help jumpstart development on the first 30 megawatt (MW) phase of the project located in Phillips County. The remainder of the project will be completed in separate phases, totaling up to 650 MW across Colorado’s Phillips, Logan, and Sedgwick counties.
The funding awarded to Phillips County is part of a broader DOE initiative that will distribute $20.5 million to community-based, renewable energy projects across the United States. Community-based energy projects like NECO Wind foster rural economic development through localized job creation, tax revenues, and lease payments. They also have been shown to increase local economics up to five times that of non-community-owned energy projects. The NECO Wind project in Phillips County is one of only five projects to receive a grant from the DOE.
“The NECO Wind project has had an enormously positive response from the residents in the project area,” says National Wind’s Scott Hafner, the project’s senior developer. “Without their support, this DOE award wouldn’t have been possible in the first place. We are looking forward to continuing our partnership with Phillips County and rest of the community to develop the initial 30 MW phase as well as the remaining phases of the NECO Wind project.”
NECO Wind has made swift progress through the beginning stages of development. Currently, over 90,000 acres have been leased to the project’s two footprints leaving site control effectively complete. The next stage will be to design preliminary turbine layouts beginning with the Phillips County portion of the southern footprint. “We will be contacting residents directly affected by these preliminary designs to welcome their involvement in the final design,” says Hafner.
NECO Wind is a community-based wind development company located in Sedgwick, Phillips, and Logan counties in Colorado that intends to develop 650 megawatts of wind-turbine-based renewable energy. The company’s mission is to produce wind energy projects that are sustainable, generational, and environmentally responsible, and to assure that the financial benefits are shared with area landowners and the surrounding community. For more information please visit www.necowind.com.
National Wind is the leader in developing utility-scale (50 megawatts or larger) community wind energy projects. It forms powerful community wind energy partnerships with property owners, assuring that the project’s economic benefits are shared with the surrounding community. National Wind and its subsidiary, Wind Energy Developers, LLC, have participated in developing 13 wind energy projects and currently have over 4,000 megawatts in active development. National Wind projects are located in Minnesota, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Colorado, and Ohio. The company has an additional 1,500 megawatts of wind energy in advanced feasibility study stages and is continually exploring expansion opportunities in other states.
Go to www.nationalwind.com for more information.
