By KEVIN WALKER
Michigan Correspondent

UBLY, Mich. — Having successfully jumped through several hoops, the Michigan thumb area is on its way to having its first large windmill park.

According to the company building the park, Noble Environmental Power (Noble), there are many benefits the park will bestow on the local community. For example, hundreds of thousands of dollars in easement payments will be made to landowners.

“It looks like the project is going to go forward,” said Joseph Trepkoski, clerk for Bingham Township, where the village of Ubly is located.

According to Trepkoski the project must be finished sometime next year, since Noble has a contract with Consumers Energy. Consumers Energy is participating in the project as part of its Green Generation program.

Preconstruction activity on the park began in 2005, and Noble was planning on having 32 turbines online by mid-2006.

There were delays, however, and since its original conception the project has grown larger. Now there will be 46 turbines instead of 32.

“There were a lot of unanticipated challenges,” said Jeanette Hagen, a spokeswoman for Noble, a Connecticut based company. “So many companies wanted to get on the power grid, there had to be a study. That first study took quite some time, seven months.”
Since other companies are planning to get onto the power grid, Huron County officials had to make sure there was enough capacity.

After that there were other studies that took additional time. There were noise studies, avian studies, wetlands studies, visual simulations and signal interference studies.

All of the studies weren’t done until late fall 2006.
Noble also had to get permits from the Federal Aviation Administration and the state for tall structures.

Once they were awarded the contract, Noble acquired  more “power purchase agreements,” Hagen said, and that’s how the project got larger.

Trepkoski said that more room is needed for the windmill park, and that there will be a public hearing on July 11 to discuss the matter.

Early this year Residents for Sound Economics and Planning, a group of about 100 residents in and around Ubly, paid for a study that claimed the windmills would be as loud as a washing machine.
Hagen disputed this, stating that the windmills will create as much noise as a quiet refrigerator. She said that the windmills are the quietest on the market.

“As people became educated about wind parks, they realized their fears really came to nothing,” Hagen said.

Hagen also said that the tubular style of these turbines means that fewer birds will be killed by the windmills. That’s because the tubular design is less conducive to nest building than the older, lattice style windmill blades.

Hagen expects that roads and foundations will be built either this fall or at the latest, next spring; she expects that the entire park will be completed by the fall of next year.

This farm news was published in the June 27, 2007 issue of Farm World, serving Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan and Tennessee.