Rattlesnake Ridge Wind project to start construction in 2020


BY JUSTIN SEWARD insight magazine


Rattlesnake Ridge Wind project has been in the works for


over a year and now expects to break ground in 2020. The 117.6 megawatt project will come to fruition, as it was announced by Berkshire Hathaway Energy that the $200 million wind farm will be built southwest of Medicine Hat, and will pro- duce enough wind energy to supply the equivalent of 79,000 homes.


RES (Renewable Energy Systems) is providing project devel- opment services for the wind farm and manager Rebecca Crump says from an interconnective standpoint, the Rattlesnake project is in Stage 3,which means the company is undertaking their functional specifications and engineering assessment reports. “With respect to permitting the project,we’re going to be submitting our application to the AUC (Alberta Utilities Commission) in the near future.We’d hope to get our approvals in place early to mid next year.We could start construction early summer, late fall next year,”said Crump. RES started land negotiations back in 2015 and it ended up


the company acquired more land because of the initial Forty Mile Wind Power Project which was submitted at 400 megawatts, says Crump. “It was just too big of a project,”said Crump.


New New


“We had about 13,000 acres,which became the Rattlesnake


project in addition to the Forty Mile project.The two projects are side-by-side,but we’ve split them based on a coulee system that runs between the two projects.” The company did not waste any time getting off the ground


last year. “We initiated kind of official consultation and discussions with the county and landowners and had a public open house in September 2018,”said Crump. The Rattlesnake Ridge project is privately funded and will be


injecting power into the provincial grid, and will not be rate- based power. There will be a monitoring system before the sub-station and


before the interconnection. “Every power plant has a monitor. It stays on real time and logs what the wind plant is producing.” The wind speeds are what first drew RES to the area and


before talking to any landowners, the company talked to the County of Forty Mile in making sure they were receptive to renewable energy projects. “We found that there were wind prospects for quite some time in the county,”said Crump. “Landowners were open to having wind on their land.” It seems that wind projects are being constructed every-


where as of late and Crump says there are a couple factors including economics, where the Rattlesnake project is not sub- sidized in any way,and more projects are being seen like it. “One big driver in Alberta, because it’s a free energy market, is


the economics and the cost of wind power has come down considerably,”said Crump. Additionally, there is climate change initiatives and electricity


is looking for a variety of fuels to stabilize the system. RES will hold job fairs, starting in early 2020, with the goal of gaining as much local employment and resources as possible.


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