by James A. Bacon
An interesting player is emerging in the Virginia renewable energy scene — Apex Clean Energy. The Charlottesville-based company has announced that it has erected two test towers for a proposed wind farm in Botetourt County to gather data about wind strength and frequency. The company has proposed constructing up to 25 wind turbines on a ridgeline about five miles east of Eagle Rock, according to news reports.
But the Rocky Forge project is encountering legal headwinds. A lawsuit filed a month ago sought to block the project on the grounds that “industrial turbines are known to catch fire, to collapse, emit audible and low frequency noise, cause shadow flicker and to throw ice from spinning blades in the wintertime,” reported the Roanoke Times. The lawsuit also noted that turbines kill birds and bats and destroy their habitat.
Dominion Virginia Power is running into similar obstacles in Tazewell County, where the energy giant faces stiff local opposition. The Tazewell County has proposed a zoning plan that would classify solar panels and wind turbines with other undesirable developments such as medical waste facilities that require a special permit.
For Apex Clean Energy, Rocky Forge is one of two wind power projects in Virginia. The facility would have a capacity of 80 megawatts, enough to power 20,000 houses. The expected completion date is 2017-2018, according to the company website. Another project, Pinewood Wind in Pulaski County, would have a capacity of 180 megawatts, enough to power 50,000 houses. All told, the company lists 53 projects in its portfolio, with the greatest concentration in the plains states of Texas and Oklahoma.
The company was founded in 2009 with the mission of building “a new kind of energy company.” The founders, who had sold their previous company, Greenlight Energy, to BP Alternative Energy, assembled a team of wind and solar energy professionals with skill sets that could originate projects, finance them, build them and manage them.
It’s not clear from the company website or news reports what the business model is for the Virginia wind farms. Among the possibilities: Purchase Power Agreements, in which a customer signs a contract to purchase a specified amount of energy from a project; project ownership in which Apex delivers a turn-key facility along with asset-management services over to a buyer; and a Structured Purchase Agreement, a long-term price agreement that allow companies to hedge against volatile fuel prices. Or Apex simply may sell electricity into the PJM electric bid, which supports a market for green energy.
