(Spirit Lake)– Dickinson county supervisors Tuesday heard an update on a wind project planned for portions of Dickinson and Osceola counties in Iowa and Jackson county in Minnesota. The Three Waters Wind project, originally owned by Scout Energy, was purchased by NextEra Energy Resources in 2020. Clay Cameron, lead project director, says the discovery of some eagle nests has resulted in them scaling things back…
“With the U.S. Fish and Wildlife setback from an active eagle nest it’s a two mile radius buffer, so it takes out a lot of real estate, a lot of turbine locations. So that’s why it is down now to 61 turbine locations currently. 20 of those locations are located in Dickinson county. These turbines are G.E. 3.4 megawatt turbines slated for this project.”
Cameron says most of those will be located in Silver Lake Township…
“We have 16 of those fully exercised option agreements with the landowners. We’re working on the four additional option agreements with the landowners. We don’t anticipate any issues. Kind of the permitting timeline for this project, as you guys know, we are submitting our Minnesota PUC application for Minnesota in August of this year, or September of this year, and a final application will be submitted in December of this year. There is no state permitting requirement in Iowa if you do not exceed 25 megawatts per collection feeder, so around 68 megawatts total in Iowa and we’re going to spread that out over several different collection feeders so it’s not going to trigger a state permit, just a local permitting here in Dickinson county.”
Cameron says they plan to come before the Dickinson County Planning and Zoning Commission to seek a conditional use permit sometime in the first quarter of 2023. He says construction wouldn’t start until May or June of 2024.
