D.C. to buy Pennsylvania wind power

• Reid Frazier
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  Reid R. Frazier is an energy reporter for The Allegheny Front, a Pittsburgh-based public media outlet covering the environment in Pennsylvania. His work has aired on NPR and Marketplace.

A wind farm in Western Pennsylvania plans to send its energy to Washington D.C., where the municipal government is trying to get its carbon footprint down to zero.

Iberdrola Renewables, the Spanish company that owns the South Chestnut Wind Power Project in Fayette County, agreed to send the power generated by its 23 turbines to the District of Columbia. The 20-year agreement will provide about 35 percent of the electricity the DC government needs to power its municipal buildings.

Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser called it the “largest wind power deal of its kind ever entered into by an American city,” in a statement.

Bowser said it would save the district  $45 million over the next 20 years. The amount of electricity generated by the wind farm is the equivalent of powering 12,000 homes.

As part of the agreement, the city is buying Renewable Energy Credits from Iberdrola, said company spokesman Paul Copleman.

Copleman noted the company has similar agreements, called power purchase agreements, with Ohio State University, which is buying wind energy from an installation in Ohio, and Amazon Web Services, which will get power from a North Carolina wind farm, currently under construction. Companies like Google and Yahoo have entered into similar agreements to use wind to power some of their data centers.

“We see these types of direct retail customers interested in wind energy for lots of different  reasons,” Copleman said. “In DC they talked about the savings, they talked about their interest in going green.”

The cost of wind is at its lowest point in history, the Department of Energy reported this week.

Though it still only accounts for five percent of the country’s electric generation, wind power has almost doubled in the U.S. since 2010, according to the Energy Information Administration.

Much of that boom was aided by a federal production tax credit for wind turbines, which Congress allowed to expire last year.

In Pennsylvania, wind accounts for 1.6 percent of the state’s electricity, according to the American Wind Energy Association.

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