Editorial
Front Page - Friday, December 10, 2010
Wind farm builder succeeds in blowing clients away
David Laprad
Tennessee Valley Infrastructure Group is a Chattanooga-based general contractor that specializes in building wind farms. Co-founded by Richard Ector in 2002, when the industry was new, TVIG is one of the top ten builders of wind farms in the nation.
- Photo provided
As a builder of small power plants around the world, Richard Ector, president and CEO of Tennessee Valley Infrastructure Group, was always at the mercy of local energy prices. When he found himself knee-deep in rising diesel fuel costs while working on a blustery Honduran island, he asked his business partners about making a change.
One thing led to another, and TVIG landed a contract to build seven wind turbines in Kimball, Neb.
That was eight years ago. Today, the walls of TVIG’s offices on Mountain Creek Road double as a photo gallery of the many projects Ector and his team have completed across the continental U.S.
From the vast, open plains of Texas, to the lush hills of upstate New York, the company has acted as the general contractor on enough projects to make it one of the top ten builders of wind farms in the nation.
Red pins cover two large maps that represent a single project in Big Spring, Texas. “That’s 172 pins, each of which represents a single turbine. The project was so big, it took two maps to get them all on there,” Ector says.
Although wind turbines produce energy without emitting pollution, the process is not without its detractors. According to an article on American National Standards Institute, opponents claim windmills kill birds, make too much noise, devalue property and mar the natural beauty of the landscape, all in an effort to produce about two percent of the electricity generated in the U.S.
While new technology and standards have helped to make windmills safer and more productive, TVIG leaves the debate to others and concentrates on what it does best: installing the modern-day giants, most of which stand taller than the Statue of Liberty.
“In one regard, building a wind farm is simple. To stack out a turbine, we build a foundation underground, cover it up, put in the three tower sections, place the generator on top and then install the three blades.
But there are a lot of little factors that go into making that happen, so it’s as much a matter of getting the pieces to the right place at the right time. In Texas, we had to build over 70 miles of road for one wind farm,” Ector says.
Since the generator on a GE 1.5 MW Wind Turbine, the industry standard model, weighs about 60 tons and stands 80 meters tall, it requires a huge crane to lift. So the roads TVIG has to build tend to be huge, as the cranes have 35-foot wide tracks. Again, as a general contractor, TVIG brings together the diverse components of the project and oversees the work.
“We generally bring on a roads builder, a foundation builder, an electrical subcontractor that does the wiring, builds a substation and ties the turbine into the utilities grid, and a crane company that specializes in the huge 600-ton cranes that lift these things,” Ector says. Ector says the process of assembling a turbine is as quick as it is simple.
“You can put the bottom two [parts of the tower] up in a couple of hours, then you have to put grout between the concrete and the steel. So we have a smaller crane that does those two and moves on. Once the grout is cured, you test it to make sure it’s strong, then you make sure the bolts are tight, and then the second crane comes along a day or two later. From the time you set the base to the time you get the rotor up can be two to three days, but the actual time it takes to put a turbine up is probably around five hours.”
While TVIG might have the process of installing a wind farm down to a science, there are winds of change on the horizon, as turbine manufacturers are producing even taller turbines capable of generating more electricity, and crane manufacturers are coming out with the equipment to do the job.
“The higher you go, the less friction there is, so the higher you go, the greater the wind speed. And since energy output is a cube function of wind speed, if you double the wind speed, you get an eight-fold increase in power. So the higher we go, the more energy we get. The cranes have been the limiting factor on the height of the turbines. Now that they’re coming out with bigger cranes designed to handle taller towers, we’re starting to see more projects using 100-meter towers.”
Increased efficiency could mean more business for TVIG, as more investors will be attracted to wind energy as revenues go up. Even now, Ector says turbines are a reasonably safe investment, as it’s possible to determine in advance how much power a wind farm will produce.
“If you put a 100 megawatt wind farm on a Texas plain, the wind isn’t going to blow all the time. So, before a company builds a wind farm, it puts up met towers ... and collects up to five years of wind data on the site. Then the company correlates those figures with data from an airport or a NOAA site to see, on average, how much wind it can expect on an annual basis. So, while the company can’t predict how much power it’ll be producing at 3 p.m. tomorrow, it knows it can expect 45 megawatts of power per year,” Ector says.
Ector’s method for choosing Chattanooga as the home for TVIG was less scientific. He’d lived in the city while working for Tennessee Valley Authority, so when he retired in 1998 from his job as a diplomat for the U.S. Department of State and prepared to launch TVIG, he moved back to the Scenic City, where he had friends.
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, new wind farms have placed the U.S. on a trajectory to generate 20 percent of nation’s electricity from wind energy by 2030. However, Ector doesn’t believe wind energy will ever become the country’s primary source of energy.
Rather, he says it will continue to be part of a diverse portfolio of power sources, all of which have their “plusses and minuses.”
“Wind energy isn’t going to replace anything, but neither is [water power], nuclear power, coal or natural gas. No one source will take care of our energy needs. But the renewables, which also include solar and geothermal energy, don’t produce CO2, so we need those to help offset the waste coal and nuclear power create,”
he says.
If the Department of Energy is right, Ector will also be needing a lot of red pins.
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