A special wind forum hosted by Enid/Garfield County Development Alliance earlier this month put Enid on the “wind energy map,” Brent Kisling said Thursday.
Kisling, executive director of the alliance, said he has received a good amount of feedback since the forum, the purpose of which was to explore bringing wind energy systems to Garfield County.
“It allowed the organizations (there) to know Enid is interested in being part of a growing industry,” Kisling said.
Two energy companies, TradeWind Energy and RES-Americas, already have leases on land in the county and could explore bringing wind farms here. Frank Costanza, vice president of TradeWind Energy, and Shalini Ramanathan, vice president of RES-Americas, both gave presentations at the Sept. 10 forum.
“We had been working with (TradeWind and RES-Americas) for months,” Kisling said. “I think the thing that came out of the forum that was in-teresting to me, between the two of them, there are 100,000 acres that are already leased for wind production (in the county). They have been very active here.”
Other organizations present at the forum were South-west Power Pool, Clean Line Energy and American Wind Energy Association, represented by CEO De-nise Bode.
Wind en-ergy could bring lots of jobs to Gar-field County, but why else should the average Enid resident care if there’s a wind farm built in the county?
“Every wind turbine has $20,000 in property taxes,” Kisling said, “and the average wind farm has maybe 100 turbines. That’s $2 million a year from just one wind farm that would be going to local schools, to the county for bridges and roads and other educational facilities.”
The first step toward the goal of bringing wind energy to Garfield County would be for machine shops supporting gas and oil industries to get contracts for the work, Kisling said. Second, a major manufacturer would come in and establish itself in Enid. Third, new transmission lines likely would go up, including some to connect a hub of lines east of Enid Woodring Regional Airport to wind turbines in Woodward.
Finally, wind turbines would be built.
Although nothing is definite yet, Kisling said those likely would be the steps in bringing wind energy to Enid.
“A new natural resource out here is wind,” he said. “We have not as a community jumped in the middle of adding value to the commodity that is out there.”