Auwahi Wind Farm in Ulupalakua

Jane and I drove around the backside of Maui yesterday to see the haps with the Auwahi wind farm… Auwahi means (milk of fire)… in essence “’smoke’. Dry windy area… dust in the air, etc.. There wasn’t a lot to see except for the big red crane in the last picture.. Construction began on the farm site and on the roads to get the parts there in March 2012. It will consist of eight wind turbines, each 428 feet tall.

The project will utilize a total of 1,466 acres for a 9 mile power line, a substation, a microwave communication tower, an access road and the turbines themselves. Once finished, it will create enough power to supply up to 21 megawatts, or 10,000 homes.

So today we drove down to where the towers and propellers are staged for the next leg of their trip. They were built by master windmill builders of yore in Denmark -overseen by the German company Siemens and shipped around the world to Maui. A friend of mine is doing the survey work on the site and the delivery road and reports that Dan Hyatt, the project manager from SEMPRA (the greater San Diego utility company that is building this farm) said these are the largest wind turbines currently available in the world – both in size and megawatts!

In addition to generating clean, renewable energy, the wind project will provide a boost to the local economy. It will create 150 construction jobs at peak and five additional positions to operate the facility, as well as provide a stable, long-term source of tax revenue for the county and state.

An important component of Auwahi Wind is an 11 MW battery unit capable of storing about 4.4 megawatt-hours (MWh) of power generated by the wind turbines during the windy morning and night hours. This stored power will help regulate and smooth intermittent wind power, providing a valuable source of grid stability to Maui Electric.

Click to enlarge Here are some Dudley shot this week… and then there was one…

10/22

They were putting the props together on the ground and should be up by now or early in the week. Wires over the mountain and the substation, close to Maui Meadows are almost all in and ready to go.