T. Boone Pickens has found a spot for the 334 GE wind turbines that wouldn’t fit in his garage: 12,000 acres an hour or so south and east of Minneapolis-Saint Paul. Pickens’s Mesa Power Group and General Electric have teamed up to form a joint venture called American Wind Alliance that is financing and supplying wind turbines for the proposed 78-megawatt wind farm, which will generate enough electricity to power an estimated 70,000 homes.
“It’s the All-American team, so to speak,” said Chuck Burdick, referring to the Pickens-GE partnership. Burdick is a senior developer at National Wind, the Minneapolis-based wind developer spearheading the project, which is still in the permitting phase.
If all goes according to plan, National Wind will break ground on the project this year and have the farm operational by 2011. Minneapolis-based Xcel Energy has agreed to buy all the electricity from the project, pending approval by state utility regulators.
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