This article was published by The Energy Mix on Aug. 29, 2024.
By the Energy Mix Staff
Canada’s biggest wind farm to date, the 495-megawatt Buffalo Plains project in Vulcan County, Alberta, has begun delivering power to the provincial grid.
The first of 83 turbines at the Buffalo Plains site was installed in April, and more than a third of the wind farm is now in place, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners announced in a release yesterday. Danish-based CIP, the world’s biggest dedicated fund manager for greenfield renewable energy investments, is delivering the project in partnership with wind manufacturing giant Siemens Gamesa and Etobicoke, Ontario-based Borea Construction.
The release cast Buffalo Plains as an “important part” of CIP’s 29-gigawatt portfolio of onshore and offshore wind, solar photovoltaic, battery storage, pumped storage hydro, and transmission projects across North America, and a demonstration of the company’s “unique ability to execute on large and complex infrastructure projects” that deliver clean power and local jobs.
Vulcan County first sought regulatory approval for the Buffalo Plains project in January, 2021, after establishing itself as the site of Canada’s biggest solar farm—the 400-MW Travers Solar Energy Project, another unit in the CIP portfolio. In November, 2023, Buffalo Plains became the fourth renewable energy project and the first wind farm in Canada to draw investment from tech behemoth Amazon.
The latest version of the Business Renewables Centre-Canada’s map of municipal tax revenues from renewable energy projects in Alberta shows Vulcan County taking in C$7,146,308 this year, or 30% of its total tax base. Before the province’s renewable energy moratorium and subsequent grid reorganization took effect, an earlier version of the map showed Vulcan in line to collect about $8.3 million per year by 2028.
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