ROBERT PIERCE
• Leader & Times
At a time when heavy winds have been kicking up across Southwest Kansas, with gusts in excess of 60 miles an hour, Seward County officials are again visiting the possibility of bringing wind energy to the county.
Monday, county commissioners hosted a special meeting to address concerns from the board and local landowners and to hear from officials with Invenergy, the Denver-based company heading up the potential project.
Before that, though, Administrator April Warden gave a brief review of the history of wind energy discussions in Seward County.
“This wind farm project started 15 years ago,” she said. “Originally, it started as Cimarron Wind. Now it is called the Thresher Wind Project.”
Warden said there have been a variety of issues that have kept a wind farm from happening in Seward County.
“We haven’t looked at those agreements and different things in quite some time,” she said. “It is going in Meade County and Seward County.”
Warden said formerly, commissions in both Meade County and Seward County met jointly to discuss possible wind energy endeavors.
“We do have a contract with Meade County, and we did submit one over to Gray County as well for assistance on the project agreement,” she said. “We do a lot of work with the road use and maintenance agreement.”
Warden added county officials help review agreements for payments in lieu of taxes or PILOT, which are also called contribution agreements and deal with decommissioning.
“Soon there’ll be three project agreements – the road use agreement, the PILOT or the contribution and also the decommissioning,” she said. “We are working with Meade County on those. We were at a meeting with Meade County a couple weeks ago, and Invenergy was going to draft those agreements and let us and the county counsel look at them as well.”
For a road use agreement, Warden said a haul route map would be needed.
“We plan on evaluating the structures, identifying any of the structures that are problematic, that won’t be able to support the construction loading, doing a pre-inspection of all the haul routes,” she said.
Warden said wind energy companies would be responsible for turning roads back to pre-existing conditions, and county workers would do a post inspection once a project is finished.
“Meade County also wants to put one of our inspectors on site as a liaison,” she said. “The magnitude of the project is a lot for the Road and Bridge guys to handle. They’re wanting us to put a liaison on site to monitor haul routs, making sure they’re abiding by the road use agreement and keeping the road safe for the public.”
Warden said Invenergy did provide some draft agreements to look at, and she distributed those to commissioners and members of Monday’s audience.
“There is a decommissioning agreement, the contribution agreement as well as the road use and maintenance agreement,” she said. “Invenergy has done their part to draft agreements to give you something to start with and to look at.”
