ELLY GRIMM
• Leader & Times
The world is turning more toward green technology and in the near future, Liberal could be part of that.
Apex Clean Energy has worked with many communities throughout the U.S. and could reach an agreement to partner with the City of Liberal in the future.
“Apex is a full-service clean energy power producer. We do everything from that initial thought of ‘Hey, this would be a good idea to put a renewable energy site here!’ all the way down the road to when the site is actually built and helping with operations and maintenance and all of that,” Development Manager Barrett Thomas said. “We provide clean energy solutions of all types and sizes, ranging from utility-scale wind and solar, battery storage, distributed energy sources and green fuels, We’re based out of Charlottesville, Va., where we have approximately 400 people on the entire team. We also have a Texas Panhandle-Kansas team that consists of about nine different developers. We’re a solidly U.S. company and 100 percent U.S.-owned. Apex started in 2009 and was founded by two individuals, one of whom was a U.S. Navy veteran, and our current CEO is a U.S. Army veteran who was a West Point graduate. As a clean energy company, we have 65-plus gigawatts of power under development in our whole portfolio, and we have built and constructed 8.6 gigawatts’ worth of commercialized production capacity across more than 35 financed projects currently producing power today. Another big number for us is, 690 million tons of carbon dioxide to be displaced/offset over the lifetime of built projects, and we’ve got more than $10 billion worth of utility-scale projects either completed, financed, or under construction. The bottom line is, we have a lot of experience in the renewable energy sphere, and that includes solar, wind, battery storage, and now we’re getting into green fuels.”
Thomas then went into more about the history of Apex.
“Apex started out as a wind energy company in 2009, and we did wind energy until about 2015 – it was about 1,600 megawatts from 2012 to 2015, and that was all wind,” Thomas said. “Then, in 2016, we started doing some wind with fan solar, and now we’ve diversified our portfolio and we’re producing one to two gigawatts, which is now our annual goal for production. In 2022, we took a small break, and that was when Ares Management did an investment in the company, a majority stake, and so that then allowed us to own these projects outright rather than having to develop them and then sell them. So now, our motto is we keep the projects through the end.”
Thomas then discussed two recent projects completed by Apex.
“One of our featured partnerships is with Plug Power, and through that partnership, Apex’s Young Wind will supply 100 percent clean power to a new hydrogen production plant. Apex and Plug Power co-developed the first wind-supplied hydrogen project in the U.S. and the largest onshore wind-powered hydrogen project in the world,” Thomas said. “That plant is currently being constructed, and it’s anticipated to produce 30-plus metric tons of clean liquid hydrogen per day. Another project we’re proud of is at Fort Cavazos in Texas. With that project, we worked with the U.S. Army and the Defense Logistics Agency, and we have basically 15 megawatts of solar there on Fort Hood Proper and in Cotton Plains, it is a 50-megawatt wind project that ties together to provide Fort Hood with all the power for that base. The Fort Cavazos project is the U.S. Army’s first hybrid (wind and solar) project, and the Army’s first project to include both onsite and offsite generation, and this project offsets carbon dioxide emissions equal to around 11,000 tons.”
With all the projects Apex has been involved with, Thomas said the company has been able to work with many financial partners.
“These projects are expensive – a large wind project can be anywhere from $600 million to just shy of $1 billion, depending on the size,” Thomas said. “We have worked with many financial partners in the past to help bring projects to life, including Bank of America, KeyBank, Bank of Montreal, and Deutsche Bank, among many others. We have those partnerships in place to be able to bring these projects through, and we’ve done those projects all throughout the U.S. In Kansas, there’s the Neosho Ridge Wind site in Neosho County, which was completed in 2020, and the Jayhawk Wind site in Bourbon and Crawford counties, which was completed in 2021. That proves we have the experience in Kansas, meaning we’d be a good fit for another potential project in the Southwest Kansas area.”
And Apex goes beyond the megawatt, Thomas said.
“In addition to producing power, which is truly our bread and butter, when Apex comes and does a project, it’s a long-term relationship with the community where we’re developing,” Thomas said. “Environmentally, we’re offsetting the carbon dioxide emissions and economically, we’re investing in the local communities where we are – we build, we do as much hiring locally as we can when we’re constructing these projects, which offer long-term jobs. Socially, we have a local vendor program where we utilize local vendors to inject the funds into the economy as much as we can locally where the projects are.”
Thomas then moved into green hydrogen, which will come into play with the proposed project for Liberal.
“If you’re unfamiliar with green hydrogen, this presents opportunities to decarbonize many sectors,” Thomas said. “Our game plan for Liberal is ... there’s the wind resource and there’s the solar resource, so we’ll take that energy from the wind, sun and batteries (since the wind’s not always blowing and the sun’s not always shining) to go into our electrolysis and green fuels production facility. From there, the water from the Wastewater Treatment Plant will meet up with the electricity. The electrolysis procedure is an electrical current going through, and it’s going to split the hydrogen and the oxygen. We’ll allow the oxygen to go while capturing the hydrogen and compress the hydrogen. There are a lot of different things we can do with the compressed hydrogen – it can be used as a fuel and in the heavy industries, it can be used for cement, aluminum and the steel business. There are cars that do currently run off of hydrogen – we’re not there quite yet, but maybe down the road we’ll be there on a large scale basis. Another avenue where hydrogen could be used is with ammonia production, which is used in fertilizer and in the shipping industry.”
Thomas also acknowledged concerns regarding the water procurement.
“I know water procurement is a concern, especially in Southwest Kansas, and the same issue is going on in Oklahoma and Texas and those regions,” Thomas said. “We know water is important. Kansas irrigated agriculture uses nearly 2.6 billion gallons per day, while Kansas thermoelectric power uses 816,000,000 gallons a day. The golf courses in Kansas use a little more than 8.8 million gallons per day, while the average 2,000-acre farm uses almost 2.7 million gallons per day. A 1-gigawatt electrolyzer facility, which is roughly what we’re looking at, uses a little more than 1.7 millions gallons per day. We do know those concerns about water are there, and that’s why one of Apex’s missions is sustainability, which is why we want to use the wastewater that would otherwise not be used. It’s an opportunity for Apex and the City of Liberal to use that resource.”
Thomas then reiterated Apex’s goal to be a community partner with Liberal and shared some benefits a facility would bring.
“A 1-gigawatt facility has the ability to bring up to $190 million in property taxes, close to $600 million to the local school district, $582 million in landowner payments, and $90 million in water payments,” Thomas said. “This would also create 1,600 local construction jobs for the build cycle, and up to 185 long-term jobs, including plant operators and technicians, maintenance technicians, dispatchers and plant managers, and will provide opportunities for skilled workers in a variety of fields.”
Overall, Thomas said he and Apex are looking forward to working with Liberal.
“We look forward to this opportunity working in the Southwest Kansas area, and we’re very grateful for the discussions that have already happened so far about this potential project,” Thomas said.
