Julesburg, CO February 17, 2010 - NECO Wind announces that Phillips County, Colorado was recently awarded a $2.5 million Community Renewable Energy Grant by the U.S. Department of Energy to help finance its community-based wind energy development. The grant, part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, will help jumpstart development on the first 30 megawatt (MW) phase of the project located in Phillips County. The remainder of the project will be completed in separate phases totaling up to 650 MW across Colorado's Phillips, Logan, and Sedgwick counties.
The funding awarded to Phillips County is part of a broader DOE initiative that will distribute $20.5 million to community-based, renewable energy projects across the United States. Community-based energy projects, like NECO Wind, foster rural economic development through localized job creation, tax revenues, and lease payments. They also have been shown to increase local economics up to five times that of non-community-owned energy projects. The NECO Wind project in Phillips County's is one of only five projects to receive a grant from the DOE.
"The NECO Wind project has had an enormously positive response from the residents in the project area," says National Wind's Scott Hafner, the project's senior developer. "Without their support, this DOE award wouldn't have been possible in the first place. We are looking forward to continuing our partnership with Phillips County and rest of the community to develop the initial 30 MW phase as well as the remaining phases of the NECO Wind project."
NECO Wind has made swift progress through the beginning stages of development. Currently, over 90,000 acres have been leased to the project's two footprints leaving site control effectively complete. The next stage will be to design preliminary turbine layouts beginning with the Phillips County portion of the southern footprint. "We will be contacting residents directly affected by these preliminary designs to welcome their involvement in the final design," says Hafner.
