The Story of St. Olaf's Wind Turbine

Pete Sandberg

The story of St. Olaf's wind turbine is a simple story of good people and good planning making good things possible.

Conversations about wind energy have been part of the environmental culture of St. Olaf College for a long time. Faculty and staff on the Environmental Concerns Committee considered the possibilities more or less continuously. Students who graduated and worked in wind power wondered why St. Olaf didn't think more seriously about a wind turbine. Sometimes it seemed like an obvious choice.

But even a desirable choice wasn't possible until a few things changed. First, St. Olaf isn't located in Western Minnesota , where stronger winds on Buffalo Ridge have created "the Saudi Arabia of wind." Rather than relocate the college to take advantage of the wind, we waited until inventors developed technologies better adapted to the wind currents of our own location. The NEG Micon NM82-the Danish windmill we have chosen-is especially designed for maximum productivity in moderate wind resources. Second, like most private liberal arts colleges, St. Olaf isn't awash in money. We don't have a large endowment, and our expenses seem to expand faster than our income. A wind turbine seemed like a good idea, but so did maintaining buildings and faculty salaries. So we needed a source of capital.

The Renewable Development Fund (RDF) became that source. In 1999, as part of a renewal of the 1994 Radioactive Waste Management Facility Authorization Law, the Minnesota State legislature required Xcel Energy to contribute $500,000 to the RDF for every dry cask containing spent nuclear fuel stored at its Prairie Island nuclear plant. In 2001, Xcel issued its first request for proposals and funded about 9 million dollars worth of projects.

Facilities Director Pete Sandberg submitted St. Olaf's request in the second round of proposals for projects, in the Spring of 2004. We asked for 1.5 million dollars to fund a 1.8 million dollar project for a single 1.65 megawatt turbine on our own lands. We argued that we were well situated to take advantage of this investment, and to set an example for other institutions looking at the potential of wind energy.

Our situation was especially favorable because of good business decisions the college had made over a period of 20 years. Utility companies often offer lower rates to customers who agree to reduce electrical load during peak-use periods. Residential customers get a break, for example, if they agree to let their utility turn off their air conditioners for short periods on the hottest days of the year. St. Olaf is in an even stronger position than most customers, because we own diesel generators that can supply all our power at any time. With our back-up capability, we have 100% redundancy in power production. When the lights go out in Northfield , they don't stay out at St. Olaf. This diesel installation includes equipment that makes the incorporation of wind generation possible in our configuration.

The story of the generators involves politics, economics and imagination. In 1992, it wasn't clear if the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission (PUC) would re-permit the Prairie Island nuclear plant because of its age and the accumulation of nuclear waste in above-ground casks. Northern States Power (NSP), therefore, faced the possibility of losing a major power source. So they asked St. Olaf to consider installing electrical generators on campus that could help save NSP the construction costs of larger power plants by helping them to flex their production. NSP would own and operate the generators for 20 years, after which they would turn them over to the college. This seemed like a good idea, but ultimately the program wasn't implemented.

But NSP still offered special rates for interruptible customers, and Pete Sandberg realized that the rate savings would pay for the generators over the long haul. So St. Olaf invested two million dollars to install three diesel-powered generators with reverse-current protection in 1999. Located at the foot of the hill on the east side of campus, they are capable of generating 4.2 megawatts of electricity. But even when they're not working, they're saving money for the college. As a result of our generating capacity, we save about $150,000 a year on our electric bill, money that can be spent for other college purposes.

Besides our own savings, these generators have other positive benefits for our utilities and for our community. Because we can go off the grid during peak periods, Xcel Energy (our new electricity provider) avoids building additional power plants. Because we can generate our own electricity at any time, St. Olaf has also become the most significant civil defense site in Rice County . And we are the standby site for Northfield Hospital in the event of a catastrophic event that compromises its power supply or its capacity.

The college also benefited from the special configuration of its electrical service. We currently operate a 225-amp, 13,800-volt service, which circulates electricity in a loop around campus. On a daily basis, the loop distribution system means that power can be continuously fed into the loop even if there's a power interruption somewhere on campus. As we considered adding wind generating capacity, the loop also meant that we could easily wire the wind turbine into our electrical loop, and feed the power into our own grid. In many situations-as at Carleton College -a wind turbine generates electricity which is sold to a utility, and purchased back again. In our case, wind energy will continuously supply our base electrical load for most of the year.

As a result of all this preparation, St. Olaf's proposal was the highest-rated wind proposal in the 2003 cycle of the Renewable Development Fund. Evaluators acknowledged the college's "unique setting" and noted that " St. Olaf College appears well attuned to energy issues and their relationship to the community and the utility from an energy supply/load perspective." They said that "the project scored high on the two primary criteria (Barriers to Market Deployment, Soundness of Technical Basis, Assumptions and Approach)." And they funded us for the full amount of our request.

The moral of the story is that we can ride the wind today because we've harnessed other energies (human and natural) creatively for years.