Global Winds Harvest
103 Front Street , Schenectady, New York, United States

Global Winds Harvest is a privately owned U.S. wind energy company formed in 1999 by engineers and principals of one of the world leading wind turbine manufacturers. We are proud of our global wind energy experience and happy to have contributed to the great success that countries such as China, Egypt, Germany and Spain have had in converting their wind resources into clean energy.  Global Winds Harvest was formed to put this successful development experience to work here in the United States. We believe that wind energy is a cost competitive alternative to electricity generated from all other fuel sources – with the great advantage to consumers that the costs of producing this power do not include negative impacts to our air and water and to the health of our children. Wind power is also constant in cost and thus can help to stabilize U.S. energy markets made increasingly volatile by fluctuations in the price and availability of natural gas.  Although large-scale wind power projects are typically sited over thousands of acres of landscape, the overall footprint (i.e., the land area taken up by access roads and wind turbines) is relatively small – on the order of 3-5% of the total project area. The beauty of this fact is that projects sited in rural agricultural areas can produce clean energy at the same time they provide extra revenue for local farmers – with little or no impacts to existing farm operations. The end results are clean domestic energy, the promotion of rural economies, the preservation of existing rural land uses, and the associated preservation of valuable wildlife habitat.

Ecological Costs & Benefits of Wind Energy

Although renewable energies such as wind power generally enjoy a well-deserved reputation for being environmentally friendly (there is no fuel to mine or to defend, no water required, and no waste to get rid of), some opponents of wind energy projects nevertheless include environmental costs of wind energy among their list of arguments. The environmental costs most often cited are habitat destruction/degradation from the project footprint and high rates of mortality of birds and bats that collide with the turbines.  Project footprints should be sited carefully and areas known or suspected to host sensitive species of plants or animals should be avoided. Although rigorous pre-development studies of potential impacts to birds and bats are often warranted (especially at this relatively early stage in the wind industry’s history), we do not believe that such studies should unduly delay the development of responsibly sited projects. Rather, a combination of thorough pre-development screening is best combined with carefully designed post-construction monitoring studies.

Be Part of a Project

Global Winds Harvest is always interested in evaluating development opportunities. If you are wondering about the wind power potential of your land, please feel free to contact us. The following factors are important for determining whether your land might be part of a viable wind power project:

• Wind Resource – as a rule of thumb, wind speeds of at least 17 mph are typically required to generate sufficient power to make a wind power project economically viable

• Interconnection/ Transmission – because the costs of transporting power to the electrical grid are high, project viability typically requires that existing transmission lines be within at least 5-10 miles of the wind resource area

• Land Area – to avoid excessive power losses from turbulence, large wind turbines are typically spaced ~1000-2000 ft apart. On average, this results in a total wind farm land area of approximately 60-100 acres per turbine.

Mid-stage Development – having determined that the project appears economically viable, this phase of development largely involves evaluating the potential environmental impacts of the project and the possibility for their mitigation, conducting electrical grid interconnection studies and securing the necessary local, state, and federal permits required to build the project. This can be an expensive and time-consuming process if the location has not been well selected from the start.

Late-stage Development – once the necessary permits and the rights to interconnect to the electrical grid have been secured, the final stage of development is focused on ensuring that all legal issues with the leased properities are in order, finalizing the precise layout of turbines and other project components (substation, electrical collection system, permanent meteorological towers, etc.), engineering the construction of these components and planning the logistics of component transport and construction.