Anyone who’s seen wind farms sprouting up along Pennsylvania highways can declare that wind turbines are nothing new. But most windmills are clustered in groups of 10, 20 or more.
The new wind turbines near the Turkey Hill Dairy in Lancaster County are different because there are just two of them. Still, the two 1.6-megawatt windmills, paid for in part with a $1.5 million state grant funded by the federal stimulus package, produce about one-quarter of the electricity Turkey Hill needs to produce ice cream, milk and iced tea. (They actually generated 32 percent of the dairy’s electricity in February, their first full month of operation.)
The turbines are actually on land the Lancaster County Solid Waste Management Authority owns next to the Susquehanna River. Their construction grew out of a partnership Turkey Hill had with PPL Renewable Energy, a subsidiary of the PPL electric company that serves the area. The authority and PPL had already worked together to develop a system to use waste methane gas from the authority’s Frey Farm Landfill, located next to Turkey Hill, and turn it into electricity for the dairy and other customers to use.
Steve Gabrielle, director of asset management and development at PPL Renewable Energy, says it made sense to explore building wind turbines or solar panels nearby. Research showed that the best course of action was to build two wind turbines far enough from the banks of the Susquehanna, in deference to birds that migrate through the property.
Sources: Turkey Hill; Steve Gabrielle, PPL Renewable Energy
Writer: Rebecca VanderMeulen