The turbine blades started turning in earnest a few days before Christmas 2023 out at the wind farm in the Lompoc hills, starting a trajectory that operator BayWa r.e. expects to turn into 257 million kilowatt-hours of energy over the course of a year, or enough electricity to run 36,000 average households.
Unlike last winter, when the deluge of rainfall caused some severe damage to the mountainous site still under construction, this year’s rains have served to clean off the blades, said Jörg Beland, vice president of operations for BayWa’s wind farms in North America. The site is largely automated, he said, with an AI bird-tracking system that scans the skies to identify the golden eagles that have nested and produced chicks in San Miguelito Canyon, where the wind farm is found.
The last hurdle for the project — which has been in the works since 2001 and is the first wind farm on California’s coast — was a “take permit” that is being issued by U.S. Fish & Wildlife should any of the blades hit one of the federally protected birds. The IdentiFlight system tracks the bird’s path, and if it’s a golden eagle headed toward one of the towers, the turbine is instructed to stop spinning, Beland explained.
“The eagles may find this area a little annoying,” he said of the forest of 27 turbines with trios of 220-foot blades. The towers stand 267 feet tall where they catch winds of between 7 and 50mph to begin rotating. Their hope is that the birds will focus on areas other than where the wind turbines spin. “So far, nothing has happened,” Beland said.
Before the project was called the Strauss Wind Energy Project, it was known as the Lompoc Wind Energy Project. BayWa, whose parent company is based in Germany, took over in 2016, and Beland said they were very excited to finally be in operation.
“What we see so far is what we expected. Wind conditions are what we expected them to be,” Beland said of the project’s power source. “Everyone is between very contented and very relieved.”
