A new wind-energy farm in Northwestern Arizona came on line recently - with a twist.
When the wind's not blowing but the sun is shining, the Kingman I Project can still produce the juice.
Vancouver, British Columbia-based Western Wind Energy recently turned on the Kingman I site and connected it to the grid of UniSource Energy Services (UES), a subsidiary of Tucson-based UniSource Energy Corp. that provides power to about 91,000 customers in Mohave and Santa Cruz counties.
The Kingman I site may be the only combined wind-and-solar generating site at the utility scale, said Mike Boyd, vice president of development and chairman of Western Wind and a former Pima County supervisor.
The $28 million facility has five massive wind turbines, from Spanish maker Gamesa, and a 500-kilowatt, polycrystalline silicon photovoltaic array. In total, it has a generating capacity of 10.5 megawatts, enough to power about 3,000 homes.
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"We think this may be the only one of its kind on a utility scale," said Boyd, who still lives in Tucson.
The first and only other utility-scale wind farm in the state is the 127-MW Dry Lake Wind Power Project, near Snowflake. The Salt River Project is buying the complete output of that plant, which went on line in stages in 2009 and 2010.
It's been a long and winding road for the Kingman project, which started out in 2005 as a 15-megawatt project that was to supply Arizona Public Service Co. under a power purchase agreement. That project was scrapped in 2007 when an Australian financing partner in the venture backed out.
Along came UES, Boyd said, looking for renewable-energy projects in its territory to meet state requirements. State-regulated power companies must generate an increasing percentage of the power they sell from renewable sources, ramping up to 15 percent by 2025.
UES asked Western Wind for a smaller project, with a solar component. Western Wind partnered with Massachusetts-based American Capital Energy on the solar array.
The utility hopes to use the site to learn how solar and wind energy technologies can be used together to help overcome their limitations - namely, the intermittent nature of wind and sun.
"Our hope was that, by integrating those two resources together, we could get a better sense of how they might complement each other, and possibly address the intermittency issues that arise with both wind and solar," UES spokesman Joe Salkowski said.
Boyd says his company hopes the project will grow to eclipse its original design.
He noted that Western Wind has submitted a bid to add 9.5 MW of wind, doubling the number of turbines on the site, in response to a UES request for proposals for 50MW of renewable energy.
Meanwhile, UES sister Tucson Electric Power Co. is looking to hook up its first big wind project, a 50 MW wind farm being built at Macho Springs, N.M., near Deming.
Completion of that $100 million project was expected by July, but now the plant is expected to go on line by November, Salkowski said.
C-Path app tracks meds
In other local tech news, the Tucson-based Critical Path Institute has launched a new iPhone application to help users track their medications.
MyMedsList, which C-Path developed with Tucson-based Scientific Technologies Corp., is available for download on iTunes for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch for 99 cents.
Users can create an electronic record of the medications they or their family members take, along with the prescriber and pharmacy information, to share with doctors, pharmacists and other health-care providers. The information is fully controlled by the user and is only recorded on the user's electronic device.
C-Path is a nonprofit partnership of the University of Arizona and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that is involved in several initiatives to speed drug development and improve safety.
Contact Assistant Business Editor David Wichner at dwichner@azstarnet.com or 573-4181.