‘Studies completed in proposed wind turbine project’: TransAlta

Here is an update to a story we brought you last week involving a proposed TransAlta wind turbine project. The Riplinger Wind Power Project, which would cover about 14-thousand acres of land near Cardston County, isn’t sitting well with the residents in the area. They say it will have a great impact on the wildlife and their community. An official with TransAlta says they are listening to the concerns of residents, but studies were done in the area beforehand to see if the area would be negatively impacted.  

“We heard a lot of those concerns when we reached out to the community. Part of what we do when we develop a project is we go out there and we do all our studies. We send out the biologists  they collect information about the wetlands, the birds in the area, the wildlife in the area, and then we build that into how we design the project so that we can mitigate the impact. So that’s what we’ve did and a lot of that feedback that we got from those studies went into how we laid out our turbines so that there was minimal impact to the wildlife in the area,” said Keith Yasinski, Director of Wind Development, TransAlta.

“TransAlta is on track for submitting an application for Permit & License to the Alberta Utilities Commission (AUC) in Q2 or Q3 2023. Construction will not occur until regulatory approval has been granted and would take between 12 and 18 months. It is anticipated that the earliest AUC approval will be granted in 2024 and for the facility to come online in Q4 2025,” said James Mottershead, Lead, Corporate Communications, TransAlta.