The P.E.I. Energy Corporation is preparing to replace the turbines at the province’s oldest wind farm, making way for a new generation of larger, more powerful machines.

The North Cape wind farm and the Aeolus turbine were groundbreaking when they were installed on P.E.I.’s northwestern tip in the early 2000s — a first for Atlantic Canada.

Blair Arsenault, operations engineer with the P.E.I. Energy Corporation, calls North Cape “the backbone of wind energy on P.E.I. the last 25 years.”

But he said the turbines are now showing their age, with more frequent breakdowns and rising downtime cutting into energy production.

“I’m coming up on my 10th anniversary in this position and it’s been very noticeable the significant increase in turbine downtime and repair costs over the past few years compared to when I first started,” Arsenault said.

“We’re at the end of the life of this turbine and we need to start looking into the future and saying what are we gonna do now and what is the future like?”

The provincial government has issued a tender for an environmental impact assessment, which will examine plans to retire the aging turbines and replace them with a new wind project on the same sites.

North Cape’s 16 turbines were installed in two phases, in 2001 and 2003. Aeolus, a single larger turbine, went up in 2003 and was fully retrofitted in 2007.

Arsenault said the equipment has operated nearly continuously for more than two decades, and different types of failures are becoming more common.

“You can see it in the energy production,” he said, noting there was around 33 gigawatt hours of annual production when he first started, compared to around 28 now.

He lined the drop, in part, to increased turbine downtime.

New turbines would be larger, more efficient

While the exact replacement turbines have not yet been selected, Arsenault said any new units will be significantly larger and more capable.

The current North Cape turbines are 0.66 megawatts each, with a rotor diameter of 47 metres. By comparison, the province’s newest wind farm, the second phase of the Eastern Kings Wind Farm in northeastern P.E.I., uses significantly larger turbines rated at 4.2 megawatts, with rotor diameters of 138 metres.

“The technology is a lot better,” Arsenault said.

He added that newer turbines are designed to withstand harsher weather, including colder temperatures and storms. While the North Cape turbines are designed to operate down to about –20 C, newer models can keep running down to –30 C, and then gradually reduce their performance all the way to about –40 C.

“They also have elevators in them, which increases the efficiency of maintenance and reduces downtime and is easier for the technicians,” Arsenault said.

The new turbines haven’t been chosen yet. Arsenault said the corporation will at some point put out a request for quotes to manufacturers, then compare bids on price, what’s included with each turbine and performance.

Arsenault said he hopes to see the repowered wind farm in place by 2029 or 2030.

He added the project will reuse as much existing infrastructure as possible, things like access roads, turbine pads and transmission lines, although the turbines themselves cannot be reused because modern machines are much larger.

Can more wind solve capacity challenges?

Angus Orford, vice-president of corporate planning and energy supply at Maritime Electric, said the utility is required under the province’s Electric Power Act to purchase energy generated by the P.E.I. Energy Corporation.

Right now, all of the wind power Maritime Electric buys from the corporation can be consumed by Islanders.

“So you know, if there’s incremental gains, it will be certainly made use of for our customers,” Orford said.

But he noted that while expanding wind energy helps meet growing electricity demand, it does not address a key challenge: capacity.

He added that wind and solar power are intermittent, meaning they only generate electricity when conditions allow. That means the system still relies on “dispatchable generation,” which is sources that can be ramped up or down on demand, such as opening the penstock of a hydroelectic dam or burning oil or natural gas.

“That’s really a reflection of the scramble to get more security and supply and dispatchable generation right across essentially North America because of capacity shortages,” said Orford.