EDENTON — No ribbon-cutting or silver shovels wielded by a few politicians would represent the scale of North Carolina’s second land-based wind energy operation. Instead, Apex Clean Energy invited hundreds of community members, landowners and government officials to join them Wednesday morning on Chowan County farmland to a sign a prone, 242-foot-long silver turbine blade to kick off Timbermill Wind, a project to generate 189 megawatts of electricity with 45 three-bladed turbines.
After being shuttled in buses to the 6,300-acre site from Edenton United Methodist Church, where a breakfast event was held, folks lined up, chatting amiably while waiting to scribble their names on the blade.
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First up, a man in a slate-blue suit and green tie strode up to the blade with a fat blue marking pen in his right hand. Reaching up while contractors watched, he wrote his name in large, looping cursive letters: Roy Cooper. Then, under his name he added “governor” and turned to the crowd, grinning widely. Everyone cheered and the signing commenced. Before long, about 250 different signatures covered the length of the blade.
One name, Sadie B. Eure, stood out just to the right of Cooper’s signature. That’s his mother-in-law’s name, said Donald “Randy” Park, pointing at the blade.
Eure and her late husband, Garland, who had three daughters, operated Eure Seed Farms in Perquimans County, Park said. Sadie Eure owns 300 hundred acres at the Timbermill site and has a lease agreement with the company for the turbines on her land.
Park, a retired farmer who lives in Belhaven, said that most of the farmers who grow crops such as soybeans, corn, cotton or wheat at the site are pleased with the project because they can still farm around the turbines, while also collecting regular payments.
“The majority are,” he said. “There are a few that are unhappy.”
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Some don’t like the way the turbines look, he said.
“I don’t think they’re an eyesore,” Park said. And the payments enable farmers to be profitable, especially when the weather is not cooperating.
Eure, who is 93, started leasing her land to Apex about 8 to 10 years ago, Park said, collecting $1,587 a month. He doesn’t know what the monthly rent will be once the facility is operational, “But it’ll be a whole lot more than that.”
“It helps to have an extra income,” he said. “She’ll be passing this on to her heirs, too.”
Chowan County has also benefited from the project and will continue to for its operational life, which is expected to be about 30 years.
“We are in effect greatly expanding our tax base in one fell swoop,” Gene Jordan, chair of the Chowan County Board of Education, told the audience at the earlier event at the Edenton church.
Jordan, who is a farmer, said that the wind energy helps diversify their resources while supporting the community and the landowners.
“My family will be able to host seven turbines,” he said. “I’m optimistic we will be able to farm for years to come.”
In addition to creating 200 jobs and generating about $25 million spent with North Carolina businesses during its construction, the project is expected to provide up to $33 million in tax revenue over its lifetime.
The project, delayed by numerous glitches including the COVID-19 pandemic, took 11 years to complete, which Apex CEO Ken Young said is about twice the time it typically takes to build a large wind farm.
“It’s coming back to life,” he said, comparing it to a cat’s nine lives.
Sprinkling his description of the project during his speech at the church with words like “fortitude” and “blood, sweat and tears,” Young credited his team and its partners. “That spirit and dedication is why we’re here today with a $500 million facility, fully developed, financed and well under construction,” he told the audience.
Apex will own and operate the facility when it is completed later this year, the company said in a press release. Last year, Timbermill announced a power-purchase agreement with Google, which will contribute to the clean energy needs to offset energy usage at its data centers.
“Google is buying the output from this project,” Young clarified in a later interview.
Most of the project’s difficulties, besides the pandemic, were to be expected, said Richard Bunch, Apex project representative and retired director of the Edenton-Chowan Chamber of Commerce. “It was all permitting issues,” he said, adding that there were lots of discussions with the Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. military that were worked through.
But whatever the bumps in the road, Bunch said Timbermill Wind is an asset for the county.
“It’s tremendous,” he said in an interview after the signing. “The occupancy tax this year is probably going to its highest ever,” he said, citing revenue related to construction. “Fuel sales, rooms, food — it just goes on and on.”
Even after the project is completed, Bunch said there will six or seven full-time staff employed locally by Timbermill.
Dr. Ellis Lawrence, who has served on the Chowan County Board of Commissioners for 14 years, said after the signing that the revenue created by the project is already being reflected in the county’s plan to build a new high school. And the county’s tax base will continue to have an annual infusion of $1.3 million from the project.
“We have watched it go full circle,” he said. “We have dealt with the ups and downs.”
In the beginning, a lot of people were calling in opposition, he said. But now most residents seem to have come around to be in favor of it.
“I was there when it started. I’ve heard it all,” he said. “In the beginning, they were talking about the bird killings, the noise that it would make. This is nothing like that. And the science is behind it. It’s more efficient. This is an alternate source of energy and we need to take advantage of it.”
Cooper applauded local, state and federal efforts working together for the success of the project.
“When you talk about clean energy, a lot of times people think about climate change,” he said at the church event. “But what it’s really about is great-paying jobs and a cleaner environment.”
