Del Mar firm is building facility in Washington state

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By Onell R. Soto

Saturday, November 7, 2009 at midnight

A Del Mar company is getting $170 million in federal stimulus funds for a massive wind project it is building in Washington state to power municipal utilities in California.

Cannon Power Group plans to use the money in the next few months to complete the second phase of a 400-megawatt project on the Columbia River Gorge about 120 miles east of Portland, Ore.

The Klickitat County project is designed to supply power to 250,000 customers of municipal utilities in California.

It is bigger than all the wind projects built in the Golden State in the past two years, said Gary Hardke, Cannon's president.

“We've been going at warp speed,” he said.

The 30-year-old company specializes in wind and solar projects it can get built quickly.

That would seem to work in its favor in its home state, where state officials have been pushing utilities to provide more power from wind, solar and other nonfossil-fuel sources.

But regulations, community opposition and the difficulty of assembling big tracts of land have made the state a hard one in which to build projects big enough to be profitable, Hardke said.

So Cannon has focused on projects near the state's power-hungry users, but outside its land-use controls.

The biggest example is Windy Point/Windy Flats, the 90-square-mile wind farm it is now building in Washington state cattle country.

“It's 26 miles from one end to the other,” Hardke said.

The first phase was finished earlier this year and consists of 62 turbines capable of producing 137 megawatts of wind power.

The project was purchased for $385 million by the Turlock Irrigation District, a water and power provider in agricultural areas southeast of San Francisco.

The next phase, now nearing completion, consists of 202 megawatts, the output of which will be sold to the Southern California Public Power Authority, made up of the Imperial Irrigation District and 11 cities, including Los Angeles, Anaheim and Riverside.

That's the part of the project being financed, in part, with the $170 million in federal stimulus funds, plus $512 million in 20 years of prepaid power purchases by the authority.

Cannon is planning an additional 100 megawatts at Windy Point, Hardke said.

It's also now working on another huge project closer to home — just south of San Diego County in Baja California.

“We've got 80 square miles of ridgeline property under lease that's easily the same size as our Washington project,” he said.

Hardke owns the company with a partner, Gerry Monkhouse. Most of its 25 workers operate out of Del Mar.

“We've been able to accomplish with a pretty small group of people the kinds of large projects big companies are unable to do,” Hardke said.

Profit margins in the wind industry are slim — it's heavily dependent on government subsidies — and as a result, big energy companies have limited interest.

“They simply can't get the same rate of return doing a wind project they can in the oil and gas business,” he said.

Cannon gets stimulus funds for wind project