End Of Year Deadline For D300 Consortium To Buy Windmills

After almost 11 months of study the District 300 Board of Education learned  Monday the deadline to start building a $50 million windfarm in Stark County is the end of the year.

The original proposal sounded like something for nothing but it's morphed in the interim and Board President summed up the current version saying now, "There is a touch of a little bit of risk."

Originally the idea was to lever a law requring ComEd  to buy any electricity generated from renewable sources into enough money to pay for the District's expensive electric bill.  Now the project would  pay for just part of the bill and the key to making even that work is a complicated house of financial and legal cards that involve buying a bunch of giant windmills by Dec. 31.

The project would be one third built with revenue bonds paid off with the money from the electricity it generates.  The other two thirds of funding would depend on selling tax credits to investors and a one-time grant from federal stimulus funds, according to District CFO Cheryl Crates. The grant is where the short deadline comes in.  "It requires us to spend the money by the end of the year," she said.

That doesn't leave a lot of time for consultant Heston Wind to complete two double-spaced pages of tasks to see if the project will really work.  A yet-unsigned letter of agreement calls for Heston to be the project's developer and commits the District to paying the company $2 million if the project is "financially viable" but the District doesn't decide to go ahead. The agreement says Heston itself would provide the numbers to demonstrate that viability.

ComEd spokesman Krissy Posey told FEN the time it would take to figure out how much to charge the project to connect to her company's grid is variable.  She said ComEd would have to do its own study "to see what needs to be done."

The plan's organization is complicated, too.  The windfarm would actually belong to a consortium made up of District 300 and two much smaller school districts in Cook and DeKalb counties.  District 300 would have an 80 percent share of the costs and profits but only one spot on the consortium's three-man board.

The matter may come to vote at the next  Board meeting Aug. 9.

In the pic:  The circle shows where Heston Wind installed a gauge earlier this year to measure the breeze in tiny Stark County.