Community Wind Project

Community Wind Project. I’m Greg Martin as Line On Agriculture presents the Harvest Clean Energy Report.

What happens when people come together to help other people? Good things. Craig Dublanko, CEO of Coastal Community Action Program serving Grays Harbor and Pacific counties in rural SW Washington is part of a group utilizing renewable energy to help others in the community.

DUBLANKO: This is a renewable energy project that really isn’t a renewable energy project for us. It’s a social service project for us that just happens to use renewable energy. It’s a 6-megawatt project but the real goal of this wasn’t to generate clean energy although we’re glad it does and we’re proud of that. What we are most proud of though and the real goal of this project was to generate funds to help low income families in the two county area that our community action agency serves.

This is the first project like this that has been developed and owned by a community action agency with the proceeds going back into the local programs including energy assistance, weatherization and even home delivered meals.

DUBLANKO: The other thing that is great about this project is it allows us to custom fit some local resources to meet needs in our community whereas sometimes the federal government or state government will come up with a program and it may or may not fit quite right in our local community. We can take these funds and meet the needs as they exist in our community.

Dublanko describes how the project is operated.

DUBLANKO: We generate the power with the four windmills and the power has been metered and it goes onto the grid on a distribution level. But that meter is then what we use to bill the PUD for the power that we generate. The PUD thens ends a check to the company, Coastal Energy Project company and they then funnel money to a community action agency and then we create a pool a resources and then we offer programs to the community.

He says they have had quite a number of other groups looking at their model and all in all it really is quite a successful program.

DUBLANKO: Not only the fact that it’s renewable energy connected with the social concern that we believe in but as a model for other communities I think historically it’s been connected with farms and with schools in the United States and I think this is the next step is connecting it with; how do we take the local resource of wind and make it a part of our local community and helping those that are in need.

Visit their website at coastalcap.org.

For additional information on clean energy, visit harvestcleanenergy.org. That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.???www.harvestcleanenergy.org