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Wray School District Wind Turbine

Watch the video, A Wray of Hope.

The Wray School District Wind Turbine was dedicated at a ceremony on Friday, February 15th, with honored guests including Colorado Governor Ritter, and hundreds of students, parents, teachers and community members from the Wray area.

NativeEnergy's commitment to fund this turbine enabled it to be built in 2008. The Wray School District is located in wind-swept eastern Colorado near the border of Nebraska and Kansas. The average wind speed at the site is estimated to be 18 mph, and the turbine is expected to produce about 2,700,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) of clean energy per year, enough to power about 270 homes.

"This project will be a self-sustaining model of energy production, income generation and innovative educational opportunity for the Wray School District RD-2 and rural Colorado."

- Ron Howard, Wray School District Superintendent

Faced with district spending of approximately $80,000 a year on electricity and declining student enrollment the Wray School District staff was challenged by its superintendent to "find new ways to create additional revenue streams for the district, emphasizing projects which would enhance the district's educational experience." Jay Clapper, the Vo-Ag instructor thought a wind turbine would be a perfect way to decrease spending and provide educational opportunities for students. After three years of effort, tapping funding sources from a $350,000 Energy Impact Grant down to individual pledges from local residents, the School District still found itself approximately 14% short on funding, and the project was at a standstill.

In the words of Ron Howard, "to attempt to cover this shortfall, the Wray School District began looking at the possibility of pre-selling the renewable energy credits (RECs) to a renewable energy company. Anticipating that most renewable energy companies would only purchase the RECs as they were generated over time, we were extremely pleased to find that NativeEnergy's practice is to purchase RECs on an up-front basis, and that they were very interested in purchasing the RECs from our turbine ... [R]ealizing that there was an end in sight we agreed to sell all renewable energy credits for the life of the wind turbine to NativeEnergy, with payment to be made upon commercial operations of the turbine. The funding made available by selling the RECs to NativeEnergy makes up substantially the amount we were in deficit." - Ron Howard, Wray School District Superintendent.

"Once I had NativeEnergy's contract in hand, that did it. I had what we needed and I called the manufacturer and placed the order."

- Ron Howard, Wray School District Superintendent