Adding to Chile’s growing wind energy industry, this week Bosques de Chiloé filed paperwork with Chile’s Sistema de Evaluación Ambiental (Environmental Evaluation System) to move forward with a wind farm on Chiloé, an island off the southern coast of Chile. The San Pedro Wind Farm will consist of 22 generators—each 40 to 80 meters tall—and will be capable of producing 36 megawatts of renewable energy for the nation’s central electric grid, Central Interconnected System (SIC).
The decision to build the San Pedro wind farm arose from studies conducted in 2009 and 2010 that provided data on wind speed, direction, temperature, and pressure in the area and helped the firm gauge the potential for wind energy. The project, estimated to cost $100 million, will be financed in part by revenues from carbon bonds, in keeping with a mechanism established under the Kyoto protocol.
The San Pedro wind farm is only the latest in a series of wind energy projects being launched in Chile. Both the Spanish fishing company Transantartic and Ecopower, a Chilean-Swiss firm, recently announced their intentions to build wind farms on Chiloé, and in July, Denmark’s Vestas—the world’s largest wind turbine company—announced it would invest in the Talinay Oriente wind farm in northern Chile, which it expected to become Latin America’s largest wind farm.
