MONASTERY – Under threatening late-summer skies, two buses rolled away from the Tracadie Fire Hall on Aug. 22 and headed down the back roads toward Goose Harbour Lake.
Inside, 50 or 60 people from around the area talked, peered through the windows and listened as Port Hawkesbury Paper Wind construction and operations superintendent Chad Weir pointed out landmarks along the way.
For a time, they had the air of kids heading off to summer camp – chatter, questions, anticipation – except the attraction at the end of this trip was a nearly $450-million wind farm. And why not? For many, it was their first chance to see one of the new generation of massive wind developments now taking shape in northeastern Nova Scotia at close range rather than from a highway or distant ridgeline. And this one was almost ready to run.
“We are actually closing out, so we’re at the tail end [and] things are starting to leave the site now,” Weir told the passengers as project workers prepared to energize its switchyard, transmission line, substation and first turbine circuit and begin commissioning. “Hopefully, in a couple weeks we’re going to start seeing some of these things turn.”
Specifically, those “things” were Nordex N163 turbines, rising 118 metres to the hub and, with a blade pointing straight up, reaching 199.5 metres from ground to tip – the business end of a massive, 30,000-acre, 168-megawatt development, seven years in the making, that will ultimately comprise 24 of these sky-scraping machines in northeastern Guysborough County near Mulgrave and is scheduled to become operational by the end of the year.
To be sure, it is not the biggest of the major wind projects now crowding planning maps in Guysborough and Antigonish counties.
The larger ones include EverWind’s Setapuktuk project, approved last November, which calls for 54 turbines generating 432 MW. Ocean Lake, approved by the province in July, calls for up to 158 turbines and 1.26 gigawatts. Harbour Hills would add another 107 turbines and 856 MW across Guysborough and St. Mary’s, although Environment Minister Tim Halman sent that project back this month for at least another year of field surveys before making a decision. Upper Afton, stretching across Antigonish and Guysborough counties, was approved in April for up to 28 turbines and 176 MW.
But the Goose Harbour Lake development, conceived in 2019 and granted provincial environmental approval in March 2023, has the distinction of being the first of this new wave to reach the final stages of construction.
And while the bigger projects are chiefly intended to supply electricity for planned green hydrogen and ammonia production at Point Tupper, this one is being developed to green up Nova Scotia’s power supply while meeting roughly 60 per cent of Port Hawkesbury Paper’s electricity requirements.
“All of the energy that that project will be developing is going to be hitting the grid and subsequently supporting the paper mill, which supports generations of employees in the area,” Port Hawkesbury Paper business development official Jay Woodworth told visitors.
What’s more, added Crystal Nicholas, president and general manager of the Wskijinu’k Mtmo’taqnuow Agency (WMA), representing 13 Mi’kmaq First Nations that collectively hold a 10 per cent equity stake in the project, “Beyond the numbers and the infrastructure we see around us today, this project is also about what we can achieve through collaboration.”
From plan to power
On the bus, however, the numbers quickly became tangible. As pavement gave way to dirt, Weir pointed out the old road from Mulgrave that PHP Wind rebuilt to move turbine components from the Port of Mulgrave to the project site. “We spent over a million dollars rebuilding that,” he said.
The result was a roughly 12.5-kilometre haul route that kept the oversized loads largely away from ordinary traffic. Weir said only about three kilometres of the trip used roads where the transports could interfere with daily travel.
There was another advantage almost immediately overhead. The project substation sits about 1.3 kilometres from a 230-kilovolt transmission corridor – one of the major power routes across the province. “We are very close to one of the province’s major transmission corridors,” Weir said as the lines came into view, “which is phenomenal for a development of this kind.”
From there, the scale multiplied. The electrical system includes 880 poles and roughly 256 kilometres of conductor feeding four collector circuits. Each turbine produces electricity at 34,500 volts before it is stepped up at the substation to 230 kilovolts for transmission.
Even pouring the foundations became an exercise in logistics. Each had to be completed in one continuous pour, with the concrete arriving at less than 18 C to maintain its structural integrity. During hot weather, crews used ice to keep the mix cool enough. “I think they bought all the ice in the region,” Weir said.
Moving the turbine components presented another problem. A truck carrying a single blade stretched more than 300 feet from end to end, forcing roads, turns and even the project’s power-pole arrangements to accommodate its sweep. Putting those components into the air required machinery on much the same scale – the main LG 1750 heavy-lift crane was so large that two other cranes were needed simply to assemble it.
The engineering also had to negotiate the landscape beneath them. The development required 59 water crossings of various kinds using culverts and bridges to accommodate 87 wetlands. “We’ve done our best to avoid these,” Weir said, adding that the project had paid more than $400,000 in wetland compensation. “So, not only is this a big wind farm, it’s a big civil project as well.”
Beyond this, the very thing the project was designed to capture also threatened, at times, to bring its construction to a standstill. A turbine’s blades behave like giant sails, and Weir said components could not be lifted when winds exceeded specified limits. “It’s a kind of brutal irony,” Weir laughed.
For all the grand scale and spirit of new beginnings, there was also a sense of an ending here.
More than 1,000 people had passed through site orientations and contributed to the project over the course of construction. About 300 were working there in the spring. By Aug. 22, that number had fallen to roughly 200 as the job wound down. Soon, most of those construction workers would be gone.
Day-to-day operations will now be centred in the project’s new operations and maintenance building, visible from the bus as it passed. Weir’s office will be there. Meanwhile, the turbines themselves will be computerized, capable of being controlled from the site office, with individual machines shut down remotely if necessary.
“There will be seven people working out of here, sometimes eight people full time every day,” Weir said. “There’s someone watching these machines every minute of every day.”
Of course, the transition from construction to operation will answer some questions and raise others. Weir said the project had studied sound impacts and selected three turbines for an additional Nordex feature – blade serrations intended to reduce noise for those living close to the machines.
One of those who does is Andre St. Pierre of Lincolnville, who can see turbines from his home. Originally from the Gaspé region, he came to the area in 1982, served 26 years in the navy, and settled in the community where his wife was born and raised.
Standing on the site that day and looking up at one of the towers, he wondered about noise. But he said, “they don’t run yet…so…”
What did appeal to him was the idea of producing green electricity. For that reason, with the tower standing and the blade still, he kept his verdict simple.
“I like it,” he said. “It’s a nice project.”
