MidAmerican Energy moves forward with replacing tornado-damaged turbines

MidAmerican Energy officials gave the Adair County Board of Supervisors updates on two projects that they have in motion within this county, during last Wednesday’s board of supervisors meeting.

Work will begin soon on replacing five wind turbines in the Orient wind farm and one in the Arbor Hill wind farm, completed in 2019, that were damaged in the 2024 EF-4 tornado. One of the replacement turbines for the Orient farm will come from the site of the Orient Energy Center — a planned generation facility that will include two natural gas-fired combustion turbines southwest of Orient just north of the Adair-Union county line.

The Iowa Utilities Commission gave MidAmerican the necessary authority to do the work needed for replacing the turbines.

“The landowners have been informed that the final locations of the turbines have been established, and they’re all very close to where they were previously,” MidAmerican’s John Huff said. “Construction should begin in October for those replacement turbines. The work should be completed by the end of the year.”

In November and December, there will be crane work required for replacing the turbines. Except for two instances where a crane will be able to be “walked” or driven to the next location, cranes will have to be disassembled and hauled to the next job because of how far the sites are from each other.

“Those turbine locations are also all able to comply with county setbacks,” Huff added. “We’re not adding any new turbines to the county’s total, for clarification’s sake.”

The IUC issued an acceptance of MidAmerican’s application for the needed authority to continue on with the process, which is called a certificate of public convenience, need and necessity. Landowners within a mile of that proposed project will receive a letter from MidAmerican within the next month that will contain a copy of that order from the IUC.

“The next thing for us is that we have to locally source some trees and get them planted at the proposed site and get that wind turbine currently located at the site to its new home,” Huff said.