Richard Bunch steers through roads that have turned muddy with the morning rain near his home in Chowan County.
He points to wind turbines that have just come into view, towering above a wide expanse of farm and timberland.
They’re the first three turbines built for Timbermill Wind, a 45-turbine project stretching about 6,500 acres near Edenton.
To Bunch, the structures have become like family.
“I’ve named number one Emma Mae. Number two is Millie. Number three over here is Macy,” Bunch said. “That’s my three granddaughters.”
Bunch is a lifetime Chowan resident who works as a local representative for the new wind energy project.
Charlottesville-based Apex Clean Energy is nearing the end of construction and plans to get the turbines spinning by November.
North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper and other local dignitaries gathered at the site this summer to celebrate with a “blade signing” event.
“We’re excited that this project can help us in our effort to fight climate change while bringing economic development to Eastern North Carolina,” Cooper said.
Bunch previously worked in economic development and said it’s a rare opportunity for the state’s smallest county.
“It's hard to attract major industry into a small, rural county. So when you're able to bring a company that comes here that's got the resources to build a $400 million-plus project, and pay $1.2 million a year in tax base, that's hard to say no to.”
The Timbermill project has been in the works for about a decade.
Brian O’Shea, Apex’s director of public engagement, said there’s been a rising demand for clean energy within the PJM energy grid, which stretches from North Carolina to New Jersey and is home to the world’s largest concentration of power-hungry data centers.
At the same time, the PJM grid has historically been a tough market in which to develop wind power, because of limited transmission capacity and permitting challenges, O’Shea said.
Timbermill is the second wind farm in North Carolina but the first to gain approval through a permitting system set in motion by state lawmakers in 2013.
“This project took a long time, but we did get there at the end of the day,” O’Shea said.
Blades for the turbines were shipped into Morehead City and trucked to Edenton, while tower sections were carried into the local Riverbulk Terminal by barge, he said.
Electricity produced by the 189-megawatt wind farm will all go to Google to power data centers.
The state’s only other wind farm — a 104-turbine project near Elizabeth City run by Avangrid Renewables — exclusively powers Amazon data centers.
County residents had mixed feelings when the new wind farm was first proposed, citing concerns with traffic impacts of construction and the aesthetics of the turbines.
But many say they hope it can inject money into the area, where a fifth of residents live below the federal poverty line. Timbermill will soon be the county’s largest taxpayer.
Charlie Creighton, owner of Colony Tire Corporation, has been a vocal supporter of the project – especially while Apex keeps buying tires.
Creighton said he understands people might not want a turbine right in their backyard. But “when I look at them from a distance, I think it makes us look like we’re progressive in moving forward.”
Some land used by Apex is owned by lumber company Weyerhaeuser. The rest is leased from local landowners, including William Monds.
Monds is a third-generation farmer of peanuts, soybeans, corn and cotton in Chowan County.
He was on the local county planning board when the wind project was first brought up, and said he researched the concept before deciding it could be a good economic opportunity.
He and many other farmers entered into agreements with Apex for the next three decades, which is the turbines’ rough life expectancy.
“Agriculture is not very promising,” Monds said. “You put everything you got out and you hope for return. This gives me something else to fall back on on the bad years, maybe put something away on the good years for when I retire.”
The more wind that blows on his four turbines, the more money he’ll earn in royalties, said Bunch, Apex’s local rep.
“He’s going to get the corn and soybeans and peanuts below it,” Bunch said. “And he's going to be harvesting the wind above.”
