Perhaps depending on what Wiarton Willy had to say about winter this morning, Canadian Hydro Developers Phase 1 wind turbines in Melancthon’s could be sending 34.5 kilovolts of electricity down the 10th Line of Amaranth within the next 28 days, but not officially until the end of March.

Jeff Carnegie, in charge of the local project for Calgarybased Canadian Hydro, said Wednesday the aim is to have all the turbines on line by the end of this month, one month ahead of schedule.

However, he added, “That’s a bit weather-dependent.” He wouldn’t guess precisely when the first turbine would go on line, but said they’ll be fired up one at a time. The interval between turbines coming on would be “dependent on how many guys” are working.

When the first phase goes on line, 34.5 kilovolts would be converted to 230 kv at the substation near the intersection of Amaranth’s 15 Sideroad and the 10th Line. There, it would be fed into the Hydro One grid.

Canadian Hydro is reluctant to name a specific date for the official startup. “We can’t plan a celebration,” said Canadian Hydro’s CEO, John Keating, in a telephone interview from his Calgary office Wednesday. But he said all the “pre-commissioning” has been completed — “a long process” involving the checking of all connections, and the use of standby generators. “The final commissioning (can be) pretty darn quick.”

Mr. Keating expects the first machine to start up about Feb. 15, and the rest within two weeks after that. But the phase won’t be complete until it has an engineer’s certificate, and there won’t be any corks popping before that. “We’ll plan a celebration later,” he said.

The virtual forest of Phase 1 turbines is just the beginning of a development that will have Dufferin County — or at least three of its municipalities — on an international energy map.

Melancthon Phase 2 actually will have turbines in both Melancthon and Amaranth, and both the transmission lines from the projects plus the substation that connects with the Hydro One grid are in Amaranth.

In addition to the Melancthon/Amaranth development, there’s a smaller wind farm in the planning stages for East Luther Grand Valley, a few miles north of Grand Valley.

The transmission line for Melancthon Phase 1 is on Amaranth’s 10th Line, with steel standards placed about 25 metres apart. Canadian Hydro is sharing the towers with Hydro One. Environmental officer Ian Cowan said the Phase 2 34.5-kv line would be along a different concession road.

Although the local project has attracted widespread news media interest, tapping wind power is nothing new. Historians have found evidence of wind-use dating as far back as 1000 B.C. Evidence of early North American use of the wind can be seen almost everywhere, in the rusting skeletons of windmills on long-abandoned, decaying farmsteads.

The newness of “wind farms” is the ultimate use to which the wind is being put. The ancients didn’t run electrical generators from turbines.

Of the earlier uses that have been documented, a website says the following: “The first windmills were developed to automate the tasks of grain-grinding and waterpumping and the earliestknown design is the vertical axis system developed in Persia about 500-900 A.D. The first use was apparently water pumping, but the exact

method of water transport is not known because no drawings or designs — only verbal accounts — are available.

The first known documented design is also of a Persian windmill, this one with vertical sails made of bundles of reeds or wood which were attached to the central vertical shaft by horizontal struts.

The arguably most famous use of wind power was by Christopher Columbus in the 15th century to cross the Atlantic. But sailboats were in vogue a long time before that.

According to other information, Norway in this century leads the way in tapping the wind. But the Melancthon development is right up there by comparison with other turbine generation projects worldwide.