GE Energy Financial Services has announced it is making a $65 million investment in the construction of an Oklahoma wind farm capable of generating 152 megawatts of green energy.

The CPV Keenan II wind farm in Woodward, Oklahoma will be constructed by the CPV Renewable Energy Company, which is an affiliate of Competitve Power Ventures Inc and will cost an estimated $319 million.

GE Energy's $65 million investment, which has an option to increase to $100 based on the commencement of future commercial operations, will be joined by $212 million in a secured credit facility from The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi and Union Bank.

Once completed, the wind farm is expected to generate enough solar energy to power 45,000 homes and cut 413,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually

"CPV REC is focused on building a bridge to a better energy future through the development of leading-edge projects like Keenan II and working with forward-looking companies like GE," said Sean Finnerty, senior vice president of CPV REC.

GE Energy Financial Services currently invests in 47 wind farms across the country that can generate up to 6 gigawatts of green energy. They also hold loans on 36 other wind farms that generate up to 1.3 gigawatts.

Posted on 28 December 2009
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The proposal would trade labs seen as benefiting white students for resources to help struggling minority students.

Berkeley High School is considering a controversial proposal to eliminate science labs and the five science teachers who teach them to free up more resources to help struggling students.

The proposal to put the science-lab cuts on the table was approved recently by Berkeley High’s School Governance Council, a body of teachers, parents, and students who oversee a plan to change the structure of the high school to address Berkeley’s dismal racial achievement gap, where white students are doing far better than the state average while black and Latino students are doing worse.

Paul Gibson, an alternate parent representative on the School Governance Council, said that information presented at council meetings suggests that the science labs were largely classes for white students. He said the decision to consider cutting the labs in order to redirect resources to underperforming students was virtually unanimous.

Science teachers were understandably horrified by the proposal. “The majority of the science department believes that this major policy decision affecting the entire student body, the faculty, and the community has been made without any notification, without a hearing,” said Mardi Sicular-Mertens, the senior member of Berkeley High School’s science department, at last week’s school board meeting.

Sincular-Mertens, who has taught science at BHS for 24 years, said the possible cuts will impact her black students as well. She says there are twelve African-American males in her AP classes and that her four environmental science classes are 17.5 percent African American and 13.9 percent Latino. “As teachers, we are greatly saddened at the thought of losing the opportunity to help all of our students master the skills they need to find satisfaction and success in their education,” she told the board.

The full plan to close the racial achievement gap by altering the structure of the high school is known as the High School Redesign. It will come before the Berkeley School Board as an information item at its January 13 meeting. Generally, such agenda items are passed without debate, but if the school board chooses to play a more direct role in the High School Redesign, it could bring the item back as an action item at a future meeting.

School district spokesman Mark Coplan directed inquiries about the redesign to Richard Ng, the principal’s assistant at Berkeley High and member of the School Governance Council. Ng did not return repeated calls for comment.