Garrick Valverde and Drew Christensen of Apex Clean Energy gave an update to Lyon County Commissioners on Tuesday.

MARSHALL — Plans for the Box Car Wind energy project in Lyon and Murray Counties are still moving forward, representatives of Apex Clean Energy told Lyon County Commissioners this week.

Company representatives said the wind 1,000 megawatt project is in the design phase this year, and will start the state permitting process next spring. The plan is for construction on the first part of the project to start in 2027.

Drew Christensen, senior director of public engagement for Apex, said the project would still be going forward, even as federal tax credits for wind and solar energy are being limited.

“We’ve expected for a long time that those would be phased out,” Christensen said. “We weren’t expecting to receive tax credits on this project . . . We’re moving forward with all of our projects under that assumption, that those tax credits will be phased out.”

Apex representatives gave updates and answered questions from commissioners during Tuesday’s county board meeting.

“We wanted to come in and share a little bit of an update on where we’re at,” Christensen said. “We’ve been hard at work over the last few years leasing lands. We now have over 140,000 acres under lease between Lyon and Murray Counties.”

Christensen said more than 1,200 individual leaseholders in southern Lyon and northern Murray Counties had signed with the Box Car Wind project.

“We’re heavily involved in designing Box Car’s first and second phase right now,” said Garrick Valverde, lead developer of the Box Car Wind project. “We will be splitting this project up into two phases as a way to just sort of streamline the permitting process. That first phase will start the permitting process sometime around the spring of 2026.”

Christensen and Valverde said Apex plans to split the overall wind project equally between the two phases. Each phase would produce roughly 500 megawatts of electricity, but the number of turbines in the two phases would depend on the size of the turbines.

The maximum number of overall turbines that would be allowed for the project was 255, Valverde said.

Compared to the number of leases in the project, Christensen said, “Not everybody’s going to get a turbine.” However, he said Apex’s leasing model was not based on whether or not a turbine was built on the land.

“Our payment model is based more on an acreage model, where we’re paying people based on the number of acres that they have participating within the project,” he said. “Those who do get turbines, obviously there’s an additional payment because you’re having an actual facility on your land, and that’s based not on the production of the turbine, but the capacity of the turbine.”

Valverde said he expected a Phase 1 permit would be received toward the end of next year.

“State permitting for Phase 2 would be at the conclusion of Phase 1 permitting. So, roughly at the start of 2027,” he said.

The Box Car Wind project would connect to the new transmission lines Xcel Energy plans to build in southwest Minnesota, Apex representatives said.