Empire District, the regulated US utility owned by Canada’s Algonquin Power & Utilities, plans to build two wind farms in western Missouri and a third in eastern Oklahoma at “quite phenomenal” prices, as part of its 600MW wind expansion programme.

Last month Empire received support from regulators in the Midwestern state of Missouri to take the next steps in its “greening the fleet” initiative, after down-scaling its wind expansion plan from an initial 800MW and pledging to keep open a coal-fired plant it had previously sought to close.