This last week, I watched a great episode of Oregon Field Guide. It had a section detailing how wind farms in Oregon are doing damage to bat species. You can see the episode here (it's the middle story in this half hour show).
Now, it's true... you drive up the Columbia River Gorge these days, and it's quite a sight to behold. Turbine after turbine after turbine.
And I thought that someone on that Field Guide had a very interesting comment... he said, some day, all of these turbines are going to be seen like Bonneville Dam. They just block a total flyway, particularly when it comes to species, like bats, that we know little about.
Two nights ago I started to think about the increasingly reckless energy speculation going on in Oregon. I love the Gorge, but my heart always will belong to SE Oregon's wonderful Steens Mountain.
Surely, I thought, they're not going to develop wind energy there??
How wrong I was.
I won't go into a great detail about Steens mountain except to say it a place of magnificent, unique beauty. You may remember back in the 1990s it was the place that Clinton had to wrangle over to try and gain SOME minimal wilderness protections (for a very small fraction of the land).
An Oregonian article published yesterday reveals that not not only is an industrial scale energy project planned for Steens mountain, but it's pretty close to moving forward.
Ruggedly beautiful Steens Mountain stands in an area of southeast Oregon so isolated that it's barely changed since cattle king Pete French arrived in the late 1800s.
Coyotes yelp at sundown. Drivers are so few that they wave to each other as they pass. Campers, hunters and bird-watchers trek from across the state to breathe in the majestic emptiness and to gaze from the Steens summit across a seemingly endless tapestry of high desert and open range.
But soon, the scenery will change.
Harney County has cleared Columbia Energy Partners of Vancouver to build a wind farm on the mountain's north slope. By year's end, 415-foot turbines could start rising from the juniper and sagebrush, among thousands of towers that developers are stampeding to build across eastern Oregon.
What's particularly galling about this project, as this article notes, is that this wind farm is broken up into 3 separate mini-projects, each for 104 megawatts. That's a weird number right? Yes it is. Because, guess what, state regulation and oversight kicks in for any project 105 megawatts or greater.
(Indeed, Harney County approved this project BEFORE any environmental review or studies.)
And why are our tax dollars being used for this project?? 40-50% of the cose of these projects will come from tax credits.
But it gets worse. Not only will the Steens be desecrated, but this wind project will require a high speed transmission line through the Steens and through Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.
"We have a gold-rush mentality in this state about wind," he said. "We could look back in 10 or 15 years and wish we had done it differently and more thoughtfully."
And this is not to just be NIMBYish and anti-development. Wind farms certainly have their role. But siting them is critical. Just as you aren't going to put wind turbines on the lip of the Grand Canyon, it simply doesn't make sense to put them on such a geological, environmental, and visual gem as Steens mountain.
Columbia Energy Partners are the ones proposing this project. And their blog has a cocky, "our way or the highway attitude":
[W]e have developed a package of seven major items we’re prepared to offer as concessions and mitigation IF they will agree not to sue after the Environmental Impact Study (EIS) for our transmission line and future project stage permits are issued. They can and certainly will be free to participate fully in those very thorough and public processes, but they must agree to live with the results (as will we) rather than sue to delay the inevitable in hopes of stopping the project on an economic basis.
Don't you love it how they've already developed mitigation items but they won't propose them or modify their proposal now. No. They will only do this if the other backs down from the "inevitable".
(By the way, no use in trying to post a critical comment to their blog. Their comments are moderated, and so far none of my critical comments have appeared.)
There's one organization that is mightily trying to stop this wind farm on Steens mountain. The Oregon Natural Desert Association will almost certainly sue (likely attacking the only weakpoint, the transmission line citing, in Oregon's poorly regulated alternative energy land rush).
So, go here, add your comment, and give a couple of bucks??