Redwood Coast Energy Authority ‘Charting Humboldt’s Clean Energy Future’
This is a press release from the Redwood Coast Energy Authority:
Eureka, CA: August 9, 2019 The Redwood Coast Energy Authority (RCEA) is updating its guiding strategic document and is seeking public input and support in the process. Workshops will take place over the coming months and the community is also encouraged to submit written comments.
RCEA’s Comprehensive Action Plan for Energy (“CAPE”) details strategies that specifically address regional energy planning and coordination, programs for energy customers, low-carbon transportation, and energy generation and utility services.
The energy landscape in Humboldt County has changed over the past seven years, and strategies within RCEA’s original 2012 Comprehensive Action Plan for Energy need to be updated to align with this new landscape. The updated plan, which will include RCEA’s goal of 100% clean and renewable electricity by 2025, will include input from the county’s Climate Action Plan development and community outreach.
RCEA is updating high-level CAPE strategies, consolidating and incorporating several of its other strategic planning documents into the CAPE, and developing quantitative targets including RCEA’s power mix make-up for the next ten years.
Comments on the CAPE are encouraged during the draft development and comment period schedule below. For more information on the calendar and workshops, please contact the Redwood Coast Energy Authority at (707) 269-1700 or [email protected], or by visiting https://redwoodenergy.org/services/planning/. Meeting agendas, schedule updates, and additional meeting details will be posted on RCEA’s website.
All Board of Director meetings are held at the Humboldt Bay Municipal Water District Office, 828 7th St., Eureka. The Community Advisory Committee meeting is at RCEA’s office, 633 3rd St. Eureka.
Join the discussion! For rules visit: https://kymkemp.com/commenting-rules
Comments system how-to: https://wpdiscuz.com/community/postid/10599/
“updated to align with this new landscape” that will be created if the massive wind generation project on Bear River Ridge and Monument Peak that RCEA supports goes forward. 900 acre clearcut, 25 mile wide corridor for transmission lines, 17 mile paved road up Jordan Creek, 40,000 cubic yards of concrete, and on and on ad nauseum. Yessiree, that will certainly be some new landscape
Climate change: 12 years to save the planet? Make that 18 months
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48964736
Now it seems, there’s a growing consensus that the next 18 months will be critical in dealing with the global heating crisis, among other environmental challenges.
I think the idea with press releases is that they’re supposed to form the basis of a story, not be printed verbatim. This seems especially a no-brainer in the age of the internet and social media. It’s not as if the RCEA is bereft of its own platform. How about a critical critique of RCEA in which its services are compared to its stated goals?
I think in an ideal world, we would do exactly that. In the real world where I’m working 70 hour weeks…press releases are all I can manage in a lot of situations. Realistically, looking at my work load, I don’t see an article on RCEA happening in the near future.
If indeed we face a 10-year window to respond to the climate emergency, then the worse thing to do is to dump many years worth of GHGs into our atmosphere over the next 18 months. That’s exactly what TerraGen’s wind scam will do.
The DEIR does not provide sufficient information to quantify the likely emissions, but just imagine barging these gigantic components and all the diesel and oil, transporting them up 17 miles of new roads through fragile Franciscan soils in Jordan Creek after bypassing Hookton and 12 street because the overpasses are too low, way over 10,000 truck trips, some weighing 110 tons and 90 feet long (old growth loaded logging truck weighed 40 tons), 11000 cu yds of concrete manufacture and installing, 3 million cu feet of old growth soils disrupted, 25 miles of too-foot corridors sliced through supposed ly regenerating forests, 15000 gal of water a day, 300 workers driving, shitting, peeing, every day for 18-24 months, giant machinery installing towers, some 350 feet tall with 250 foot long blades on bases of scraped ground 350 feet on a side on top of concrete pads 65 feet in diameter burned 10 feet into the ground (never to be removed from the ground), 25 acres of facilities, over 900 acres of logging and clearing of carbon sequestering vegetation.
They like to amortize these emissions over 25 years despite their immediate impacts, and they like to say that compared to a natural gas fired plant, their emissions will be neutralized within a few months, both depending on PT barium’s attributed characterization applied to Humboldt, that “A sucker is Born Every Minute.”
We do our part intelligently by nourishing biodiversity, avoiding cumulative impacts, growing trees, and deploying and incentivizing widespread rooftop solar Photovoltaics mingrids and electric vehicles, which share our energy wealth, AND by rejecting on-shore wind power because it is costly, dirty, inefficient, destructive, biocidal, and concentrates our energy wealth in the hands of a few global fossil fuel powerhouse hedge funders.
TerraGen’s high priced PR has crafted their tobacco science DEIR, a 900 plus document devoid of objective science padded with irrelevant inclusions to bulk it up and intimidate. They have also influenced a knee-jerk response to climate: wind. Don’t buy it, it’s a giant con. This site is a biological hotspot teeming with precious and unique biodiversity, in the flyway and byway of HRSP, Headwaters Forest and other Old Growth islands, despite their PR to paint the site as already so “managed” that a wind factory won’t matter (ignoring cumulative impacts, marbled murrelet demographics, etc).
RCEA and the County envision an economy based on net electricity exporting, first with on-shore then with off-shore wind, and they dismiss the on-shore impacts and ignore all the benefits of the solar PV option.
It is suicidal to discharge so much GHGs when off-shore wind promises orders of magnitude more power within 5-10 years, and as much as TerraGen’s 135MW within 5 years, without the terrestrial impacts (depending, of course). And the solar option provides the resilience that we desperately need in emergencies and when the grid shuts down, with minimal adverse impacts, requiring little new infrastructure.
RCEA, et al are relying on anachronistic technology: gears and wheels, exploiting kinetic and mechanical to generate electrical energy. Edison would recognize this as his own.
Solar utilizes ionic transfers, like we and other animals, and plants do. Way more sophisticated and promising as the generative and storage technologies advance. Consequently, we will pay up to 60-70 cents per KWh for TerraGen’s wind power, (RCEA won’t reveal these costs) whereas solar from the grid is going for a third of that, and rooftop solar can cost as little as 10 cents over time. We already buy our hydro from Shasta, and solar from Fresno (instead of producing that locally), we can buy wind from the grid too. There is no reason to build this monstrosity.
Read LoCo, May 16 for an eloquent description of the site from the Wiyot.
In short, the TerraGen wind factory is not a conflict over wind power, it is about the inappropriateness of this worst of all possible sites. See Sierra Club’s advisory:
https://www.sierraclub.org/policy/energy/wind-siting-advisory
And the NCJ Op Ed by Greg King
As an energy seller, RCEA has a direct financial conflict of interest because they’d prefer to sell you electricity rather than supporting you as a homeowner generating your own power. Therefore, RCEA should not be directly authoring this energy plan. Instead, they should award a contract to an independent research entity with qualifications and no conflict of interest.
In such a rural county, we should be independent of the statewide grid, and not rely on it for our energy needs. That means small scale distributed systems, so called micro grids and storage. Rooftop solar and micro-wind energy generators at the home and business, such as Semtive’s 2400 watt vertical axis design that can be installed alongside a solar system and battery storage:
https://semtive.com/