Planning Commission Denies Wind Turbine Project; Appeal Still Possible
Wind Turbines [Photo by Jeff Kubina from Columbia, Maryland via WikiCommons]
The first vote ended in a tie–three for and three against (one member was absent.) But the second vote, found Commissioner Noah Levy, who first tried requesting an extension of two weeks to review documents, and when that was denied, switching sides.
According to one of the attending audience members, “What changed Noah Levy’s vote & hence the final outcome, was all the folks turning out. He said he has been on the Commission for 5 yrs. & never seen anything like it.”
Though the Planning Commission has denied the proposal, Terra-Gen and its supporters have the option of appealing the decision to the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors. And, that seems likely to happen.
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Just keep saying NO NO NO
Put them offshore if you want clean. Disrupting peoples lives is not “clean”. Killing large numbers of endangered wildlife is not “clean”, and bullshitting the public nine ways to hell is not “clean”. I especially dislike the adds claiming this will offer cheaper electricity. That has never happened, never will.
Put them offshore if you must have them, before PG&E sells the plots they have leased for windmills to the offshore drillers.
Get smart and build a Nuke or coal plant that will work at night in the calm & windy days, and doesn’t rely on a pipeline.
And the county will be blackout free for 50 years
One of the things I haven’t seen mentioned is the fact that there are producing natural gas wells in Humboldt County.
The King Salmon power plant is a natural gas burning plant, yet it is my understanding that the gas to run it comes across 36.
Hook it up to where those wells feed that plant, and we have completely local power generation.
Seems to make sense to me.
it is sad that the only time that we can get together is to stop the foward progress of man. you people are selfish and entitled
Dave Brower put it really well:
“Environmentalists always keep fighting, because when we win something, we only win for a short time, but when we lose, we lose forever.”
Deep gratitude to Noah for hearing the will of the community, recognizing the inherent rights of indigenous people, and realizing that this project is a disaster for the environment and wildlife.
💖well put. Kate
What the fuck is wrong with people? Oh no, clean energy! We can’t have that! Trump says so! It’s much better to kill birds with tanker spills, pipeline leaks, stripping the entire surface of the earth of all life to get at the coal underneath it, and turning the planet into a burnt crisp, than risk killing a smaller number IN MY BACKYARD!
This is not clean energy if you do your research, and it would destroy the heart of what Humboldt County has to offer as a buffer against climate change–a significant carbon sink and host to biodiversity found few other places. Using technology to solve the problems it has caused in the first place with outmoded technology on a site that CDFW deems inappropriate and the Wiyot tribe considers sacred land is not a smart choice. We can and will do better than this.
That’s bullshit about the prairie being a carbon sink. Photosynthesis fixes carbon, the plant dies, the plant matter decays, and it releases methane and carbon dioxide. The only terrestrial environments that provide carbon sinks are bogs. Prairies are also some of the more biologically uniform environments.
The Wiyots use electrical energy and fossil fuels just like everybody else. They’re just another NIMBY group with a slightly modified set of false pretenses.
Climate change – the most serious issue facing humanity until it’s time to actually do something about it.
Actually forests are the greatest terrestrial carbon sink.
Every argument about carbon has been repeatedly shown to be false. The carbon emissions prevented by generating clean power far exceed the amount that would be sequestered by the grasses and trees removed by the project, even if you include the emissions produced constructing the turbines and installing them. Any source claiming otherwise is either misinformed or shilling for the coal and oil industries.
How do you declare them “outmoded”? What new technology would you use instead?
What sites do you (and/or the CDFW) consider appropriate for strip mining, oil and gas wells, and oil pipelines? Because that’s what’s getting built instead.
“Sacred land” is irrelevant. This is an excuse people trot out in place of actual arguments. No one’s ancestors more than a generation or two ago had any comprehension of the problems currently facing the planet, and anyone who claims otherwise is just putting words in their mouths. Did you know my ancestors believed we should build a nuclear power plant on top of that ridge, to power a giant Luxor-style light beam illuminating the heavens, for their spirits to transfer to the afterlife on? I demand we build this immediately, because this belief was sacred to them.
Who needs stinkin’ facts?
Sadly, people lacking facts seems to be the way all discussions are going these days… Although I don’t know if it’s just these days, since religion (basically defined as things irreconcilable with facts) has been popular for quite a while.
Ive noticed the people who are the least educated are often the most vocal. It’s extremely apparent with this topic. Lots of people against this project based of non factual data and conspiracy theories, etc.
I’m really sad to see this not project denied, for my children and grandchildren.
Then your ideas have not generated enough Watts.
When the facts cannot be debated, insults are the only things the ignorant have left to point to.
What Facts??? I saw NONE in your comment!!!
People still keep saying it won’t be carbon-neutral, which has been repeatedly and thoroughly disproven. But every time there’s any mention of wind, they say the same thing. And no matter how many times people point out that it’s wrong, they just keep saying it. It’s not a matter of opinion, like whether they look good, or of debate, like whether it will kill more or fewer birds than are currently killed by oil, gas, and coal production based on which models and statistics are used, but a researchable established fact, and yet people still repeat it.
A link please to the data that shows where its been “repeatedly and thoroughly disproven”
By the way, there’s no such word as “disproven”. Disproved, you bet.
I hesitate to go here because I don’t allow grammar corrections of other commenters but I was sure disproven was a word. Multiple word sites show that “disproven” is a word. Here’s one. https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/disproven
As far as I know, both disproved and disproven are acceptable… English is not my strong point, but I think of picking between them as “They disproved the claim” vs “The claim has been disproven”. Disproved would also be acceptable for the latter example, but disproven would not be for the former, showing the usages are different. The difference between past tenses and past participles and the other things I never really figured out in English class! Of course, before someone replies complaining about my example above, some things that I did figure out I intentionally ignore, like treating periods and commas similar to question marks when deciding to put them inside or outside of quotes. Language evolves, and I’m being part of it. 😛
People substitute all kinds of things for religion. All kinds of things.
Want facts? Research Scotland’s wind energy fiasco. They’re in the process of dismantling these ugly bird killers.
https://www.audubon.org/news/will-wind-turbines-ever-be-safe-birds
Did you read that Audubon page all the way to its conclusion? “But in a warming world, where more and more birds are going to be threatened by climate change, a pragmatic approach to energy creation and safeguarding the planet’s birds might be the one we have to accept.”
Turbines kill birds. Not building turbines also kills birds. This is a lesser evil situation.
I would hope that we wouldn’t have to kill birds at all. Unless we’re going to eat them, of course. I’m not the first person to point out that your logic represents a false choice.
roads kill dear. rip them out
Another false choice, yo.
https://youtu.be/N-yALPEpV4w
“As consumers, we pay for electricity twice: once through our monthly electricity bill and a second time through taxes that finance massive subsidies for inefficient wind and other energy producers.” https://www.newsweek.com/whats-true-cost-wind-power-321480 https://bizfluent.com/about-5414768-average-cost-wind-turbine.html
It is not that easy to chose a giant windmill that relies on heavily subsidized funds to be built and maintained, that is proffered by a company that will go out of business without government subsidies, has a limited life span even though it costs millions to replace. It sounds nice- wow free and clean wind power- but it’s a relatively delicate device needing lots of service and millions each to replace. Other less risky, more easily maintained choices are available.
The coal and oil industries are also heavily subsidized, just more sneakily, through things like land grants, support for pipeline construction, certain major politicians advocating for their businesses, etc. I like how the first article you linked had to add a big disclaimer on top pointing out the author has ties to the oil industry. Also, apparently transmission lines are only needed for wind power, not for any other power source. There’s something wrong with the second link you pasted. It takes me to “comparison-between-hydropower-nuclear-energy”, which despite the url is the article “The Difference Between Solar Energy and Electricity”, which does not seem relevant.
This is the same argument used against railroads – they might not exist without government subsidies, so they’re unprofitable and evil – while ignoring that their competition, both roads and marine shipping – are very heavily government funded.
All power plants have a limited lifespan, need a lot of maintenance, and cost millions to replace. Wind is actually very low maintenance compared to coal.
The extra government subsidies for wind are just to do exactly this, make it even more profitable than other energy sources, to encourage its development and adoption. Because sometimes it costs slightly more to do what’s right, rather than what has the lowest short-term cost.
The issue is not that other things are subsidized or that those other things are bad but why they are subsidized, what people get for the subsidy. Oil production would have been pursued whether subsidized or not as a readily available, needed product. So now it’s time to move on. To where is the question. Wind turbines are more like military contracting where the purchased item may sound useful, prove to be untenable but still cost millions and subsequently may be found on Amazon for a whole lot less after which discovery the contractor abandons the maintenance and retires rich. Wind turbines such as be touted in this case are huge, breakable money pits that without subsidies will become too expensive to keep. Some wind mills somewhere- not these wind mills here. Let the manufacturer prove their value to the people who live there . Just because the promise something doesn’t mean they will deliver. The wind will be there.
Do you have any evidence they won’t deliver? Wind projects elsewhere have been successful, and I see no reason to doubt this one would be as well.
All major power plants are large, expensive, breakable projects.
Isn’t that the point about any large plant to send power far away? But you ask (I know not really wanting to hear but)
“Good site access. Wind turbines are large and heavy, so the access roads and tracks to the site need to be capable of taking oversize loads with no weak bridges, excessively tight corners or steep gradients. Obviously as the proposed turbine gets larger, the size of the constituent parts that have to be delivered get larger and the access requirements more stringent. ” “Construction of 17 miles of new road, some 200 feet wide and rising through the Jordan Creek watershed, which is just beginning to recover from slides caused by Maxxam’s forest ”
Mind you the people who adamant about the necessity of this project seem to be the same as those objecting to – gasp!- any logging at all. Detail, details.
https://www.northcoastjournal.com/humboldt/hook-line-and-turbine/Content?oid=14580535
https://www.renewablesfirst.co.uk/windpower/windpower-learning-centre/what-makes-a-good-wind-power-site/
“Good grid connection. All of the wind turbines that we supply require a suitable three-phase electrical supply to connect to. ” Well most of us who live here are well aware of winter outages in rural areas but then there’s PG&E safety outages. So all that lovely wind will be exactly when PG&Eshuts it off.
Then there is something that I have not heard much about and that the need for such large machines to be in constant data connection to keep them from self destruction when the wind varies. Now who is the county with the least reliable connection? Hmm… Oh well…
The second link says “A lot of the older objections to wind turbines due to bird strikes have now been shown to be unfounded” which seems quite relevant. Also points out that noise is a non-issue past a half mile, and in fact refutes a number of claims of the first link. And I love all the xenophobia, it’s just as humorous as the first time I saw that op-ed. They’re from *thunderclap* MANHATTAN *lightning*!
I support sustainable logging, as should anyone else who lives in a wood-framed house.
There is no constant data connection needed to prevent self-destruction. All turbines have enough local controls to recognize an overspeed condition and yaw sideways to the wind, feather the blades, apply brakes, or otherwise take whatever emergency action the designer intended to be done to prevent damage, without any long-distance networking. Control may be optimized from a remote central control station, but there’s redundant systems locally. Yes, these systems occasionally fail, and turbines have indeed catastrophically failed from overspeed, but the lack of a network connection was not the cause. And this is why you don’t hear about it!
But they won’t have local controls- that requires personnel on site for maintenance and emergencies. Looking at PG&E or for that matter almost every other business, such expensive people are not supported locally when it is so much more efficient for them to be located near cities that support them.
The difference is that you persist in seeing everything as being successful- the company will build them with the best of technology and materials, they will be installed by people from out of the area who understand and respect the delicate environment and would never hurt it for money, that they will be maintained once the government subsidies dry up and, like any old machines, they become expensive to maintain. Me? I see that power companies across America have deferred maintenance to the point of failure, that Humboldt Co has not the population that can sway politicians to protect their interests, that our area has been caught betweening warring values from the populated areas that have already trashed their environment, want to prevent the same being done here yet are greedy in taking what they want and moving down south. I can see the county being left with a monstrous clean up for a defunct wind farm that has been abandoned by its owners.
All my caveats could be addressed But that would mean the company might not be able to harvest its profits and leave so they refuse. They should not be able to twist a shiny bauble in front of people’s eyes to get away with it.
By “local controls”, I mean “a circuit board inside each turbine”. They’re designed to protect themselves. Not doing so would be expensive.
They may well suffer from all the problems that other power plants have. But they’ll be producing clean energy until and during those problems, rather than burning fossil fuels.
Do your research…. THIS IS NOT CLEAN ENERGY… and the folks pushing for it are NOT DOING IT FOR THE ENVIRONMENT… THEY ARE DOING IT FOR $$$.
Stay clear on that FACT
Of course they need to make money. How does that make it a bad deal? I don’t think anyone was thinking this was a charity job. Also, no energy source is totally clean. This seems like a good project and it’s as clean as it gets. I consider myself an environmentalist but sometimes the people on my ‘side’ can be idiots.
Would you prefer off shore drilling?
That is not the real choice. That’s a scare tactic- give me the land for the windmills or I’ll spill oil into the ocean.
The real choice is what is the best investment- smaller solar sites or 600 ft windmills. It comes down to which is the better mechanism for harvesting. If there were no solar panels, then wind mills might be a costly but unavoidable need. But solar panels do exist, investment in storage is needed. Not a billion dollars in machinery needed huge maintenance cost to keep going and inevitable huge replacement costs. Renewable and zero carbon are not magic words that should blind people to what that means.
Around here, solar is not a great investment. The amount of storage we would need is far greater than would be needed for similarly-sized solar installations in many other areas, and the total production would be a lot lower than in many other areas. Wind is much more reliable here.
Major solar plants also cost billions, require maintenance, and have defined life expectancies.
Yet so many people do use it. And wind power is intermittent too. And there’s no more storage capability than for solar- both feed into the grid. I wonder how many hours of down time these wind mills will have?
Cleanest power out there, we should be supporting this instead of trying to run Humboldt back into the Stone Age. It’s not either support this or support off shore drilling, my point is that we all use power, we all want it and we don’t like nuclear or fossil fuel. Nothing is perfect. Wave energy will affect ocean life. Nothing is without effects. You all have a car I bet. You all use electricity. Any step towards sustainable energy is a good move in my mind. There are plenty of good views in Humboldt county, turn your head if you dont like the one in front of u!
The choice is not between brilliant modern science or It wanting his cave fire as if that were the only choice. That’s the latter of snake oils hawkers. It’s between choosing what is the best use of our resources or being sold a shiny bill of goods. Of course this company wants this resource- it one of the few places they can afford to get their hands on that works. Should we really be so naive as to buy it without examination? We have something of great value. We should get something for it that works for us like we should have gotten something for the water diversions. As it is, our area gets to pay for the consequences of these choices while the mass of users get the benefits.
Conservation IS totally clean. Build smaller houses. Learn to live in less conditioned spaces (a sweater worn indoors lasts a while). Get off the damn airplane for casual recreational travel. Consume less plastic crap. Stream less video; refuse energy wasting “virtual currency” (server farms are massive consumers of power). Walk, carpool, bicycle when possible.
Yes- a million times yes. It would be possible to be active doing more on both fronts but for immediate results, conservation is will do something now.
There is NOTHING “Clean” about this project!!!! It’s a Smoke & Mirrors fiasco brought to you by BIG Oil!!!!
Have you ever visited Bear River Ridge? If you have, you may have noticed what a beautiful environment it is. If not, it explains your ignorant comment. Windmills will ruin it forever. There are no plans to remove the windmills’ foundations of cement and rebar after the windmills’ useful lives have ended. It’s more than dead birds, which is a significant issue even with “geo-fencing” capability. It would be great if the land could be purchased and returned to its rightful owners: the Wiyot Tribe — before it can be subdivided and ruined with development.
Almost nobody actually wants nor likes the 600 ft tall monuments to technological advancement. They’re ugly. They only make electricity, they don’t control flood. The high price of this electricity can’t be justified.
The false need for this project is being fanned by money-making fools who are still stealing our special place in this world. Stop the selling of this project, it’s bad.
Such great news!!!
I dont think folks get just how destructive these turbines are to the environment, nor understand that terra gen is just another pge. Remember folks, the reason we got cut off was due to lack of transfer switches to turn on just our county while counties to the east experience fire weather. (Yes a very very basic descrip, i know its not as easy as flipping a switch). Unless the power station changes, the wind power would not keep the lights on. It would be no different.
Wind power is an outdated tech from the 70’s. We need to demand that all the incredible new tech out there be utilized. Big companies have bought up patents to sit on as the new tech doesnt generate huge amounts of money. Like the sensor strips they can put on roads that generate power from the friction of cars tires.
The county ought to look towards the Rancheria who hired a LOCAL group, the amazing Schatz energy lab, to do their solar grid. The blue lake casino had power the enitire blackout. The county had to move anyone dependent on electricity to survive into hotel rooms at the casino to keep them alive.
Ruining our environment so we can be comfortable has to stop.
The writing on the wall has told us so over and over and is now in big neon lites.
So will you be ok with not having power in your home and taking your horse to town? I say practice what you preach! We live in a world where we have a need for power- when the psps happened everyone was screaming like someone had deprived them of a human right! And now the same people don’t want a clean local source of power? What a bunch of complainers. The same thing happened when P. Shannon wanted to make willow creek self sufficient on hydro power. He was shot down by radical environmentalists. I think my point is, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
“A clean local source of power,” implies the power would stay here, which it would not.
Kind of like people in the vicinity of an African diamond mine saying, “we have diamonds.”
No, they don’t. They live in the vicinity of a diamond mine. They don’t get to keep the diamonds.
There’s (at least) two problems with that argument…
First, why would you think the power wouldn’t stay here? We import power. The wind farm would replace this power we’re importing. The only way, in fact, for this wind farm to _not_ power the local area would be if we simultaneously ramped the king salmon plant up to full power (greater levels than we currently run it at), thus forcing the wind farm’s energy out of the area. Needless to say, this is the exact opposite of the actual plan, which is to reduce the king salmon plant’s output and burn less natural gas.
Second, when it comes to the climate, “local” is the entire planet. Even if the power from the wind farm were entirely sent out of humboldt county, it would still be clean energy reducing carbon emissions and benefiting the planet just as much, including humboldt.
“First, why would you think the power wouldn’t stay here?” Because no one has offered even the slightest guarantee that it will. Wishful thinking us not a guarantee. Promises in writing frequently don’t get fulfilled. Ones not in writing never do.
I’ve tried replying to you three times, but it vanishes into thin air. Hopefully this post works, and Kym sees it and figures out what’s up.
Steve, I thought your analogy was good, and instructive.
I think BT missed your point.
And I think you entirely missed mine… There is no “local” when the climate is involved.
Actually, there is such a thing as local, even when the climate is involved.
For example, we have a local government. We have local weather patterns, local geography, local rivers, and local ridge-tops that have meaning and significance for local indigenous tribes.
https://www.nrel.gov/gis/wind.html
If you look at these maps, especially the 80 meter hub height one, you will see why this company is so anxious for this project. Areas like ours are rare as Ben’s teeth. We are the Sutter’s Mill of resource for land built turbines in California. Southern Oregon and Washington have other such places but they will not benefit California’s seperate power systems. We are almost it and this is just the first project in a line that goes from the coast inland. This decision will shape the use of all that area forever. It is worth much more discussion than “climate change” shout downs.
Most new technologies haven’t been built because they aren’t actually practical for one reason or another.
Generating power from vehicles on roads is something that everyone had a good laugh at, because it’s totally idiotic for anything more than lighting up a street sign or something. You can only get a little bit of power out of a passing car, and guess where that power comes from? The gasoline engine in the car! Burning fossil fuels! Except through about the least-efficient most-round-about method possible! It’s a stupidly expensive, overcomplicated, utterly inefficient and worse-than-useless idea. If that is your best example of new technologies, it should tell you something about all the rest.
The microgrid at the casino was extremely expensive, and is not a good large-scale system. Also, their primary backup power is a friggin’ huge generator installed behind the hotel. A system similar to their microgrid is an option, but only at huge cost, and requiring clearing thousands of acres of land, which everyone will object to. Solar isn’t an abundant resource around here, especially during the later parts of winter.
Yes, ruining the environment has to stop… Which is why we need to immediately begin construction on as much clean power as we can, everywhere we can put it, rather than drilling for more oil and gas. Oil, gas, and coal are far more destructive to the environment, in both the long-term and the short-term. Go look for some pictures of oiled seabirds next time you worry about birds hitting turbines…
What is the back up system to the turbines? A “friggin’ huge generator ?” The point that needs consideration should be that massive projects, while sounding impressive, are not as good in the end as lots of smaller systems that don’t take out everyone when they fail.
Yep. And we already have that huge generator, in the form of the king salmon power plant. Grid-scale storage would greatly reduce our dependency on it, but that’s a technology that still needs a lot of development. We do have good potential for pumped hydro in the tri-county area, but I can just see the protests when a company tries not just flooding a few more valleys, but leveling the entire top of the nearest tall mountain too…
Lots of smaller systems don’t make sense, for two main reasons. Economy of scale means that large, centralized systems will always cost less to build and maintain while being more efficient and reliable, and smaller systems don’t benefit from the ability of large grids to average out intermittent production from multiple energy sources over a wide area.
“lots of smaller systems don’t make sense”
Not true. It’s just that you don’t see the sense.
Large centralized systems are not more efficient. I would say that PG&E proves this point. Do you think that they are efficient and reliable?
You are making sweeping generalizations and I find your conclusions dubious, at best.
Yes, I think pg&e’s systems are substantially more efficient and reliable. And cheaper, too. Let’s use a hypothetical battery-backed solar system as an example.
PG&E special-orders a thousand truckloads of panels. You order one pallet, and pay as much as five pallets cost them. They’re not the same as the ones anyone else ordered, either.
Employees, rather than general contractors, install them. Since there’s so many identical units, the installation goes much quicker and cheaper than a bunch of people installing a punch of random home systems.
Same for the batteries. They contract with a battery supplier for special grid-storage-size ultra-heavy-duty cells. They install them with heavy equipment. Your contractor is stuck dealing with off-the-shelf batteries of outdated design and cost-optimized construction, pays about five times as much for them, lugs them around by hand, then goes to the chiropractor.
They install the panels in a huge flat desert plain, on identical racks. You have to figure out how to make them fit your roof, worry about leaks, try to convince your neighbors to top their favorite second-growth redwood to let the sun reach your roof, etc.
PG&E orders huge industrial inverters. I’m going to lump charge controllers, battery management, etc, all into a generic “inverter” for simplicity. The cost per watt is much lower than the inverter you buy. Theirs are designed with redundancy, swappable modules, etc, while yours is a single unit. A failure of any part of theirs results in a negligible reduction of output, and they have spares on-site, since they’re all the same. A failure of yours, which is more likely, results in a total loss of power, and you have to wait for one to be shipped from a warehouse somewhere. Since everyone has an inverter, there’s constant failures, and a non-trivial percentage of people are without power at any given time.
They have robots with firehoses and a dedicated team of panel maintenance people. You let your panels sit on the roof and grow moss, since it’s dangerous and difficult to clean them.
They have a battery maintenance team to perform any required maintenance on the batteries, perform offline testing and preemptive replacements as needed, etc. You, depending on technology, have to do monthly maintenance on your batteries yourself, which you forget to do, and don’t realize you have a few bad ones until there’s a storm and you wake up to a cold house the second day. Oh, and your batteries cost more than the value of the total amount of electricity they’ll store over their lifetime. I already did the math for this in another thread a while back, not going to do it again.
They have a big grid that can provide power from other sources, such as wind turbines spread over a wide area if there’s a lack of solar output, or failing that, fossil fuel power plants, all of which is done entirely invisibly to you. Meanwhile, since the chances of you having usable average wind speeds is exceptionally low unless you live on a ridge, you only have solar, and a long storm means you have to fire up your generator, which will be dirty, loud, and inefficient, likely producing less than half the power from the same amount of fuel as pg&e’s generators would. For some actual numbers, the Wärtsilä 18V50DF as used in king salmon is 47% efficient, while a modern generator engine is 32% (best number I could find, a modified briggs running off an ethanol blend) at best, or 20% or so for an older ones.
Your panels are in humboldt, where we’re lucky to get 2 peak sun hours in winter. Their panels are in the desert and baking in sun all year round.
And on and on and on, I’m too tired to keep adding to this…
So you think it’s hard that you need to convince a theoretical neighbor to top a fictional tree but it’s easy to enforce massive change over miles of other people’s environment?
WELL Said!!!!
I’m with you, Awesome!
Maybe the current tech is not as up to date or as good as it could be. But once it is, it should go wherever available that allows for the most efficient production of electricity. Will it have some environmental impacts? You bet your booty it will, but it is a much better alternative to a dead planet, suffocated by the coal and oil industry greed and ignorance.
I am not native American, but I bet my ancestors would appreciate folks in the current age doing what they can to save the planet, and all sacred places around the globe.
Once the proper technology is available and installed, name it something that honors the land it sits upon.
It’s time to stop hoping that some environmental miracle happens sometime in the future, and act now!
Ask the weott tribe if there is anywhere that isn’t sacred to them in north america. Nothing would get done if it needed their permission.
By the way, has anyone else noticed the wind turbine “powering” their sacred casino?
As for the people who are such staunch defenders of “indigenous rights” put your money where your mouth is and sign your land deed to them and move back to europe.
Granted, what happened to native people was bad but time marches on. My ancestors had a hard time with Genghas Kahn but we survived.
As to indigenous rights, you’re wrong. Just wrong. It’s that simple.
Once again postponed, a very poor idea proposed to be built in a very ill-advised place… This isn’t going to just go away, no doubt, but for the present, an ecological disaster has been averted…
If they want wind power, that’s fine, just build it out in the desert, where it should be, and bury the wires, all the way to Humboldt…
The problem is that there are few places with winds so consistent. Wind mills have to go to the places where the wind can justify their huge costs. This place was researched and chosen. There aren’t that many such places in California and most of the rest are in areas populated by rich people. We are again being snookered but the greedy south in taking but not giving back.
Well if no one can justify their huge costs, then f-k ’em.
This outta be all we need to know. They’re too expensive. They’re too much liability. They don’t belong here. From what you’re saying, they don’t belong anywhere in this state.
Thank you Planning Commission, for doing the right thing!
Gotta call my frackin’ buddy, this is great news!
“Didja hear that? They killed another one! Raising my whiskey.”
“Music to my ears, JR, music to my ears.”
“Mine too. Let’s go frack some more rock! They’re gonna be needin’ it.”
Exactly.
Only in memes on Politics for Dummies. Once installed, these turbines won’t disappear because they were problematic.
Bad place for this project. Period. The question now is the supervisors. Do they have the guts to follow the will of the people in this district, who are overwhelmingly opposed to this venture.
Why is it a bad place?
Reason #1: on a scale of 1 to 4 (1 being a great place to site wind turbines and 4 being a terrible place to site them due to too many negative impacts), CDFW rates this project site as a 4. Reason #2: It’s in the middle of a migratory bird route and Golden Eagles and Bald Eagles will be chopped to bits, not to mention numerous other birds and bat species. Even though there are mitigations that can be made, Terra-Gen says they can’t/won’t do the mitigations because it cuts too far into their profit margins. Reason #3: it will negatively impact tribal cultural resources. If you are honestly interested in learning more about why people oppose this project in the proposed location (including a lot of scientists in our area), I suggest you read the public comment letters here (scroll down to find them in both the DEIR and the FEIR. ) Here you go: https://humboldtgov.org/2408/Humboldt-Wind-Energy-Project
We’re doomed, people. Not this week, maybe, or this year, but our collective inability to surrender anything to compromise for the betterment of all vs ourselves, our community, our county, our state our nation…
San Francisco does not embrace ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle’, Humboldt does not embrace large scale alternative energy, Public Transportation is underused, and on and on…
Yet few are giving up their desire to travel around the world, their love of electronics, running water, cars, eating exotic foods that travelled half way around the world to get here, hot showers, surfboards, have children…
Few are doing the research that would show them how much energy is actually used to process their bottle of water or how much would really be needed to power our county’s needs or what it would cost to upgrade our infrastructure so we could be self reliant.
Few are willing to pay the taxes or higher bills that modernizing sewers and water and power and schools and hospitals and roads and all those things that we have grown used to.
But many are willing to blame and fight and believe assumptions and many unfounded fears that protect what they feel is endangered.
And many are scared of projects on a scale large enough to achieve something and terrified of any business with assets big enough to afford to pay for it.
We. Are. Doomed.
Having children is not equivalent to a hot shower or travel. It is more equivalent to having water or eating- not a matter of stop but of balance. Getting too big is a reasonable fear and, more importantly, people claiming resources locally to be sent to the south has a pretty awful history.
Balance is key
The Age of Stupid.
Yes but can you rely on the Stupid to realize who is in that category. Certainly responding enthusiastically to the chants of the online mob might be a clue.
Terra Gen… Shameless
Terra Gen representatives were attempting to shame Humboldt into supporting and approving their ill-conceived wind project by stating that 50% of the County’s current power source is from fossil fuels and “You are having impacts, we are having impacts today. Do we want to do something about it?” Terra Gen the Russ Family and even PC Chair Morris resorted to playing the “Guilt Card”, shameless.
The Russ Family and Mr. Morris basically stated if the project did not go through the land will be subdivided and fragmented. That’s not the case. The land is in a Class B Williamson Act Agricultural Preserve.
I truly believe every Humboldt County resident supports clean, renewable energy including wind energy. In fact I believe Humboldt has to be one of the greenest, self-reliant, off the grid energy friendly counties in the State, if not the Nation. However, the proposed location for the project is absolutely horrible, ecologically, biologically, culturally and aesthetically.
The wind industry, American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), encourages wind farms in areas of existing wind turbines near existing transmission facilities in upland desert areas and agricultural (farm) lands, not on environmentally, aesthetically and culturally sensitive ridge tops.
The cultural resource impacts, bird fatalities, including eagles, hawks and other raptors, bat fatalities, planned rodent extermination, the conversion of timberland, agricultural land, increased fire danger, the unfathomable amount of wet weather grading in an area of high instability and highly erodible soils and the associated sediment transport into the Eel River as a result of this poorly located project is unacceptable.
Not one person spoke against clean renewable wind energy.
It was and is all about the location.
Cows can graze next to wind turbines. What is a better alternative spot? I guess you prefer your power to come from pge natural gas generator then?
Calm down. This isn’t the right site, no one is saying a wind farm can never be developed here.
Everything else you said is hyperbole. If we are voicing concerns about the turbines effect on the environment why would we embrace fracking to get coal or oil shale?
Possible next steps if Terra-Gen appeals: Within 5 days of project rejection, Terra-Gen must pay a large fee to the Planning Department in order to file an appeal to the Board of Supervisors.
Due to the holiday, Board of Supervisors has only 2 regular meetings in the month of December (scheduled for Dec. 10th and Dec. 17.) However, special meetings may be scheduled with 72 hours notice.
Expect press release from planning about special meeting – but no guarantee they’ll give one, so – watch the agenda page carefully.
https://humboldtgov.org/167/Board-of-Supervisors
If Special Meetings are scheduled with 72 hours notice, they would only be on Mondays or Fridays due to room availability.
According to the clerk who provided this info, they would probably have 2 to 3 meetings about it “due to the controversy.” This may be in December or it may be pushed back to January.
Good Info to keep handy. I hope most who commented watched Commissioner Mac Kavour(sp),to help understand
her reasoning.This isn’t the Tulip Craze, but things are hyper because of time constraints that could have been avoided in my opinion,and maybe Commissioner Levy would agree. RJF
It would have been an AESTHETIC MAR…..when they wake up and put these contraptions on the ocean, no one will care, out of sight out of mind.
Let the damn green freaks in Frisco save the planet. I don’t want to fuckin look at windmills.
U.S. Out of HUMBOLDT. Just another corporate greed money grab
I would rather have a wind farmer as a neighbor than a dope farmer. One is quiet and doesn’t stink and the other one there destroying the environment. At least one is doing good for you’re economy.
To be real, I’m going to die before too many more years pass. And quite frankly, I don’t give a shit about the rest of you, none of you have shown anything but greed and selfishness. The politicians are mostly crooks who start off broke and end up rich, and cant slap their own ass with both hands due to always having one hand under the table. So your all a miserable lot and I won’t miss even one of you… Burn down the planet, finish what you’ve started.
I think your honesty is very refreshing. You made me laugh. Frank, I hope you get all the creature comforts you need and peace of mind to enjoy while you are here. Blessings to you.
As usual, there is plenty of wailing about setting fire to the world but somehow it seems more likely that the hands holding the matches are the ones offering technical solutions to keep the energy hungry fed than those who simply refuse it. Self centeredness got us here and apparently that is to be considered some sort of virtue now.
They really should have things like this on a ballet next time to reflect how a majority of people feel about it. I think a lot of people who are for it are not as driven to go to BOS meetings. I know I wasn’t. It’s easier to get riled up against something than for it sometimes. I wrote 2 emails to the BOS expressing my support for them. Most people for it probably didn’t. I’m sure the emails didn’t count very much.
Biggest air conditioner/wind generator on the planet, the Pacific Ocean, right in our backyard.
Let’s find the right place to place some turbines, pump seawater uphill to a reservoir when not feeding the grid, and generate electricity with potential energy when then wind isn’t blowing. No battery storage, just an artificial lake us locals could recreate in maybe?
That’s pumped hydro, which is already in use around the world. The problem is it requires a large uphill reservoir, either high valleys that can be dammed off, or leveling the entire top of a mountain with a circular dam around it. And people protest this much about the grass lost to a few turbine pads…
Umm… they’re protesting a lot more than just grass. Just sayin.
Yup, not gonna work here most likely. Just shaking my head about the NIMBYism. No silver bullet to solve the problem
“No silver bullet.” You got that right… unless it’s a beer, or the one I got for werewolfs.
The solution will have to be as complicated as the problem. I’m with Awesome — decentralized micro-grids, all the way. And restructure R&D so it’s public.
The NIMBYs are the ones who like projects in other people’s back yards too. Santa Barbara is not going to make room for this project in their back yards either although 90% of the value goes to people like that. https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2019/11/18/wind-farm-near-lompoc-on-agenda-for-santa-barbara-county-planning-commission/
OK, you want it here. What are you offering beside some vague feel good green rush emotions in exchange? Let’s see how much you all really value these warm and cuddly feelings. You first. Choices are much more dire for us where the livelihoods got to you and the liabilities are left with us.
It’s an ecosystem at stake; not just “grass.” Have you ever been up to Bear River Ridge? Will there be a guaranteed set-aside fund, administered by a reputable third-party with no ties to the project proponent, that will pay for the removal of the windmills, including their cement and rebar foundations or whatever materials the foundations will be made of? Where is the guarantee of such removal? It is my understanding the foundations will remain. That is ridiculous. The ridgetop grassland ecosystem is worth protecting.
PG&E’s electrical grid is a byzantine quagmire. Anyone who thinks the proposed windmills will have any effect on improving that grid is, as we say, spittin’ in the wind. The land should be purchased and returned to the Wiyot Tribe. Keep it pristine open space before it’s subdivided and developed. That’s the implied threat, anyway, of a landowner of some of the grassland, isn’t it, if the wind farm is not approved?
Glenn, I wholeheartedly agree with your points. From what I understand, some of the land is zoned TPZ (HRC land), and some is zoned Williamson Act (Russ family land). It takes either 10 years after Williamson Act contract termination, or a large up front payment to get out of a Williamson Act contract. The W.A. agreement people I personally know of have in place prohibits them from subdividing their acreage into parcels less than 160 acres each. Once people opt out of a Williamson Act (W.A ) contract, the property taxes go up incrementally every year for 10 years after the opt out, until they reach normal levels again. Unless you pay up front, it takes 10 years to fully phase out of a W.A. contract. Under the W.A. contract, people agree to keep large tracts of land in tact in exchange for a huge break on property taxes for the duration of the contract. They also have to show that it’s being used for timber, farming, ranching, or agriculture continually, and deriving a certain amount of profit from those activities. It’s a way for the State to preserve farmland, ranchland, timber land, and open spaces, etc. by offering tax incentives to property owners. Because of this, I’m not sure exactly how likely it is that the Russ family would choose this option, but who knows?
As for what Planning Commisioner Noah Levy opined at the meeting about that same land being subdivided and turned into “pot farms”, that seems pretty far fetched to me. They aren’t giving out licenses to non-prexisting grow operations, so if the County follows their own rules, this wouldn’t happen. I’m actually pretty disappointed in Mr. Levy for using such an irresponsible scare tactic. If an illegal grow began operating, they’d get an abatement notice and $10,000 a day fines, just like everyone else who would not or could not permit their grow.
The County has sent out thousands of abatement notices in the last couple of years, which is driving our economy straight into a ditch. People I personally know who couldn’t afford to get permits have lost their property and been forced to leave the area. I personally think that if TG appeals, the Supes might try to approve this mega-project as a way to forestall a future loss in property taxes and sales tax revenue. Property values in former robust growing areas are tanking. Businesses are going belly up. Foreclosures are at an all time high. Whether one approves of growing or not, the fact is that the most growers spent their money locally, donated to schools, charities, and rural fire departments generously. They were a mainstay of our economy here, and they’ve been driven out of our County in droves by the County’s Draconian tactics and the high cost and frustration of a complicated licensing process. One friend of mine applied for the smallest permit possible and it’s already cost her $50k. They’ll have to reassess property taxes if the land values continue to decline at this rate. The Supervisors stumbled blindly into legalization and seemed to favor a few mega-growers over the small farmers and sadly, it’s caused an economic and social tsunami in our County, the effects of which we are just now beginning to really pay attention to. Our County is already suffering from the consequences of the short sighted, ham handed, punitive approach the County chose to implement. Southern Humboldt folks are absolutely disgusted by Estelle and feel completely betrayed and forgotten. Her chances of reelection are pretty slim at this point. That might be why she’s spending so much time buttering up her Fortuna constituents. (She rarely comes to Rio Dell, by the way.)
One other thing…(and I mean no disrespect in pointing this out) I noticed you used the term “wind farm”. I also keep hearing people call these things “windmills”, when the proper terminology is “industrial wind turbine project”. Calling these “wind farms” or “windmills” seems to be a strategy of developers to downplay just how huge these 50+ story behemoths actually are, and how they change landscapes into industrial sacrifice zones with new roads, acres of concrete, noise pollution, and light pollution from dozens, and in some cases, hundreds of red and/or white blinking FAA lights both during the day and at night. All one has to do is search for “wind turbines at night” or “windmills at night” on YouTube to see how much light pollution they produce. As I see it, they’re basically trying to turn the Eel River Valley, and especially Rio Dell and Scotia into the new industrial sacrifice zone of Humboldt County. A lot of folks in Rio Dell and Scotia are low income, so this makes it particularly insulting. Luckily, they have excellent environmental experts and attorneys advising them right now. Terra-Gen will not win this fight if they choose to waste more money on an appeal.
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