WA is not the place for wind farms

By Rick Dunn, Benton County PUD general manager; from Tri-City Herald 2/5/2023

The numbers don’t add up for the Horse Heaven Wind Farm (HHWF) — unless your goal is to produce the least amount of electricity possible when it’s most needed, while negatively impacting the most land, wildlife, and people possible.

It’s common sense to recognize that the intermittency and variability of wind power is a significant deficiency when the grid is expected to deliver continuous and uninterrupted electricity no matter what the weather.

The question is, can you assign a number to this deficiency? The answer is yes, and utilities in the Northwest have done it.

In response to increasing risk of Northwest power grid blackouts driven by rapid retirement of coal plants and crippling restrictions on new natural gas power plants included in Washington and Oregon clean energy laws, a consortium of utilities organized by the Northwest Power Pool started an effort called the Western Resource Adequacy Program (WRAP).

One major objective of the WRAP was to adopt common grid reliability planning and analysis standards, including calculating what percentage of installed wind farm generating capacity across selected geographical areas can be counted on when electricity demand is highest, i.e., the coldest and hottest days of the year.

What the WRAP team determined is Washington wind farms are expected to provide the lowest effective winter capacity than any region analyzed by a factor of more than two to three, depending on the month. In the worst case, utilities who add Washington wind to their portfolio will only be allowed to use 8% of the maximum generating capacity possible as credit toward their January dependable supply inventory.

Washington wind is expected to perform better in summer months, but June and July are when hydropower is usually operating at maximum levels and the power grid doesn’t need as much help from other technologies. The greatest need in summer for dependable generating capacity usually occurs in August and September when hot temperatures are still in play and the hydro system water flows have petered out. These are also the months the WRAP team determined Washington wind summer effective capacity numbers drop to 18% and 13% respectively.

Clearly the WRAP assessment shows not all wind farms are created equal and that matters to utilities trying to balance affordability with reliability and environmental impacts.

For further perspective, the next time you are driving by Hermiston or Boardman in Oregon, keep in mind the three natural gas power plants you can see from Interstate 84 occupy 15 to 20 acres each and are providing between 474 and 635 megawatts (MW) of 98% effective capacity year-round, with carbon dioxide emission rates between 50% and 60% less than coal.

In contrast, the 850 MW Horse Heaven Hills wind farm lease boundary area is over 72,000 acres and the project would only be credited by the WRAP for 68 MW of January effective capacity and 153 MW for August.

It would take more than seven projects the size of the HHWF to provide the January effective capacity of a single clean burning and dependable natural gas power plant.

This is illustrative of why a myopic focus on reducing carbon-dioxide emissions through a deepening dependence on energy-dilute wind power must ultimately come to terms with the laws of physics and the high financial and environmental cost of achieving a reliable power grid with this technology.

Yes, I know the HHWF developers are including battery storage and solar in their project. And who wouldn’t when politicians offer generous tax subsidies to cover the exorbitant cost of propping up their favorite technologies. Just keep in mind, existing grid-scale lithium-ion battery technology is limited to a four-hour discharge time, is material intensive, and lasts about 3,000 cycles, which is 8 to 15 years depending on the frequency of charging and discharging.

Yes, elections have consequences. And when it comes to clean energy policies in Washington, the negative ones are beginning to materialize. Utility engineers have been backed into a corner by politicians who are now designing the power grid to their liking.

There is no doubt, wind farms are going to be built. But if you still think the numbers should matter, the HHWF and any other Washington wind farms should be low on the list of alternatives. For more perspective, please see: https://www.bentonpud.org/About/Your-PUD/Overview/News.

Rick Dunn is the general manager of the Benton Public Utility District.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

DEIS Comment 1/31/2023 by Markus Stauffer

Failure to Protect Views from Badger Mountain Park

Issue:

Badger and Candy Mountain are Tri-City landmarks and the unique views from the tops need to be protected. Especially the sights of iconic Mt. Hood and Mt. Adams to the west are picturesque and the planned wind farm on the Horse Heaven Plateau would destroy this panorama (Reference 1).

Rule/Reason:

SEPA WAC 197-11-440 re contents of EIS:

(e) Significant impacts on both the natural environment and the built environment must be analyzed, if relevant (WAC 197-11-444). This involves impacts upon and the quality of the physical surroundings, whether they are in wild, rural, or urban areas. Discussion of significant impacts shall include the cost of and effects on public services, such as utilities, roads, fire, and police protection, that may result from a proposal. EISs shall also discuss significant environmental impacts upon land and shoreline use, which includes housing, physical blight, and significant impacts of projected population on environmental resources, as specified by RCW 43.21C.110 (1)(d) and (f), as listed in WAC 197-11-444.

The Badger and Candy Mountain parks are located within the Tri-Cities and are visited by hundreds of people every day. The views from the top with the majestic volcanoes to the west would clearly be impacted by the spinning blades of the HH wind turbines 6 rows deep.

The DEIS has failed to address the impact of the 25 mile wind farm on the ridges of the Horse Heaven Hills to the quality of the parks and to recreation in the Tri-Cities.

Application of Rules:

• A series of hilltops called Little Badger, Badger Mountain, Candy Mountain, and Red Mountain is separated from the Horse Heaven Hills by the Badger Canyon valley. These mountain tops offer 360 panoramic views with the Horse Heaven Hills and the iconic Mt Hood, Mt. Adams, and Mt. Rainier to the west (reference 1).
• Several parks with hiking, biking and horse trails have been established and are managed by the City of Richland recreation department.
• A group called “Friends of Badger Mountain” has been active in establishing the parks and volunteers have spent thousands of hours to build the trails in these steep hills.
• The Friends of Badger Mountain collected $ 2.5 million dollars to add land to the newest preserve, the Little Badger Mountain; reference 2.
• The Friends of Badger Mountain collected about $ 1.5 million to buy land for the for Candy Mountain park
• In 2003, the group spent spent $600,000 to preserve 500 acres on Badger Mountain, and establish the original park, now managed by the City of Richland Parks & Recreation department.
• Views of the Mt Hood, Mt Adams, and Mt Rainier volcanoes is a major part of experience
• Wind turbines in rows of six deep on the ridges of the HHH in a direct view path to the volcanoes would destroy this experience (reference 3).
• This would be similar to obstructing the view of Mt Rainier from TacomaConclusions:

• The parks at Little Badger, Badger and Candy Mountain are beloved Tri-City destinations and deserve protection of the 360 degree views.
• The unique views from these mountain tops to Mt Hood and Mt Adams needs to be preserved
• At a minimum, a one mile wide corridor in the line of sight to Mt Hood and Mt Adams needs to be established on the ridge of the Horse Heaven Hills without any obstructing wind turbines.

• At least 20 wind turbines are in a direct line of sight with Mt Adams and Mt Hood within a 1 mile corridor; they should be eliminated or moved to different locations.

References:

Reference 1: View of Mt. Adams from Badger Mountain

From National Park Service,

Badger Mountain Trail Head/Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail

https://www.nps.gov/places/badger-mountain-trail-head.ht

View Point of Mount Adams and Mount Rainer from the west side of the summit of Badger Mountain. On a clear day, the top of Mount Adam can be seen above the west end of the Horse Heaven Hill ridge and for Mount Rainer look west up the Yakima River valley, almost in line with the Benton City water tank.

Reference 2: Local groups have spent millions of dollars to help establish the parks around Badger and Candy Mountain

https://www.tri-cityherald.com/sports/outdoors/article271347422.html

From the Tri-City Herald article: “This is the final land acquisition that we needed to create a continuous trail system from the existing preserve down from Badger to connect to Queensgate,” Comstock said. “From Queensgate we now have all the property across the saddle, gaining access to the ridge top all the way to the summit of Little Badger.” In all, they spent about $2.5 million acquiring the land needed. The larger

portion cost $1.5 million, which group president Bob Bass said is about what they paid for all 200 acres on Candy Mountain.
“This will probably be the most expensive piece of trail anywhere in Eastern Washington,” Bass said. In 2003, when the organization first launched, they spent just under $600,000 to preserve 500 acres on Badger Mountain, but growth in the area has led to increased demand for land, and with it higher land prices.”

Read more at: https://www.tri-cityherald.com/news/local/ article261321552.html#storylink=cpy

Future Little Badger Mountain Preserve

1) The “Friends of Badger Mountain” have collected millions of dollars to establish the parks; they spent thousands of hours of volunteer time to build the trails. These parks are beloved by Tri-Citians with the fabulous views from the top of the Columbia Basin and the Horse Heaven Hills.

From the Friends of Badger Mountain website: Home – Friends of Badger Mountain

2): From the top of Badger and Candy Mountain, there are iconic views of the volcanoes to the west.

From “Explore Washington State” https://explorewashingtonstate.com/hiking-trails-in-the-tri-cities/

Reference 3: View from Badger Mountain with HH Wind-farm Simulation (Option

This simulated image from the DEIS shows the wind farm obliterating the panorama of the Horse Heaven Hill

Reference 4: The Line of Sight from Badger Mountain and Candy Mountain toward the Volcanoes to the West

• Angle from Mt Badger to Mt Adams is 268.5 degrees
• Angle from Mt Badger to Mt Hood is 242.7 degrees
• Angle from Mt Badger to Mt Rainier is 290.5 degrees

Reference 5: The same Line of Sight showing the Wind Turbines Obstructing the Views of Mt Hood and Mt Adams

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Margaret Hue’s Letter to the Editor of the Tri-City Herald from September 4, 2022

Clash of Titans: Clean Energy, Conservation and NW Power Grid

BY Rick Dunn, General Manager Benton County PUD, October 1, 2021

While I was not surprised when Oregon joined Washington to pursue 100 percent clean electricity, it was tough to hear of Oregon’s prohibition on the siting of new natural gas-fired power plants.

As a utility executive with a better-than-90-percent clean power-supply portfolio, but in need of dependable capacity to cover persistent and consequential summer energy deficits, it continues to be difficult to accept that states with nation-leading clean and low-cost electricity are forcing utilities and our customers to gamble grid reliability on the hope that overdevelopment of wind and solar power inside and outside our region will be the answer to replacing dependable capacity provided by retiring coal plants.

One frustrating irony is that some of the same entities that helped convince policymakers to back utilities into a corner and force a deeper dependence on wind and solar power are continuing to cavalierly call for the erosion and outright removal of carbon-free hydroelectric generating capacity—the very hydropower on which Washington and Oregon’s 100-percent-clean aspirational visions and bragging rights were established.

And rather than celebrating our existing nation-leading clean energy capabilities, anti-hydropower interests are attempting to capitalize on a shift in political power together with emotionally charged arguments and opinions to weaken support for hydropower, while falsely promoting wind and solar technologies as environmentally benign replacements.

The industrialization of natural landscapes, ecological disruption and volumetric waste challenges that would be the result of replacing diminished hydro generation with wind and solar power never seem to be a part of the anti-dam conversation, and they should be. Clearly dams have significant environmental and ecological impacts and it is right to continuously scrutinize and scientifically evaluate their operations. What is not right is to proclaim an unwavering commitment to science when it suits narrow ideological interests while being willfully blind to the fact all energy conversion technologies have limitations and life-cycle impacts that should be considered in a balanced costs-versus-benefits analysis.

Unfortunately, 100-percent-clean-energy policies now have utilities on a path where we are required to assume that some power generating technologies have disproportionately high environmental costs and others have only benefits.

This is not only intellectually dishonest, but may also increase the fragility of the Northwest grid as aggressive renewable energy policies experience project development friction resulting from longstanding conservation policies and pushback from rural citizens who will clearly bear the greatest burden if the development of thousands of miles of new transmission lines, and sacrifice of potentially millions of acres of natural landscapes to wind and solar farms, continues as envisioned by policymakers.

In the months following Benton PUD’s release of a 2020 report opposing wind farm development in the Pacific Northwest, I have had the opportunity to witness the impending renewables-versus-conservation battle firsthand. There is nothing like a proposal to build the state’s largest wind farm within view of the nearly 300,000 citizens of the Tri-Cities area in Benton and Franklin counties to force the hard questions about Washington’s Clean Energy Transformation Act (CETA) and 2021 State Energy Strategy (SES).

At a nameplate generating capacity of up to 1,150 MW of combined wind, solar and battery storage technologies, the Horse Heaven Wind Farm would include 850 MW of wind power with up to 244 wind turbines as tall as 600 feet stretching for more than 25 miles across the horizon and covering an area encompassing 113 square miles of the iconic Horse Heaven Hills.

While project developers are undoubtedly drawn to Washington by the substantial existing wind footprint and 100-percent-clean headlines generated by CETA, I wonder if the developer expected a letter to the Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife expressing significant concerns with the proposed project based on a potential clash with conservation efforts.

In an April 2021 letter, WDFW stated, “These areas, as well as the entire Horse Heaven Hills ridgeline, are used seasonally and year-round by a variety of avian species, some of which are State, Priority, Candidate, and Threatened Species. In fact, the entire Horse Heaven Hills ridgeline is an important area for avian species and other wildlife, including reintroduced Pronghorn antelope. It is a strategic location that provides suitable habitat for a variety of native plant and wildlife species and has been recognized as such through a variety of scientifically validated stakeholder publications.”

The Fish and Wildlife Commission then followed up its EFSEC letter with a unanimous vote Aug. 27 to move the ferruginous hawk from the state’s threatened species list to endangered status and identified wind power development as a contributing factor to its decline.

Unsurprisingly, and in addition to WDFW concerns, the Tri-Cities community with a 95 percent non-emitting hydro- and nuclear-based electricity portfolio has expressed overwhelming opposition to the wind project based on EFSEC filings by virtually every local jurisdiction as well as economic-development interest groups.

Negative impacts associated with viewsheds, decommissioning and turbine disposal, tourism, birds, wildlife, and flashing lights were at the top of the list of concerns identified by a Tri-City Regional Chamber of Commerce opinion survey.

Additionally, community leaders have expressed significant frustration with the developer’s decision to use the optional EFSEC process to attempt to gain Gov. Jay Inslee’s approval of the project in lieu of working directly with local planning authorities.

The wind project is an early and compelling test for two fundamental tenets of Washington’s State Energy Strategy, which are to “build an equitable, inclusive, resilient clean energy economy” and to “ensure public participation and inclusion of historically marginalized voices.”

Furthermore, the SES states, “Public and community participation is important to ensure energy policy is informed by local knowledge, meets local needs and is viewed as legitimate by the local community.”

While these goals and objectives are easy to state and easy to agree with, it will be extremely difficult to deliver on their promises. Particularly if low-capacity and energy-dilute wind and solar projects requiring vast land areas continue to be the primary means for reducing electricity emissions and developers are allowed to continue using the EFSEC process to gain project approvals.

And like conservation policies aimed at protecting animals and ecosystems from industrial development in rural and sensitive natural habitats, the promises of the SES are not likely to make renewable energy development easier.

Policymakers need to confront the reality that clean-energy policies with strong preferences for wind and solar power are likely to face land-use conflicts as a significant limiting factor and that this project development uncertainty could contribute to the fragility of the Northwest grid as the scheduled rapid retirement of coal-fired power plants proceeds as planned and the strategy to overbuild wind and solar projects faces the prospect of project development gridlock in some areas.

This same uncertainty will likely be amplified further when you consider the potential pushback by citizens and agencies representing Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, states that continue to be identified by Washington policymakers as essential to the wind, solar and transmission line development necessary for achieving their aggressive clean-energy goals.

To gain additional perspective, Washington’s SES indicates a near-doubling of electricity consumption would be required by 2050 to significantly decarbonize the transportation sector and natural gas end uses.

Given Washington’s annual electrical energy consumption was recently 10,700 aMW, the SES vision would require more than 35,000 MW of wind power or more than 42,000 MW of Washington-based solar power to generate an equivalent amount of annual energy.

Of course, no single technology is being proposed as a solution, but when you consider wind farms on average require about 140 square miles of land for every 1,000 MW of installed capacity, a land area equivalent to 60 Seattle’s would have to be covered with industrial wind turbines to achieve just the incremental energy envisioned by the SES.

And while land use would be significant for solar power as well, the volumetric and potentially toxic waste stream based on the current size of a 300 W solar panel would cover a football field to a depth of over 1.6 miles.

If you do the same math to account for the 100,000 MW of solar capacity already installed in the U.S., the football field is already piled 4 miles high. While clearly it is not an apples-to-apples comparison, it is worth considering that according to the U.S. Department of Energy, all 83,000 metric tons of used fuel resulting from the entire history of our country’s commercial nuclear power production would fit on a football field at a depth of less than 30 feet.

I submit that if policymakers are serious about rapid decarbonization, we must come to terms with the scale of energy resources that will be required, as well as the looming land-use conflicts that beg for a serious discussion regarding technologies like advanced nuclear with a much higher energy density and vastly smaller footprint.

It continues to frustrate me that policymakers remain reticent to advance the dialogue on nuclear power when companies like NuScale have developed designs for a small modular reactor complex that could generate 720 MW of always on and non-emitting energy on a footprint of only 0.05 square miles.

And while Washington’s CETA and SES keep the door open for nuclear and other technology breakthroughs, I have yet to hear a policymaker or clean-energy visionary mention the simple fact that building large-scale, energy-dense power generating stations as close to population centers as possible would be more efficient and would minimize the need for long-distance transmission lines that are always met with opposition.

It was very encouraging for me to hear a recent presentation by Grant County PUD officials in which they acknowledged the unspoken environmental impacts and operational deficiencies of intermittent wind and solar as part of their decision to seriously consider advanced nuclear power. Yes, spent fuel from commercial nuclear power is consequential and challenging, but it is nearly impossible for me to imagine how deep decarbonization of the transportation sector and natural gas end uses is achieved without it.

While I am firmly in the “lovers of hydro camp”, we must acknowledge hydropower was the first variable generating resource and that with each passing year in the era of coal plant retirements and deepening dependence on variable wind and solar, we may be one El Niño drought away from a polar vortex-induced Northwest grid emergency.

And while laudable and necessary utility efforts are underway to try and overcome the shortcomings of balkanized reliability planning that for many years has counted on surplus inventories of dependable generating capacity, we cannot be certain the Western Resource Adequacy Program will quantify and help deliver adequate amounts of new physical generating resources in the time frame needed to cover deficiencies that may be revealed by simultaneous drought and extreme weather conditions.

I acknowledge the “laws of the land” appear to have written off cleaner-burning natural gas as a logical replacement for retiring coal plants, but if your clean-energy vision has your eyes looking to eastern Washington and Oregon and lands in adjacent states as the only solution to meeting policy mandates, keep in mind the eyes of us who live in these lands are looking back at you.

And we are wondering when your community will be ready to talk about the possibilities of forward-looking nuclear power and be willing to compromise and make some sacrifices of your “backyards” to be part of the solution.

Perhaps that will come when we come to terms with the unspoken costs of wind and solar power or the day our increasingly fragile grid breaks under the weight of too much wishful thinking and not enough reality.

Rick Dunn is the GM of Benton County PUD in central Washington.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Below is a sample letter sent to the commissioners.  If everyone on this list sent the commissioners an email telling them to oppose the HHH Wind Farm, they would sit up and take notice that there are people all over the surrounding area who oppose this project! You don’t need to send a long email; just a sentence or two will suffice.  Use your own words expressing your passion to stop this project.  Let’s flood their in-boxes by Monday before their Tuesday morning meeting (June 7)! Thanks so much!! 🤗

Dear Commissioner Delvin, McKay and Small, 

      Now that the EFSEC has approved a land use permit for the Horse Heaven Wind Farm, are you going to litigate to stop this project?  We expect our elected officials to stand up for the best interests of our community.  Your power has been cut out by EFSEC.  Litigation needs to occur to stand up for our community power. 

     The community does not want this project.  This project will be far too close to neighborhoods.  A farm of this magnitude should be in a rural area far, far away from where people live.  The wind farm will be devastating for our entire area for multiple reasons.  Can you imagine the dust bowl that this project alone will create once construction begins?  What about the fire dangers posed from the construction and maintenance of these proposed farms to our already drought forecast desert climate?  There is so much documentation about hazards and deaths posed to humans, birds, bats, animals, insects caused from turbine farms which are not even the size of these proposed turbines. 

     Concern for all these environmental issues go out the window when it comes to so-called “green energy” projects.  If a person off the street caused these environmental harms, they would be fined and/or jailed for killing eagles, protected (including endangered) animals, damaging the shrubsteppe including sensitive species, starting a fire through negligence, harming people, etc.  The energy will not be used in this area.  Our energy is already 93% carbon free and we currently export energy. 

     I strongly urge you to oppose this wind farm project through litigation. Thank you for your time and support to fight this wind farm,
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Going Green is more destructive to the Earth’s environment than meets the eye

Forwarded by Dr Robert Margulies

Prior to my career selling ‘High Tech Printed Circuit Boards’ (PCB’s), I started in sales with company in Long Island, NY, packaging Uninterrupted Power Supplies utilizing Nickel Cadmium Storage Batteries.Somehow, I still receive tech bulletins and publications from the industry., and recently received this and thought it may be interesting to others as well.What is a battery?’ I think Tesla said it best when they called it an Energy Storage System. That’s important.They do not make electricity – they store electricity produced elsewhere, primarily by coal, uranium, natural gas-powered plants, or diesel-fueled generators.  So, to say an EV is a zero-emission vehicle is not at all valid.Also, since forty percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. is from coal-fired plants, it follows that forty percent of the EVs on the road are coal-powered, do you see?Einstein’s formula, E=MC2, tells us it takes the same amount of energy to move a five-thousand-pound gasoline-driven automobile a mile as it does an electric one. The only question again is what produces the power? To reiterate, it does not come from the battery; the battery is only the storage device, like a gas tank in a car.There are two orders of batteries, rechargeable, and single-use. The most common single-use batteries are A, AA, AAA, C, D. 9V, and lantern types. Those dry-cell species use zinc, manganese, lithium, silver oxide, or zinc and carbon to store electricity chemically. Please note they all contain toxic, heavy metals.Rechargeable batteries only differ in their internal materials, usually lithium-ion, nickel-metal oxide, and nickel-cadmium. The United States uses three billion of these two battery types a year, and most are not recycled; they end up in landfills. California is the only state which requires all batteries be recycled. If you throw your small, used batteries in the trash, here is what happens to them.All batteries are self-discharging.  That means even when not in use, they leak tiny amounts of energy. You have likely ruined a flashlight or two from an old, ruptured battery. When a battery runs down and can no longer power a toy or light, you think of it as dead; well, it is not. It continues to leak small amounts of electricity. As the chemicals inside it run out, pressure builds inside the battery’s metal casing, and eventually, it cracks. The metals left inside then ooze out. The ooze in your ruined flashlight is toxic, and so is the ooze that will inevitably leak from every battery in a landfill. All batteries eventually rupture; it just takes rechargeable batteries longer to end up in the landfill.In addition to dry cell batteries, there are also wet cell ones used in automobiles, boats, and motorcycles. The good thing about those is, ninety percent of them are recycled. Unfortunately, we do not yet know how to recycle single-use ones properly.But that is not half of it.  For those of you excited about electric cars and a green revolution, I want you to take a closer look at batteries and also windmills and solar panels. These three technologies share what we call environmentally destructive embedded costs.Everything manufactured has two costs associated with it, embedded costs and operating costs. I will explain embedded costs using a can of baked beans as my subject.In this scenario, baked beans are on sale, so you jump in your car and head for the grocery store. Sure enough, there they are on the shelf for $1.75 a can. As you head to the checkout, you begin to think about the embedded costs in the can of beans.The first cost is the diesel fuel the farmer used to plow the field, till the ground, harvest the beans, and transport them to the food processor. Not only is his diesel fuel an embedded cost, so are the costs to build the tractors, combines, and trucks. In addition, the farmer might use a nitrogen fertilizer made from natural gas.Next is the energy costs of cooking the beans, heating the building, transporting the workers, and paying for the vast amounts of electricity used to run the plant. The steel can holding the beans is also an embedded cost. Making the steel can requires mining taconite, shipping it by boat, extracting the iron, placing it in a coal-fired blast furnace, and adding carbon. Then it’s back on another truck to take the beans to the grocery store. Finally, add in the cost of the gasoline for your car.A typical EV battery weighs one thousand pounds, about the size of a travel trunk.  It contains twenty-five pounds of lithium, sixty pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. Inside are over 6,000 individual lithium-ion cells.It should concern you that all those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each EV auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth’s crust for just  one  battery.”Sixty-eight percent of the world’s cobalt, a significant part of a battery, comes from the Congo. Their mines have no pollution controls, and they employ children who die from handling this toxic material. Should we factor in these diseased kids as part of the cost of driving an electric car?”I’d like to leave you with these thoughts. California is building the largest battery in the world near San Francisco, and they intend to power it from solar panels and windmills. They claim this is the ultimate in being ‘green,’ but it is not! This construction project is creating an environmental disaster. Let me tell you why.The main problem with solar arrays is the chemicals needed to process silicate into the silicon used in the panels. To make pure enough silicon requires processing it with hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, trichloroethane, and acetone. In addition, they also need gallium, arsenide, copper-indium-gallium- diselenide, and cadmium-telluride, which also are highly toxic. Silicone dust is a hazard to the workers, and the panels cannot be recycled. Windmills are the ultimate in embedded costs and environmental destruction. Each weighs 1688 tons (the equivalent of 23 houses) and contains 1300 tons of concrete, 295 tons of steel, 48 tons of iron, 24 tons of fiberglass, and the hard to extract rare earths neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. Each blade weighs 81,000 pounds and will last 15 to 20 years, at which time it must be replaced. We cannot recycle used blades. Sadly, both solar arrays and windmills kill birds, bats, sea life, and migratory insects.There may be a place for these technologies, but you must look beyond the myth of zero emissions. I predict EVs and windmills will be abandoned once the embedded environmental costs of making and replacing them become apparent.  “Going Green” may sound like the Utopian ideal and are easily espoused, catchy buzzwords, but when you look at the hidden and embedded costs realistically with an open mind, you can see that Going Green is more destructive to the Earth’s environment than meets the eye, for sure.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

WA Gov. Inslee ‘clearly doesn’t care what we think’ about wind turbines in the Tri-Cities

By Barry Bush, Tri-City Herald Opinion page from March 6, 2022

Does Governor Jay Inslee understand the energy industry? Those of us who live in the Tri-Cities do. Recently, the Governor made comments while visiting that suggest that wind turbines are the cure-all for all of our ails. He is wrong and he knows it. Let’s take a look at his comments one by one.

“Wind Energy is a way to reduce forest fires.” This is not true. The fact of the matter is that the more turbines you build the more transmission needs to be built. Next time you drive over Snoqualmie Pass take a look at the massive transmission lines that traverse the Cascade Mountains going east to west. These are similar to the ones that have caused massive fires in California over the last decade. More transmission lines equal more fires. “In the past year 250,000 salmon have died in the Columbia River.” This is a massively inflated number and is without context. Does this number include accidental early releases of smolts into the Columbia River? What about the bird deaths that will occur as a result of building a wind project in the middle of the Pacific Flyway? What about the Endangered Ferruginous Hawk that lives in the middle of the planned Horse Heaven Hills project? Does the Governor know that the state of Washington currently has a program designed to save the Ferruginous Hawk called the “Washington State Recovery Plan for the Ferruginous Hawk?”

“The visual impact is offset by not having children choking with asthma in the summer.” The governor and all of those who want the Horse Heaven Wind Project live hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles away. They will not have to look at them for the next 30 years. President Biden has been pushing offshore wind. This is due to the fact that it is not necessary to build more intrusive transmission lines, and we can site the turbines close to the load centers in Western Washington where the energy is needed. Why does Governor Inslee refuse to even consider putting turbines offshore? Why do those who live in Western Washington think it is permissible to destroy the Eastern Washington environment in order to satisfy their insatiable thirst for more energy? “They also create jobs.” It is true that the building of turbines creates temporary construction jobs. After the project is complete the project may employ up to 30 people for a nameplate 1150MW project that will produce energy about 28% of the time. These are jobs that pay a living wage, but very few jobs are actually created. The Horse Heaven Hills wind farm is expected to employ about .026 jobs per Megawatt produced. Compare this to the Columbia Generating Station, which generates about 1207MW and employs 1000 people or 1.20 jobs per MW. The Columbia Generating jobs are generally far more technical and pay much higher salaries. The Horse Heaven Wind Project is expected to erect up to 250 Space Needle-sized turbines that could be as much as double the height as the current turbines in South Kennewick. The project is also expected to take up land that is similar in size to the city of Seattle. The Columbia Generating Station has been picked as the location for small modular nuclear reactors. These reactors are base load plants that create energy all of the time. The Tri-Cities is a nuclear community with vast experience in the industry. These small modular energy projects will not require any more land as they will go on the existing site of Columbia Generating Station. The Governor clearly does not care what we think. Almost every local political entity has come out against the Horse Heaven Hills project. Not one has come out in support. Over 80% of the population is against the project. He simply does not value our opinion. If he did, he would have met with the city councils and electric utilities that oppose this project. He simply does not understand that the Horse Heaven Hills are our Yellowstone, and are valued as much to us as Mount Rainier is to Western Washington.

The Horse Heaven Wind Project is currently in front the Washington State Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council (EFSEC).The comments regarding this project from the Governor are out of line and were clearly meant to influence the council. Based on the governors’ actions, he should recuse himself from all things that relate to the Horse Heaven Hills project. It is clear that he has already rubber stamped the project without hearing from EFSEC.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

June 24, 2021 • California • Wind Power News

Shasta County denies proposed wind turbine project

Shasta county planning officials unanimously rejected a proposed wind farm, saying its negative impacts would outweigh any environmental benefits.

The Fountain Wind Project, proposed by Houston-based Connectgen, would include up to 72 wind turbines in East Shasta County. It was turned down by Shasta County Planning Commissioners at the end of a ten-hour-long meeting Tuesday night, with eight hours of public comment.

Paul Hellman is the county director of resource management. He said much of the opposition was from people not wanting the rural area to be dominated by the energy industry.

“The thought that there might even be more in the future, that this could become a real hub for this type of industry in that area,” said Hellman. “They really didn’t want to see any perpetuation of this kind of use in that area, being a very rural area.”

Hellman says that the region-wide push for clean energy shouldn’t fall solely on areas like Shasta County.

“I think it’s pretty clear to most people that live here that we definitely produce more than our fair share of clean energy already,” Hellman said. “You know, this area produces a lot more alternative energy than it consumes. And a lot of that is exported through the grid to other areas.”

The only major clean energy facility in Shasta County is the Hatchet Ridge Wind Farm, which has 44 turbines.

Many in opposition of the Fountain Wind project say more wind turbines would harm the bird population, many of which are culturally significant to nearby the Pit River Tribe. They also say the turbines would obstruct the view of the mountain range, which is culturally and traditionally important to the Pit River Tribe.

The Fountain Wind project would be run by Houston-based energy company Connectgen. In their proposal, they emphasized the tax revenue the county would gain as well as the job opportunities construction and maintenance would provide.

The company has four more days to decide whether to appeal the decision.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

Washington State’s Approaching Energy Crisis – Good Intentions Gone Wrong?

By Dr. James Conca, Forbes, June 17, 2021

Washington State has trouble on the horizon – trouble with its electrical grid. Trouble as in not being reliable. Trouble as in risk of rolling blackouts. The trouble stems from attempts to decarbonize our society. Getting rid of coal, oil and gas in generating electricity is the low-hanging fruit, but just getting rid of them without a realistic plan to replace them can do more harm than good. Seeing this trouble in Washington State, however, is scary. Besides usually having the lowest cost of electricity in the country, we have never had a big problem with reliability. Washington is one of the most decarbonized states in the union with utilities getting more than two-thirds of their electricity from hydro 70%, about 5% from nuclear, 4% from wind, 11% gas and 10% coal, with the latter from a single in-state coal plant as well as imports from neighboring states. The Washington State Legislature passed the Clean Energy Transformation Act (CETA) in 2019 which requires that all utilities eliminate coal by 2025 and provide carbon neutral electricity by 2030. Many stakeholders, utility officials and industry leaders warned that losing baseload sources like coal would increase the probability of brownouts and blackouts if demand increased, a likely occurrence in the next ten years.

“In our kind of zeal to remove CO2 emissions and aim for this 100% clean energy, we’re creating a reliability crisis, potentially,” Benton County PUD General Manager Rick Dunn told the Lens News. “We need to get more serious about securing our future supply of electricity.” Dunn warns that Washington faces a large gap between grid demand on the coldest and hottest days and the availability of dependable electrical generation over the next decade. After nearly two decades of relatively flat growth, both annual and peak electricity loads are forecasted to increase in the region by 5 or 6%, even after accounting for increased energy efficiency. A similar warning came from the Northwest Power Pool. They conducted a study which showed that the situation could bring an end to a period of stability dating back to the end of the ENRON-precipitated Western energy crisis of 2000. The Northwest Power Pool considers an outage risk of <5% to be safe, but the study warns that the state faces a 26% probability of an outage from insufficient generation to meet an increased load. That increased load-to-generation ratio will come from the loss of remaining coal plants, an increase in electric vehicle use and a slow increase in population.

On top of this, there is a serious push to decommission four hydroelectric dams on the lower Snake River, which would put further strain on the grid by removing over 8 billion kWh/year of reliable green energy, requiring over seven thousand MW of new wind turbines, as many as presently exist in the entire State, or two new gas plants, or one new pack of small modular nuclear reactors. CETA requires utilities to gradually shift toward clean energy sources such as wind. However, these lack both the reliability and predictability of fossil-fuel resources such as coal and natural gas and require back-up sources for when they fail to generate. Gas and hydro presently provide that backup in the Pacific Northwest, while gas provides it almost everywhere else in America. It’s not that CETA prohibits the use of natural gas, but it does discourage it.

On an annual basis, wind power plants generally generate energy equivalent to about 25 to 30% of what they would if the wind blew constantly and the generators were producing at their maximum nameplate rating. By comparison, our nuclear plant generates well over 90% of its maximum nameplate rating year after year. But it’s even worse. According to the most recent E3 Northwest Resource Adequacy study, The effective capacity contribution of Washington’s 7,100 MW of wind power that was in place in 2018 in the Pacific Northwest was determined to be only 7% of its nameplate capacity, that is, only 500 MW of wind power, out of 7,100 MW, can be expected to show up on the coldest days in the region. This incredibly low contribution of wind was confirmed in a winter power market price excursion that happened in February/March 2019. Compared to the 100% for nuclear, gas and coal, wind cannot be relied upon in the cold of winter or the heat of summer. According to E3, retiring 3,000 MW of coal will require 8,000 MW of new firm capacity by 2030 to maintain reliability. Building more wind turbines just won’t do it. As Dunn quips, praying for mild weather and abundant snow and rain for hydro isn’t an adequate plan when it comes to keeping the lights on.

We use to plan pretty well in the past for future energy crises when all we had to do was be sure we had enough energy at a reasonable price. We weren’t hamstrung by the push to decarbonize. It is not enough to just put up wind and solar without planning for the infrastructure needed to efficiently employ them, or without the hydro and small modular nuclear plants that should be backing them up instead of gas or the dream of sufficient batteries that is decades away. Dunn sees natural gas and small modular reactors as important energy sources as the state transitions away from coal, but the state Department of Commerce’s Energy Strategy envisions a ramp-up in wind. In one scenario, electricity demand grows 90% from 2020 to 2050.

While today the state exports electricity, that scenario also anticipates Washington will become a net importer by 2050, in which 43% of its electricity will come from multiple states such as Montana and Wyoming. But all of the strategy’s decarbonization scenarios expect wind to eventually become the dominant energy source in the Western United States, an absurd endpoint that just invites rolling blackouts and grid failure. If the wind isn’t blowing in much of the west, then where would the energy come from? Dunn is skeptical of such a wind-future. As is anyone familiar with wind at high penetration values. The problem is wind power can displace some of the energy produced by fossil fuels but it cannot provide the dependable capacity needed to keep the grid reliable over a wide range of conditions. And when you consider the abundant but highly variable clean hydro in the Pacific Northwest and how drought conditions are the predominant driver of blackout risk, it makes little sense to shut down reliable fossil-fuel while deepening the dependence on another highly variable resource like wind power.

This is evident in Benton County where a proposed wind farm project of 244 super-large wind turbines on the ridgeline of Horse Heaven Hills would do little to help the state keep the grid reliable. It has also drawn protests from the local community where hydro and nuclear power dominate its over 90% clean power supply portfolio. At the same time, the use of out-of-state wind energy would require new transmission lines built across Washington and through mountainous terrain and vast natural landscapes, something that continues to be shot down by the public every time it’s proposed.

The other issue is that clean energy debates are so politicized. “When we bring up the issue of reliability…sometimes (people) interpret that as we’re against environmental issues,” said Dunn. “That is just so not the case, but sometimes they interpret it like that. What we try to do is connect the dots between decarbonization, environmental compliance, renewable energy, and grid reliability so we can have affordable, reliable, and environmentally sustainable generation. Sometimes that gets lost in the message.”

If this kind of problem can happen in Washington State with one of the lowest carbon footprints of any state and one of the most aggressive decarbonization plans in the world, then other states had better beware.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

Seek compromise before siting solar, wind farms in rural Washington

By The Seattle Times/ Northwest Editorials in The Tri-City Herald, May 16, 2021

Wind and solar energy resources have proven easy to love — from afar. Many city, county and state government agencies have flocked to embrace renewable electrical power with little to no carbon emissions. But residents in the wide-open spaces where wind and solar farms are supplanting food crops complain of new landscape blight.

Both sides need to hear each other out.

The hard reality of the climate crisis requires building cleaner electricity sources to cut carbon emissions. That means wind farms offshore and on ridgelines, and solar farms taking over acreage from scrub brush or cropland. 

But residents who love rural Washington’s bright open spaces deserve better than a “get used to it” scolding as their landscape changes. The transitions to channel sunshine and canyon winds into the power grid must be managed with sensitivity. The shift to cleaner energy is too essential to lose progress to a deepening cultural clash.

As the Times’ Hal Bernton reported, wind and solar development east of the Cascades pits neighbors against each other in several communities as power suppliers dangle offers to lease acreage. In March, Klickitat County commissioners passed a moratorium on solar developments west of Goldendale, and Benton County commissioners unanimously opposed a large wind turbine project for the Horse Heaven Hills.

Washington state officials need to cultivate better buy-in for the green energy future Gov. Jay Inslee touts. The Legislature recently approved a promising pilot that, if successful, could lead to expanding clean electricity sources. The Washington State University energy program is conducting a state-funded $500,000 study to map where solar development in Washington’s Columbia Basin would incite the least conflict. The approach is a California import, where it showed it can be successful. A 2015 project evaluated the 9.5 million-acre San Joaquin Valley for places where solar farms might be accepted by talking to landowners and other people with local interests. The effort identified 5% of the valley — 470,000 acres, a little more land than all of Thurston County — as sites where solar development was least likely to provoke conflict. 

The Washington State energy project is expected to produce a similar guide to low-controversy sites for solar development by mid-2023. WSU energy director Todd Currier said the project could be replicated in “one or two more” sections of the state if successful. “We’ll do the Northwest thing, get some people around the table and talk,” he said in an interview, “and maybe have some positive outcomes.”

Inslee and the Legislature should watch this project closely and encourage participation. Solar developers need a road map of where they might build on friendly terms. Communities should have influence on where energy projects could be tolerable. And over time, building the machinery to harness solar and wind energy where people find it less jarring will broaden its acceptance. State law gives Inslee the power to override local government decisions on solar projects, as Klickitat County Commissioner Dan Christopher lamented.

“Even if we don’t want it, you can force it into our backyard,” he said. But exercising that power risks worsening the already existent blowback against solar. A turn away from solar development would hurt efforts to reduce carbon emissions and income possibilities for owners of low-profit crop acreages. The political and environmental solution is to help clean energy find where it can fit in best. This transition means too much to be botched.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

The Tri-City Chamber of Commerce conducted a public opinion survey on the Horse Heaven Hills wind farm project from March 25 to April 8, 2021. The results contradict Scout’s claim that their public opinion surveys show that most people in the Tri-Cities are in favor of the wind farm project.

Survey data also reveals community concerns regarding the level of impact that specific Horse Heaven Wind Project outcomes (such as viewshed, turbine disposal, wildlife, etc.) will have on the region. Scout Clean Energy is seeking permit authorization through the Washington State Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council (EFSEC) for the Horse Heaven Wind Project.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

Horse Heaven Wind Farm leadership responds to damaging polls, public opposition

By Dylan Carter | Morgan Murphy Media | April 23, 2021 

BENTON COUNTY, Wash. – Ever since the Horse Heaven Wind Farm was first proposed, it’s been a point of contention amongst Benton County community members. Opposition intensified when the Tri-City Regional Chamber of Commerce conducted a public opinion survey that saw 78 percent of 2,200 respondents express concerns about the project.

As a result of their findings, the Chamber of Commerce took an official stance against Horse Heaven Wind Farm and sent a letter detailing their concerns to Governor Jay Inslee and the State of Washington Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council (EFSEC). In it, they listed the following as the top five reasons for concern based on their polling:

• Viewshed – Destruction of a wide swath of the natural land and view scape
• Decommissioning and Turbine Disposal – Waste disposal problems
• Tourism – Obstructed views are detrimental to tourism
• Birds and Wildlife – Obstructed migratory bird path and wildlife damage
• Flashing Lights – Light pollution via red, flashing, aviation warning lights at night

This wouldn’t be the first time that community members expressed their concerns either. Hundreds of people attended a virtual information session on March 30, in which representatives of Scout Clean Energy (the team behind the wind farm) listened to community feedback.

As a result of such backlash, Scout rescinded its request for an expedited review process. However, the team isn’t ready to scrap the project as their own research conflicts with that gathered by the Chamber of Commerce. Dave Kobus, who is the Lead Project Manager for the proposal, issued the following statement:

“We were surprised and disappointed to learn that the Chamber of Commerce has taken a position against our project. Unfortunately, there is a great deal of misinformation regarding our project and wind energy in general which can lead to concern and confusion about what is being proposed, and how the local community might be impacted, Kobus said.”

Given the group’s stated mission of promoting regional prosperity and being a catalyst for business growth, we hope that the Chamber will continue a dialogue with Scout to learn more about the economic benefits this project will bring to the region,” added Kobus. 

The Horse Heaven facility will combine wind, solar and battery energy storage and at full build-out, will bring up to 1,150 megawatts of clean energy to the region – while also generating local tax revenue, employment opportunities and economic infusion for regional businesses.

The project represents a total capital investment of more than $1.7 billion to the Tri-Cities region. Construction and operations will create jobs and increase demand for local businesses that provide construction materials, equipment and supplies, as well as lodging, food and fuel. 

Kobus also provided statistics from polls conducted by EMC Research, a national research firm specializing in polling, focus groups, and public opinion research. He says that Kobus conducted a live telephone survey of 500 registered voters in Benton County that is meant to reflect the opinion of the general public.

The results of those surveys showed a very different reaction to the Horse Heaven Wind Farm than displayed by the poll run by the Chamber of Commerce. According to metrics from the EMC poll, 54% of Benton County voters expressed some level of support for the project during initial polls. They returned to voters after providing further information about the project and saw support increase to 61% compared with 34% opposition and 4% of voters who didn’t provide an opinion on the topic.

Additionally, EMC’s research showed that 80% of voters think that government support for renewable energy is important and that 70% think that wind energy is important. The Horse Heaven Wind Farm would place up to 244 turbines, two solar arrays and battery storage systems across the Horse Heaven Hills in Benton County.

Where do you stand on the Horse Heaven Wind Farm?

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

WA state Fish & Wildlife concerned about huge Tri-Cities wind farm. Public weighs in

By Annette Cary, Tri-City Herald, MARCH 31, 2021

The proposed Horse Heaven Hills Wind Farm just south of the Tri-Cities would be so large that its impacts on important wildlife would be difficult, if not impossible, to avoid, says the Washington state Department of Fish and Wildlife.

While the state agency is still preparing formal written comments, a staff member gave a brief overview of its concerns during Tuesday night’s meeting of the Washington state Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council. More than 200 people attended the virtual meeting, and the agency received more than 300 comments before the meeting.

Scout Clean Energy of Colorado is proposing a wind farm on a 112-square-mile clean energy production site, with wind turbines that would stretch along 24 miles of the Horse Heaven Hills from south of Finley to south of Benton City. The developed area of the project would cover about 10 square miles. The most likely option it is considering would include 244 turbines standing almost 500 feet tall, with a second proposed option including 150 turbines standing up to 670 feet. That’s more than 60 feet taller than the Seattle Space Needle.

Officials with both Benton County and Visit Tri-Cities said Tuesday they opposed the project. Comments from others were both pro and con. Union officials said the project would provide much-needed construction jobs and some long-term maintenance jobs.

A landowner said that the turbines would be on land already farmed and those fighting the proposal are trying to stand in the way of their neighbors. Much of the land to be leased for the project is now used for dry land wheat or pasture. Another farmer said fears of noise, shadows from the moving turbines and red flashing lights have been blown out of perspective because the turbines would be concentrated on the south side of the Horse Heaven Hills, away from Tri-Cities views.

Those opposed said the short-term economic benefits from construction would be outweighed by the long-term harm the project could do, including to the area’s tourism economy and quality of life. “People in Benton County and the Tri-City region care deeply about preserving their ridges and skylines for future generations,” said Benton County Commissioner Will McKay. Others speculated that the power produced by the wind farm, which is proposed to include solar and battery storage components, would be exported to areas, including in California, that have banned wind farms there. Imagine a panorama of 244 turbines the size of the Space Needle lined up from Seattle to Tacoma, said Markus Stauffer of the Tri-Cities’ Save Our Ridges. “We don’t wish that on Seattle, so please don’t do that to the Tri-Cities,” he said.

The meeting Tuesday night was one of the early steps toward a decision by the Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council on whether to recommend the wind farm be permitted. Gov. Jay Inslee will make the final decision. More opportunities for public comment are expected, in part because Scout Clean Energy this week withdrew its application to have a decision on a permit for the wind farm fast tracked after hearing concerns from community member that could limit public involvement. A full environmental review, called in environmental impact statement, still must be done.

WILDLIFE WORRIES

The Horse Heaven Hills has some of the last remaining uninterrupted shrub steppe and natural grasslands in Benton County, testified Michael Ritter of Kennewick, the statewide technical lead for wind and solar development for the Washington state Department of Fish and Wildlife. The proposed site of the project and its length from east to west puts its turbines, transmission lines and solar arrays close to or crossing over many of the draws and canyons with native shrub steppe and grassland habitat, he said. The ridgeline represents important connectivity among natural areas, he said. “The immense size of the project along the Horse Heaven Hills ridgeline and … impact to an important wildlife and habitat connectivity corridor will be difficult if not impossible to mitigate,” he said.

TOURISM CONCERNS

Visit Tri-Cities is concerned that the project could cause significant harm to the area’s tourism economy and business investments, Visitors spend more than $500 million annually in Benton and Franklin counties, said Michal Novakovich, president of the organization. Novakovich said a hotel developer told him he had dropped a hotel project because the proposed wind project would be in the hotel’s line of sight. Wind turbines would not only rob the region of scenic beauty, but would create a perception of a windy destination, Novakovich said. The rolling vineyards and estate wineries make up “incredible views” of the Horse Heaven Hills in the Red Mountain American Viticultural Area, he said. The area’s rugged desert hills are a draw not only to wine lovers, but also to those interested in exploring and understanding areas carved by ice age floods.

WINE INDUSTRY

The wine industry also could be harmed, said state Rep. Mary Dye, R-Pomeroy. The Horse Heaven Hills has 27% of Washington state’s total grape production and produces some of the state’s most coveted wines, she said. In west Texas, wind turbines have been found to raise temperatures about three-quarters of a degree and change the microclimate of the land, she said. “I’m very concerned about the impact this change could make. It could devastate some of the area’s most important wine production areas,” she said.

BENTON COUNTY OPPOSED

The Benton County Commission submitted a letter to the state council on Tuesday saying that the project would not comply with goals and policies of the Benton County Comprehensive plan or the criteria needed to obtain a county conditional use permit. The county has received more than 400 calls and emails from residents on the Horse Heaven Wind Farm. About 90% of those contacting the county oppose the project, McKay said. The turbines would be visible from up to 80% of the land within 10 miles of the project, including from much of the Tri-Cities, he said. It would be just four miles south of Kennewick, part of one of the largest urban areas in Eastern Washington, he said.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

Letter by Frank Kliever to EFSEC

Frank was asked by the judge after the EFSEC hearing to send details about the Horse Heaven Hills American Viticultural Area

The Horse Heaven Hills American Viticultural Area (AVA) has the single largest wine making facility in Washington State, the Columbia Crest Winery owned by Chateau Ste. Michelle. Washington is seeing a growing economic benefit from the grapes grown in the extremely special soil and environment of the Horse Heaven Hills AVA. How special is the soil? Wikipedia: “The sandy loam vineyard soils create a nearly inhospitable environment for the phylloxera louse, which may be one of the reasons why the phylloxera epidemic has not ravaged the Washington wine industry as it has the Californian and French wine industries in the past.” 

Woodinville, Bothell and other Western Washington cities have seen over 100 new wineries and tasting rooms open up over the past few years in a move that could eventually unseat California as the top producer of the best wines in the US, thanks to our Eastern Washington grapes. The Cabernet Sauvignon grapes grown in the Horse Heaven Hills include vintages which scored the rare 100-point rating from Robert Parker’s The Wine Advocate. Only 15 other wines in the US, all from California gained that prestigious score. Wine business owners in Western Washington refer to the Horse Heaven Hills as if it were some sacred place one would take a pilgrimage to and enjoy the best of what they have trucked yearly to their wine pressing facilities for bottling in Western Washington. 

Why would we even consider putting a wind/solar farm within the Horse Heaven Hills and cast massive shadows from the 500 foot and higher monstrous bird-killing wind machines over a 20+ mile stretch and cover thousands of acres of the best south-facing precious land with black plastic panels, roads and unsightly infrastructure? Why would we even consider effectively taking away massive amounts of the best unique land from the future of our wine industry as vintners ramp up for more production over the coming decades? Wind/solar farms want what grapes like, wind and sun. But it is the soil of the Horse Heaven Hills AVA that makes it so special for the grapes and other similar agricultural products, while it is meaningless for a wind/solar farm.  There is no compatibility between massive wind/solar farms and premium vineyards and agriculture. So, there is no mitigation of this fact except to find another location for the wind farm, like offshoring the turbines as President Biden wants to do, and using land that is not in our precious Horse Heaven Hills AVA for solar installations.

What is the best-use future of The Horse Heaven Hills? It is a small, yet extremely important sliver of land in Washington State.

Governor Inslee should use tax credits to boost the vintners and new business owners so they can spread out on the best of the precious open plantable land available in the Horse Heaven Hills sooner rather than later, boosting the economy for the benefit of all Washington taxpayers and the creation of thousands of long-term jobs throughout the State. Wine businesses from around the world could be drawn to this special area adding even more of a boost to the Washington State economy.

Imagine a future for Benton County and Washington State with entrepreneurs developing new vineyards and elegant wineries highlighting and adding pastoral beauty in our treasured Horse Heaven Hills. Governor Inslee could become known as a wise visionary protecting our natural resources while creating economic growth and strength for the entire State of Washington.

Thank you for your consideration.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

Nuclear Power Continues To Break Records In Safety And Generation

James Conca, Forbes Magazine, 3/25/2021

Energy Northwest in Richland, WA, which operates the only nuclear power plant in the region, the Columbia Generating Station, has earned the American Public Power Association’s Safety Award of Excellence for safe operating practices in 2020. The agency earned first place in the category for utilities with 1 million to 3.9 million worker-hours.

It is always surprising to hear the public and anti-nuke activists repeating the willfully ignorant ideology that nuclear is unsafe. It turns out to be the safest of all energy sources by any measure and in any study.

At the same time, nuclear has the highest rate of electricity generation of any energy source, producing the amount of electricity it’s suppose to produce over 90% of the time even in years when they have outages for fuel replacement. Energy Northwest is usually over 95% capacity factor (cf = power produced over a year divided by the maximum power that could be produced). On the other hand, coal averages about 55%, natural gasabout 60%, hydro about 44%, wind 35% and solar 25%. And nuclear takes so little fuel, produces so little waste, which we know what to do with, and just keeps going and going.

Energy Northwest also operates the White Bluffs Solar Station (38.7 kW with a cf = 15%), the Packwood Lake Hydroelectric Project (27.5 MW with a cf = 38%) and the Nine Canyon Wind Project (96 MW with a cf = 31%). The combined output of these non-fossil fuel systems exceeds 10 billion kWhrs/year, enough energy to power a city the size of Seattle, having a total capacity of 1,300 MW with an average combined capacity factor of >90%.

Washington State’s chamber of commerce, the Association of Washington Business, has also named Energy Northwest its Employer of the Year a few years ago.

“We are proud and thankful for this APPA recognition. Energy Northwest values employee safety above all else,” said Brad Sawatzke, Energy Northwest CEO. “We all recognize the importance of going home healthy to our families each day, and this drives our dedication to safety.” 

About 330 utilities from across the nation enters the annual safety awards. Entrants are placed in categories according to their number of worker-hours and ranked based on the most incident-free records during 2020. The incidence rate, used to judge entries, is based on the number of work-related reportable injuries or illnesses and the number of worker-hours during 2020, as defined by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

 “Utilities that receive an APPA Safety Award have demonstrated that they have made the health and safety of their employees a core value,” said Brandon Wylie, chair of APPA’s Safety Committee and Director of Training & Safety, during APPA’s annual Engineering & Operations Virtual Conference March 24. “Designing and maintaining a top-notch utility safety program takes a lot of hard work and commitment. These utilities and their communities should be very proud.” 

The Safety Awards have been held annually for the last 60 years. APPA is the voice of not-for-profit, community-owned utilities that power 2,000 towns and cities nationwide.

Energy Northwest also operates the White Bluffs Solar Station (38.7 kW with a cf = 15%), the Packwood Lake Hydroelectric Project (27.5 MW with a cf = 38%) and the Nine Canyon Wind Project (96 MW with a cf = 31%). The combined output of these non-fossil fuel systems exceeds 10 billion kWhrs/year, enough energy to power over a million homes, or a city the size of Seattle, having a total capacity of 1,300 MW with an average combined capacity factor of >90%.

Not only is Energy Northwest safe and productive, it’s part of a non-profit public agency, formed as a Washington State joint operating agency in 1957. Electricity from Columbia Generating Station is distributed to 92 utilities across the Pacific Northwest as part of the Bonneville Power Administration.

All for between 4.7 – 5.2 ¢/kWh now and for the next 30 years. Can’t get much more reliable, safe or cost-effective than that.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

Seattle Democrat’s tweet mocking Tri-Cities hurts wind farm debate

BY THE TRI-CITY HERALD EDITORIAL BOARD , 3/28/2021

Tri-Cities’ opposition to the Horse Heaven Wind Farm recently caught the attention of a Seattle Democrat who went on Twitter to ridicule the community, highlighting an urban attitude that rankles those of us living in Eastern Washington. 

The tweet by Derek Richards, president of Young Democrats of Washington, said, “Re- publicans against the Wind Farm say they don’t want the high pay- ing jobs in their community because of the ‘visual pollution’ the wind farm would cause. Here is a visual of the area in question.” He included a photo of a Tri-City agricultural field, with homes dotting the base of rolling hills in the background — apparently mocking anyone who would see beauty in the scene. He also went on to say that: “The best part is there are miles and miles of that view all over the place in that part of the state. So one windfarm will not deprive you of being able to enjoy views like that.” 

There you have it. 

Eastern Washington doesn’t matter. The view is the same everywhere — and there is so much of it — what’s wrong with cluttering some of it up with wind turbines? And the people who live there? Well, boosting clean energy is more important than what they think — even though they have to live with the decisions made by people who don’t have a stake in the game. 

Scout Clean Energy’s plan to put wind turbines the size of the Space Needle along 24 miles of ridgelines south of the Tri-Cities is a piece of a bigger issue for Eastern Washington. 

It’s not only about the wind project. It’s also about the ability for a local community to decide for itself what happens to it. Scout Clean Energy of Colorado has submitted an application for the Horse Heaven Wind Farm to the Washington state Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council rather than to Benton County. That means the council and Gov. Jay Inslee will have the authority to approve the project regardless of what Tri-City officials and residents say. The whole process feels like a way to get around local control, and it’s disappointing. 

It’s not like the Tri- Cities is shirking its duty to support clean energy production. Between nuclear power from the Columbia Generating Station at Hanford, three solar projects, the Nine Canyon Wind Project (yes, we already have one wind farm) and power from Ice Harbor Dam, the Tri-City area alone generates enough power for more than 1 million homes or a city the size of Seattle and much of its metropolitan area. It’s 100% clean energy and it’s more than our own community requires. That seems like a pretty solid contribution to the state’s goal of reducing carbon emissions. In addition, 40% of Washington state’s power is produced within a 100- mile radius of the Tri- Cities, according to TRI- DEC. 

So the idea that people who don’t live in the Tri- Cities will decide whether to approve a wind project that the community doesn’t need and in general does not want is a huge frustration. 

Yes, there are property owners who will make good money leasing their land to Scout Clean Energy, and there are union workers who are in favor of the project because it will provide them temporary jobs. But this is not a win-win situation. 

At a recent public hearing in Benton County, most Tri-Citians complained about how ugly wind turbines are, and how they will be an eyesore on the hills. Many worried their property values will decline. 

Seeing a tweet from a Seattle Democrat essentially saying the Tri-City area is already ugly so there shouldn’t be a problem only adds to the divisiveness between the two sides of the state. 

The state council plans its own public hearing on the Scout Clean Energy plan on Tuesday, March 30. Tri-Citians must participate — if only to emphasize how much they value their community. 

There is no doubt some people in the region will come out ahead if the wind farm is approved — and we understand what the project will mean to some hardworking farmers. Nevertheless, if the wind farm goes through, it’s a safe bet most Tri- Citians will look at them and see a symbol of West Side indifference to Eastern Washington. What a shame, to have that kind of visual reminder of disregard from one side of the state to the other. 

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

GUEST OPINION , Tri-City Herald, 3/28/2021

Wind farm will devalue hydro 

BY MIKE PAOLI 

Gov. Jay Inslee will soon decide if the relatively new wine country of Horse Heaven Hills is a good fit for a 27-mile swath of wind turbines ranging from 500 to 670 feet high. Power from these goliaths of new wind tech will meet his clean energy goals for western Washington. It will also cause irreparable environmental and economic harm to our community for the next half century. 

So why here? Because they don’t want it there. Case in point: In 2011 Energy Northwest pursued a wind project on the west side, for the west side. Their site centered on a former gravel quarry in Pacific County, right alongside communication towers and commercial logging operations. The location offered advantages of high winter winds and readily accessible transmission lines. Ecological studies, however, estimated the pro- posed 27 wind turbines would kill one marbled murrelet, an environ- mentally threatened bird, every two years, or five murrelets each decade. It was the leverage opponents needed. Political strings were pulled, and working closely with the state Department of Natural Resources, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service effectively killed the project by requiring cost prohibitive mitigation strategies. 

Colorado-based Scout Clean Energy is taking lessons from that failed attempt. There will be no effort to stake turbines — some 65 feet taller than Seattle’s Space Needle — along the I-5 corridor where they are needed. Nor will Scout advertise ecological studies, assuming they’ve done some. As a rule, the taller the tur- bine the deadlier to wild- life, and 150 to 245 of these massive machines will take out their fair share of birds. Statistically, deaths will mainly be songbirds, followed by day-hunters such as hawks, eagles and peregrine falcons. 

Efforts to win local hearts — a webinar, a chat on KONA radio, and local ads extolling the project’s tax benefit — have been minimal. Scout instead made an end-run on the county by applying direct- ly to the Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council in Olympia, where the final decision will rest with the governor. To be fair, in January a Scout representative said the project could be fully permitted through Benton County, but that would prove “burdensome” on local agencies. The kindness of this gesture appears lost on 90% of residents who spoke out at the county’s recent town meeting. 

During that meeting, a Scout spokesperson said the project “needs to be close to a power market with a developing need.” The reference was to investor-owned utilities, such as Puget Sound Energy in Bellevue and Pacific Power in Portland, which must bolster their clean- energy portfolios to meet state carbon-reduction mandates. Our local utilities already meet these mandates — we’re flush with hydro and nuclear. Southeastern Washington won’t need additional energy until at least 2030, and by then advanced nuclear should be in construction. Cheap natural gas can readily serve as a stop-gap if needed. 

We could certainly use millions of dollars in annual tax payments, a short-term construction boon and 45 long-term maintenance jobs. But the wind farm will take far more than it gives. It will slice through the view shed of wine country,  and skirt along miles of urban growth boundaries specifically designed to preserve and protect natural and agricultural lands. Property and home values along the boundaries will plummet. Destroying the scenic vistas of these high, rolling hills (and a bald eagle here and there) will sacrifice tens of millions of dollars in community growth and tourism potential. 

Market competition from this government- subsidized power will also devalue our local hydro assets. The impact will be higher-cost electric bills. This competitive bite will hit us each spring, when wind tends to blow and is needed least. Ex- cess energy from Scout’s project will be available to the market at the same time our public utility districts are selling surplus hydro to help sustain our low residential energy costs. Plus, there are no transmission lines in place to move the power — an- other cost recouped through our electric bills. This project, as Dr. Jim Conca recently wrote, “will make someone out of state a lot of money.” The instate value will be passed to west-side utility customers, and we will pay for it all. 

The state council’s public hearing on Tuesday, March 30, is our last best chance to tell Olympia, and the governor, what we think of this scheme. Ben- ton and Franklin residents need to participate in that meeting — we won’t get another shot. 

Let’s tell state leaders we will not support a venture in our backyard designed to solve a problem in their backyard; we do not accept the notion that sending energy value to our west- side neighbors is worth forfeiting the economic and environmental health of our own community. 

Mike Paoli is a graduate of the University of Idaho’s utility executive course, and was Chief Communication Officer for Energy Northwest. He owns Tri-Cities Public Relations in Kennewic 

___________________________________________________________________________________________________W

Wind project a great opportunity for Horse Heaven farmer

BY CHRISTOPHER BUBBA WILEY , Tri-City Herald, 3/28/2021

Dear Residents of Tri Cities, WA, 

In light of the ongoing debate about the Scout Wind Farm Project, I think it is time you are introduced to your neighboring community in the Horse Heaven Hills. 

Yes, you heard that right. There are people that live in this dry, barren, and seemingly isolated plateau which borders the south of Tri-Cities. You see, these hills are more than an afternoon escape for your bike rides and hikes. This is more than a place where you take scenic Sunday drives. This is more than the home of beautiful sunsets featuring Mount Adams, Rainier, and Hood. This is more than the scenic view from your backyard. 

And to another group of Tri-Cities residents: This is more than a place for you to dump trash, un- wanted dogs, or dead livestock when you think nobody is looking. This is more than a place for your high school kids to take their girlfriends on Friday night. This is more than “the home of the Baby Graves” or “the place where the dust comes from.” This is more than a place for you to drive your Jeep and tear up a freshly seeded field. This is more than a place for you to go shooting and start wild- fires in July. This is more than the place where the hillbillies live. 

This is the home of a family based community, which is very old. My family has been here since 1946. Many others were original homesteaders here, who took a chance breaking out farm ground in a desert. We are proud to be dry land wheat farmers living in some of the driest non-irrigated farm- land in the world. This is the home of people whose neighbors live miles away, not city blocks. 

This is the home of people who get excited when they see rain clouds for the first time in weeks and are often disappointed when they change their path at the last minute, leaving their crops dry and thirsty. This is the home of people who do without modern luxuries like wells or city water service, sew- age service, or reliable high speed internet. 

This is the home of people who started a volunteer fire department because they watched their friend burn up in a tractor trying to save his crop from wildfire. This is the home of people who face frequent hardships such as drought, blizzards, dust storms, poor crop prices, constantly rising input costs, and increasing restrictions on how we make a living. This is the home of people who watch housing developments pop up on land which used to be the farm of their grand- father’s best friend. This is the home of people who patch up their 20-year-old harvester, their 75-year- old plow, and their 60- year-old planter year after year; because the new technology coming out just isn’t designed for such a small niche market. This is a community of survivors; forgotten by the world and ever shrinking, but not going anywhere anytime soon. And lately we are feeling rather betrayed by our neighbors in Tri-Cities. 

You see, we have recently been given a great opportunity. An opportunity to diversify our farm operation, increase our land value, and raise our bottom line. An opportunity to insulate ourselves from unstable crop markets. An opportunity to maybe update some of our farm equipment and hope- fully enter the 21st century one of these days. An opportunity to not be quite so reliant on rain and financial aid to send our kids to college. An opportunity that will maybe let my father retire someday, instead of working himself to an early death like his father and grandfather before him.  

The name of this opportunity is the Scout Clean Energy wind farm. Now I’m not here to argue about how much energy these turbines will produce, where they will send it, or how they will store it. I’m not going to tell you I think they look pretty. But I will say shame on you for pretending to care about the beauty of an area that up until now, you have treated as your personal playground, your dumpster, a shortcut to Oregon, or the future site of more houses. 

Shame on you for condemning construction on a ridge while hoping to someday build a mansion on the very same hill slope. Shame on you for being this upset about something that at the very most, would be a slight change to your backyard view. Be- cause this same thing would be an absolute life changing blessing to your neighboring community. 

In closing, please don’t feel this was written to bash the Tri-Cities. The Tri-Cities is a great community, which the Horse Heaven community bene- fits from as well. Every once in a while when we get a wild hair, we do get off our tractors and come to town. And guess where we go to buy groceries and clothing? Guess whose restaurants and small businesses we love to support? Yes that’s right, we deeply care for, respect, and support the Tri-Cities community. We are just asking for the same in return. May we all grow and thrive together. 

Editor:

We get it: farmer Christopher Bubba Wiley likes the idea of a steady paycheck from Scout. Sorry for all the problems we are causing when we drive/hike/bike through your hills but remember, we really love the Horse Heaven Hills where you live. How about this compromise: you sell us a small parcel of your land when the time is right for you for one of the subdivisions with a view that we all love. You get a hefty check, you can send your kids to college, etc. and we get to look at the beautiful HHH with a few extra houses. Alternatively, we hate the hills with turbines, and you can’t sell a parcel of your land for subdivisions. Also, I do worry about living so close to these monsters, for health reasons.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

The Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation opposes the HHH wind farm project because of its visual impact on this historic landscape.

Will Inslee sacrifice Tri-Cities skyline for clean energy? Wind project will tell | Editorial

BY THE TRI-CITY HERALD EDITORIAL BOARD

MARCH 19, 2021 12:10 PM

Colorado-based Scout Clean Energy is asking the state of Washington to approve a wind farm and solar project that would stretch along 24 miles of ridgeline along the Horse Heaven Hills south of the Tri-Cities.

BY BOB BRAWDY

The thought of turning our beloved Horse Heaven Hills into a pin cushion for massive wind turbines breaks the hearts of most Tri-Citians. Yet, in the end, will our sadness be a factor when Gov. Jay Inslee decides whether to approve Scout Clean Energy’s application for its wind project? That’s the big question.

Inslee is known for his clean-energy goals, and while we support fighting climate change and reducing carbon emissions, many of us in Eastern Washington are tired of feeling like we’re the sacrificial spot for that agenda.

We realize wind projects are bound to be built in our state, but must a project of this magnitude be constructed so close to a major population center?

And, we might add, it’s a population center that relies heavily on the wine industry and the tourism that it brings. Beautiful vineyards, rolling hills and spectacular vistas are what bring people to Tri-Cities’ wine country.

No one will be impressed by a skyline scarred by monolithic structures. More wind turbines will most certainly ruin the view.

At a two-hour public hearing held with Benton County commissioners Tuesday, citizens complained repeatedly that the turbines would be an eyesore and an atrocity in our backyard.

As discussion of this project moves forward, we would like to remind the governor that there is a precedent for heavily weighing the affect wind turbines have on a scenic landscape. In 2004, the Whistling Ridge Energy Project would have placed wind turbines on a prominent ridgeline near the town of White Salmon, a community along the Columbia River. While not in the boundaries of the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area, the proposed wind farm was near the line. Opposition to the plan was fierce, and in the end Washington state decided the project must be scaled down, which eventually led project managers to abandon the plan altogether. The arguments against the Whistling Ridge wind project were that it would “mar world-class scenery” with “little to no benefit to the state of Washington’s citizens,” according to the Friends of the Columbia Gorge. It also would “harm the local tourism economy and negatively affect property values in surrounding communities.” Sounds a lot like the same arguments Tri-Citians are making. The Friends of the Columbia Gorge also say that: “Icons of the Pacific Northwest, like the Columbia River Gorge, Mount Rainier, and the Olympic Mountains, should be off-limits to large-scale energy development. We can combat climate change without having to sacrifice our most special places and our core values.”

We completely agree. Eastern Washington is not devoid of natural beauty. To Tri-Citians, the Horse Heaven Hills are a special scenic area. Why should it be valued any less than other remarkable sites in Washington state? 

To add to the concern, the wind turbines planned by Scout Clean Energy are massive. The Colorado-based company is considering two options — and both include wind turbines comparable to the height of the Seattle Space Needle, where the observation deck is at 520 feet.

One proposal puts 244 turbines at almost 500 feet tall over about 10 square miles. The other option would be to install 150 turbines at 670 feet tall. The leased farm land for the project stretches about 24 miles from south of Finley to the south of Benton City. If the application were up to Benton County officials, it likely would be dead on arrival. At the public hearing, Commissioners Shon Small and Will McKay voiced opposition to it before the meeting even started. But the decision won’t be made at the local level.

Scout Clean Energy has filed its application with the Washington state Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council instead. Company officials claimed the scale and scope of the project would create a burden on county staff, but to Tri-Citians it feels like an end-run around the local community.

The final decision on whether to allow the project will be decided by the evaluation council and Inslee. The state council plans its own public hearing on the Scout Clean Energy plan on Tuesday, March 30. To register to comment, call 360-664-1345 before the meeting or email efsec@utc.wa.gov. And then hope that council officials and Gov. Jay Inslee pay attention and truly listen to local input. The views of the citizens who will be most affected by their decision should not be easily dismissed.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

Tri-Cities residents call proposed wind farm an eye sore

By Annette Cary | Tri-City Herald | March 17, 2021

A huge wind farm planned to stretch along the Horse Heaven Hills just south of the Tri-Cities would be a blight on the community, speaker after speaker said Tuesday at a town hall meeting.

Scout Clean Energy of Colorado has applied to the state of Washington for a permit to build the Horse Heaven Wind Farm project, which would include wind, solar and battery storage.

Although the Benton County Commission only has input into a state decision on whether to allow the project, it held a public meeting in Kennewick to gather public opinion before commissioners submit comments to the Washington state Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council.

The council and Gov. Jay Inslee have final say over the project.

About 80% of the speakers were opposed the project at the town hall meeting, with 44 signed up to speak in person and others calling in comments.

They used terms like “atrocity,” “eyesore” and “grotesque.” One woman came with a poster board saying the Horse Heaven Hills would need to be renamed the Horse Hell Hills.

Those supported the project were mostly union members and officials, who said they spoke for many more than just themselves, who wanted the construction jobs the project would bring and then the limited number of maintenance jobs during the project’s operation.

A representative of Labors’ Local 348 in Richland said the project would give jobs to more than 1,000 construction workers.

“It’s great for working men and women in our community,” he said.

Scout Clean Energy is considering two options.

One would have 244 turbines standing up to almost 500 feet tall over about 10 square miles of the total 112 square miles to used for the project.

The other option would be to install fewer, but taller, turbines. There would be 150 turbines standing up to 670 feet tall.

‘Should be appalled’

“I understand the importance of green energy, but to have these massive towers right in our backyard is an atrocity in my opinion, said Matt Malin, a mechanical engineer, who lives two miles south of the Tri-Cities southern urban growth boundary.

The urban growth area covers the area where the Tri-Cities, Benton City and Prosser expect to grow over the next 20 years.

The leased land for the wind farms stretches along about 24 miles from south of Finley to south of Benton City.

“This project is not just in our urban growth area, it is our growth area,” said Barry Bush, a Benton County Public Utility District commissioner, who said he was not representing the PUD at the meeting.

The PUD has opposed building more wind farms in Benton County, but has not taken a stand on this project.

“If you are a Realtor or a builder you should be appalled,” Bush said.

People are not going to want to buy homes that look out at wind turbines and it will not help the area’s tourism industry, he said.

However, Scout Clean Energy said its project would be on land outside of the urban growth area that is designated for agriculture use.

Benton County officials said that if the 244 wind turbine option is pursued, more than 200 turbines would be visible from some areas, some of them to the north of the project.

While the industrialization of the skyline to the south of the Tri-Cities would endure for decades, the local community would see little benefit, several people said.

Scout Clean Energy, the landowners and construction workers who get short-term jobs would benefit, said Doug Fearing of Kennewick, who has lived in Benton County for 72 years.

“We get to look at these things. That is what we get to do,” he said.

He called the many wind turbines he sees when he drives to Portland and Walla Walla “butt ugly.”

Others said they were concerned by the shadow flicker on nearby residents as the turbines rotate and also the night lighting required by the Federal Aviation Administration.

One person described the flickering red lights from another wind farm that she sees in the dark from her family’s cabin in the Blue Mountains.

Power generation needs

Several people said they expected power generated by the project to be sent south to California or possibly to the west side of Washington.

The Northwest Power and Conservation Council projects a need for 8,000 more megawatts by 2030 as demand rises and more than 4,400 megawatts of coal-fired and hydroelectric power generation is retired.

But Bush said Horse Heaven Wind Farm turbines would not provide a local benefit because more electricity is needed on the hottest and coldest days of the year when the wind is not blowing.

The energy complex would produce only 30% of its stated capacity and would need to be backed up with hydroelectric dams and nuclear plants that generate electricity more reliably, said Richard Yrjanson of Richland.

The project, including wind and solar, would have a generating capacity of up to 1,150 megawatts. At full capacity that is about the power required by a city the size of Seattle.

Yrjanson called the project “a very expensive way to generate quite unreliable electricity.

Multi-generation farms

David Kobus, project manager for the Horse Heaven Wind Farm, said after the meeting that power production is an export economy, not unlike the wheat grown in the area and exported now.

Much of the land proposed for the project is now used for dryland wheat production and grazing.

“These property owners have the right to seek the fullest economic use of the land that has been in their families for generations,” he told the county commissioners during the meeting.

Several people said that there were better uses of the land than wind and solar power production.

One person said the proposed project was just too big and too close to the Tri-Cities.

But Kobus said Scout Clean Energy picked the site based on factors such as being close to adequate transmission capacity and being near markets for the power.

Purchasers for the power have yet to be identified, with the project not yet having permits or starting construction.

Kobus said issues with turbine shadow flicker had been worked out on a one-by-one basis with the owners of the limited number of properties that could be affected.

The project, planned over two phases would generate almost $20 million in property tax revenue during its first full year of operation, according to an economic impact analysis commissioned by Scout Clean Energy.

Over 35 years of operation, the project would pay nearly $260 million in property taxes, much of that going to local schools, according to the company.

Washington state meeting

Tri-Cities area residents and others will have a second chance to comment at a land use hearing before the Washington state Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council at 5 p.m. March 30.

People will be allowed to comment on all issues surrounding the proposed Horse Heaven Wind Farm, according to the agency.

It will be held online via Skype at bit.ly/EFSECmeetingHH and also will have telephone access at 360-407-3810. The meeting ID is 6702140#.

Officials will be available to answer questions from 5 to 5:30 p.m., followed by a presentation and then a public hearing. To sign up to comment call 360-664-1345 before the meeting or email efsec@utc.wa.gov. Comments also may be emailed to that address.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

Wind turbines don’t belong on Washington’s Horse Heaven Hills | Guest Opinion

BY JIM CONCA , Tri-City Herald, MARCH 15, 2021 

A company out of Boulder, Colorado called Scout Clean Energy has applied for a permit to build a massive turbine wind farm in Washington State on the Horse Heaven Hills, extending from the town of Benton City, through the Tri-Cities, to the town of Finley. The wind farm will have upwards of 250 turbines that are 500 feet tall and cover about 6,500 acres (over 10 square miles).

But the Pacific Northwest is a lousy place to build wind turbines for two very good reasons. The power will not displace any fossil fuels but will only displace hydro, another renewable. And wind in this region just doesn’t produce much energy, only 30% of its total capacity.

There is a growing opposition to this project in the region, just for these reasons.

Interestingly, Scout Clean Energy has applied for Site Certification by going straight to the State authorities, circumventing the county government, knowing that the locals do not want this project and hoping that the state’s goal of 100% non-fossil fuel by 2045 will push this through against them.

The real problem is that Scout Clean Energy is building this wind farm in the wrong state.

Tornado Alley is the optimal place for wind turbines in the United States, pushing capacity factors to 50%, and has made wind the second largest generator of electricity in Kansas, South Dakota and Iowa, where they actually displace coal power.

The capacity factor is the percentage of the time a system is supplying its nameplate or installed capacity. The nameplate capacity times the capacity factor equals the actual output of the generating system.

According to the Scout Clean Energy plan, the new farm’s nameplate capacity will be 1,150 MW. Since the capacity factor for this wind farm is only 30%, the generation will actually be only 345 MW operationally. Wind turbines in this area have an average capacity factor of only 27%.

In comparison, the capacity factor for the Columbia Generating Station, our local nuclear power plant, is 98%. With a nameplate capacity of 1,207 MW, it’s producing about 1,180 MW continuously, over 3 times that of the similarly-sized proposed wind farm.

Scout Clean Energy claims that this wind farm will offset 3.5 million tons of CO2, but that’s not true either. There is little fossil fuel in Washington State, which is 70% hydro, 8% nuclear, 13% renewables (mostly wind), 5% gas and 4% coal, the latter from a single coal plant scheduled to be retired in 2025.

This new Scout Clean Energy wind power will only displace hydro, another renewable, thus having no effect on carbon emissions, no matter where the energy ends up. We know this because it’s what happens all the time in this state. Just look at weekly electrical load maps from the Bonneville Power Administration, who is the main system operator in the Pacific Northwest.

The grid must be closely balanced between load, or power draw off the grid, and the power coming onto the grid from all energy sources. Hydro is used almost exclusively to load-follow and balance the grid. When load goes down, or more energy comes onto the grid like wind, hydro drops. When load goes up or wind dies away, hydro increases.

This wind farm will have no effect on climate change or carbon emissions, will not replace fossil fuel at all, will mar the beautiful vistas of this area, and provide a trivial number of temp construction jobs. But it will make Olympia feel good.

And it definitely will make someone out of state a lot of money.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

Wind Turbines On Washington’s Horse Heaven Hills – How Not To Pursue A Green New Deal

by Dr. James Conca, Forbes Magazine, March 9, 2021

A company out of Boulder, Colorado named Scout Clean Energy has applied for a permit to build a massive turbine wind farm in Washington State on the Horse Heaven Hills, extending from the town of Benton City, through the Tri-Cities, to the town of Finley (see figure above). The wind farm will have upwards of 250 turbines that are 500 feet tall and cover about 6,500 acres (over 10 square miles).

But the Pacific Northwest is a lousy place to build wind turbines for two very good reasons. The power will not displace any fossil fuels but will only displace hydro, another renewable. And wind in this region just doesn’t produce much energy, only 30% of its total capacity. There is a growing opposition to this project in the region, just for these reasons.

Interestingly, Scout Clean Energy has applied for Site Certification by going straight to the State authorities, circumventing the county government, knowing that the locals do not want this project and hoping that the state’s goal of 100% non-fossil fuel by 2045 will push this through against them.

The real problem is that Scout Clean Energy is building this wind farm in the wrong state.

Tornado Alley is the optimal place for wind turbines in the United States (see figure below where average wind speeds exceed 6.5 m/s), pushing capacity factors to 50%, and has made wind the second largest generator of electricity in Kansas, South Dakota and Iowa, where they actually displace coal power.

The capacity factor is the percentage of the time a system is supplying its nameplate or installed capacity. The nameplate capacity times the capacity factor equals the actual output of the generating system.

According to the Scout Clean Energy plan, the new farm’s nameplate capacity will be 1,150 MW. Since the capacity factor for this wind farm is only 30%, the generation will actually be only 345 MW operationally. Wind turbines in this area have an average capacity factor of only 27%.

In comparison, the capacity factor for the Columbia Generating Station, our local nuclear power plant, is 98%. With a nameplate capacity of 1,207 MW, it’s producing about 1,180 MW continuously, over 3 times that of the similarly-sized proposed wind farm.

Scout Clean Energy claims that this wind farm will offset 3.5 million tons of CO2, but that’s not true either. There is little fossil fuel in Washington State, which is 70% hydro, 8% nuclear, 13% renewables (mostly wind), 5% gas and 4% coal, with the latter from a single coal plant scheduled to be retired in 2025.

This new Scout Clean Energy wind power will only displace hydro, another renewable, thus having no effect on carbon emissions, no matter where the energy ends up. We know this because it’s what happens all the time in this state. The figure below is an example of a weekly electrical load map from the Bonneville Power Administration, who is the main system operator in the Pacific Northwest.

The grid must be closely balanced between load, or power draw off the grid, and the power coming onto the grid from all energy sources, as can be seen in this BPA load graph below.

Load in this graph is in red, and the energy sources are blue (hydro), green (wind) and brown (thermal – coal, gas and nuclear). Notice that hydro is used almost exclusively to load-follow and balance the grid. When load goes down, or more energy comes onto the grid like wind, hydro drops. When load goes up or wind dies away, hydro increases.

Whenever energy from wind comes onto the grid, hydro generation is dropped or curtailed, by spilling water over the dams instead of through the turbines. This common practiced. And will continue, and even increase, if the Scout Clean Energy project goes forward.

This wind farm will have no effect on climate change or carbon emissions, will not replace fossil fuel at all, will mar the beautiful vistas of this area, provide a trivial number of temporary construction jobs, and preferentially kill raptors and migratory birds in the great Pacific Northwest Flyway zone. But it will make Olympia feel good.

And it definitely will make someone out of state a lot of money.

——————————————————————————————————————————————

Wind power plan won’t help Benton

Letters to the Editor, Tri-City Herald, February 21, 2021

Scout Clean Energy (SCE) has submitted a proposal for a 1,150 MW wind/solar farm in Horse Heaven Hills. SCE was initially going to apply for approval with Benton County, but now has changed and gone directly to the state.

SCE has said they want to be open with residents about this project. They have provided no informa- tion to assess electricity rates for the power or who is buying it. SCE could receive an estimated $10.8 billion in revenue, of which Benton County would get a scant $260 million in taxes over 35 years. They cite a need for 4,400 MW of additional

power in the Pacific Northwest over the next decade. In 2018, the Northwest sent 40 GWh of electricity to California, a third of which was wind power. Washington is not short of power; California is. Benton County should not keep subsidizing Cali- fornia’s short-sighted power planning, as it has done for decades.

So, what just happened here? The state of Wash- ington and not Benton County is now going to decide if SCE can dot 75,000 acres of beautiful, pristine vistas with wind- mills and solar panels? Ironically, the only climate that will change with this farm is Benton County’s.

– Craig Brown, Richland

Tri-Citians must stand up to wind turbine plan | Guest Opinion

By Barry Bush

From the Tri-City Herald, March 08, 2020 02:19 PM , Updated March 10, 2020 12:20 PM

Scout Clean Energy plans a 60,000-acre wind farm on Benton County farm land south of the Tri-Cities along the Horse Heaven Hills ridgeline south of Badger Road. The new project is planned to include as many as 212 turbines in rows along about 24 miles of the ridgeline of the Horse Heaven Hills. This view from the Reata Road overpass across Interstate 82 faces southwest towards Benton City. Bob Brawdy Tri-City Herald

Scout Clean Energy from Boulder, Colorado has proposed building 500-foot turbines along 24 miles of our Southern skyline in the Horse Heaven Hills.

A 500-foot turbine is massive when you consider the top of the turbine blades at Nine Canyon Wind Farm in Kennewick are only 350 feet. The Space Needle and the Gateway Arch are roughly as tall as these proposed turbines.

I am opposed to this project. I will not support another wind project in Eastern Washington until those on the Westside start to contribute by also building wind sites in Western Washington.

Late last year I had a discussion with one of these so-called environmentalists at an industry meeting in Portland. She explained to me that they always will be able to build turbines in Eastern Washington because the counties get paid handsomely via taxes and the farmers that own the land get millions of dollars per year via federal subsidies.

I explained to her that we are tired of being paid off so they can destroy our environment. I told her that I find it ironic that the federal government can tax us and then give the money to vulture capitalists so they can use the money to destroy our local community.

It is time for those of us in Southeastern Washington to stand up to these faux environmentalists. We need to start making our own decisions. We need to demand that the governor commission an environmental study to determine the effects of these wind turbines on our community.

The study that was recently done regarding the Snake River dams can serve as a blue print. We cannot trust an environmental study conducted by wind energy companies whose only real intent is take make money via federal subsidies and become wealthy.

Any environmental study should be done by a third party and be multi-year in order to determine long term effects on the people and animals that live here.

Much of my professional career has been spent in public power. In that time, I have learned that many people who say they are environmentalists are exactly the opposite.

I have witnessed Initiative-937 — the clean energy initiative — pass with the majority of our community opposed. All this initiative did was force local utilities to pay millions of dollars for intermittent wind energy they did not need, and allow much cheaper hydro power to go to other states that were not affected by the initiative.

This initiative was supposed to lower our levels of carbon in the state. It did not.

Both wind and hydro power are both carbon free, but wind is far more expensive. It did however make wind developers extremely rich.

Wind projects in this state enjoy massive subsidies from the federal government. Currently that incentive is $23.00 for each megawatt-hour produced. I refer to these people as vulture capitalists. They take hundreds of millions of our dollars via federal subsidies, build projects that we do not need, and then transmit the energy to Portland, Seattle and beyond. Very little of the energy produced is used locally. They do this while living in faraway locations like Boulder, CO. and Seattle, WA.

Many in the so-called Western Washington environmental community are only environmentalists when the laws they pass do not affect them. They continue to pass so called “green laws” in Olympia and then expect those of us in Eastern Washington to build their turbines in our back yard.

In the process our birds are killed and we are forced to look at these unsightly turbines on a daily basis. What they fail to recognize is that we are located on one of the major North American bird migration flyways called the Pacific Flyway. This Flyway stretches from Alaska to Patagonia and involves millions of birds migrating annually.

The NW Energy Coalition is the leader of this movement in the Western Washington. These people are backed by wind manufacturers and are paid handsomely for their services. They are also the people that are leading the movement to tear down our Snake River Dams.

They are doing all they can to tear down the dams in order to save orcas, but do not care about the thousands of birds that are killed annually by their massive wind turbines. I can only assume this is due to the fact that the hydro energy community is not backing them financially.

These people are just fine with the industrialization of our viewscapes, but will never consider building a wind farm or any other energy project in their own backyard, even though many great wind sites exist on our Western coastline and offshore.

In a very short time Benton County Commissioners will be asked for permits to allow the Scout Clean Energy project to proceed. Please call your county commissioner and let them know that you are opposed to this new project and will vote accordingly in November.

Barry A. Bush is a board member of the Benton PUD, however, he wrote this column as a private citizen.

Wind farm energy powers California

Letters to the Editor, Tri-City Herald, May 7, 2020

When Michael Rucker talks about “Wind energy myths generate confusion” (Tri-City Herald, 4/2/20), he adds to the confusion: He says it will bring “wind energy to the region and the state of Washington,” but he really means it’s electricity for California and its renewable energy mandate; we have plenty of energy for Washington with hydro and nuclear.

He talks about generating $2.4 million per year in taxes and 16 jobs; that pales in comparison to Tri-City visitors spending $560.2 million in 2019, generating $54.5 million in taxes and 6,370 jobs (Visitor Bureau). I think the visitors from the West Side enjoy the sweeping and unspoiled views of our hills when visiting local wineries.

These wind turbines are giants: at 500 feet, they are much taller than the Statue of Liberty (305 feet). Imagine the views from our popular Badger Mountain: 212 wind towers on 60,000 acres in 24-mile rows on the ridges of the Horse Heaven Hills and a forest of churning blades and blinking lights.

Global warming is real and we need to combat it in sensible ways, but this industrial-scale destruction of our landscape is not the way to go.

Markus Stauffer, Pasco

Wind turbines mar scenic skylines

Letters to the Editor, Tri-City Herald, April 2, 2020

It is refreshing and energizing to hear from people like Benton PUD Commissioner Barry Bush, a knowledgeable and experienced energy professional, about the true motivation of outsiders who push for “clean energy” projects such as the proposed installation of over 200 wind turbines along a 24-mile stretch of the Horse Heaven Hills skyline. I strongly believe that there is a silent majority of Americans who, like me, are becoming increasingly disturbed with these types of energy projects that, factually, are not the best energy source options in consideration of clean, sustainable and environmentally friendly qualities.

I am dismayed with the thought that another beautiful skyline may be polluted by 500-foot-tall wind turbines that cannot provide significant baseline demand power, kill birds, raise our energy costs and are just plain ugly. Being a first-time writer of a Letter to the Editor, my motivation is to encourage and persuade others to become proactive by making your voice heard on these and other matters we believe in. A simple first step is to follow Mr. Bush’s advice: “… call Benton County commissioners and let them know that you are opposed to this new project and will vote accordingly in November.”

Jeff Warga, Benton City

Windmills bring little real benefit

Letters to the Editor, Tri-City Herald, April 9, 2020

The proposed Horse Heaven windmill farm will best case generate 600 MW only at peak wind periods, or about what a Snake River dam or half what the Energy Northwest nuclear does on a 24/7 basis on demand. And only when the wind blows, which is less than 25% of the time year around; mostly in the spring with full hydro runoff and low consumption when more power is least needed.

Wind makes minimal contribution during peak demand. BPA is forced to buy at well over their real costs of generation whether they need the power or not; and at high prices passed to ratepayers. The Stateline windmill farm in Walla Walla County since 2001 has paid less than a teachers annual salary per year to the local schools. Scout will “blow” into town, put up their windmills, collect the huge PTC subsidy, and leave us to pay the bill and see Horse Heaven littered up with the massive windmills not generating power for many days per year. Until storage technology is commercially available and affordable, the last thing we need is more windmills. Let the green side activists and money grubbers like Scout build them on their skylines, not ours.

Michael Scrimsher, Burbank Heights

At times, wind power does stop

Letters to the Editor, Tri-City Herald, April 5, 2020

I would like to provide a fact in response to the guest opinion titled “Wind energy myths generate confusion.” According to the Bonneville Power Authority website, https://transmission.bpa.gov/business/operations/wind/baltwg.aspx, there was essentially zero wind-generated electricity added to the BPA network during the week immediately before the article written by Michael Rucker appeared in the newspaper. What wind power was delivered was generated on Saturday when the demand was lowest for the week. Raw tabular data is available from the BPA website from 2007 through 2020 for different sources.

Every megawatt of electricity generated by windmills in the Mid-Columbia must be backstopped with dispatchable generating sources to ensure electricity is available during the hottest days of summer and on frigid winter nights. So why pay for two electrical generators, or a wind turbine and an electric storage device, when one reliable and dispatchable power plant is sufficient?

Finally, as a nuclear engineer, I am proud to note that the Columbia Generating Station was steadily pumping out more than 1160 megawatts all week long without deviation, just as the plant did all winter long.

Donald R. Todd, Richland

Horse Heaven wind farm project offers few benefits for Tri-City economy

By Markus Stauffer and Richard Gerlitz

Opinion, TriCity Area Journal of Business, October 2020

The Horse Heaven Hills wind farm project planned by Scout Clean Energy (Tri-Cities Area Journal of Business, May 2020) would stretch along 24 miles of ridgeline from south of the Tri-Cities at Jump-Off Joe Butte to near Benton City.

As many as 212 wind turbines would be placed in several rows, each turbine 500 feet tall. We oppose such large-scale projects that alter our skyline and our outdoor quality of life.

The Tri-City region is a hub for electric power generation for Washington state.

Over 40% of clean, renewable electricity in the state comes from the dams of the Columbia Basin and another 8% is produced by the Columbia Generating Station, the nuclear power plant in Richland.

Overall, 76% of all electricity in Washington comes from hydropower, highest in the nation. We don’t need additional unreliable and expensive wind power.

Wind is intermittent and electricity is only generated about a third of the time. The Benton County PUD issued a position paper in July that it will no longer connect wind power to its grid; the unpredictable electricity generation forces the PUD to have equivalent backup power generation which is costly.

Scout Clean Energy is a broker of electricity. It connects investors and willing landowners with contractors to build wind farms all over the West.

They are based in Colorado and are not a local “brick-and-mortar” company caring about our community.

They sell “renewable, green” electricity to the highest bidder. Some of electricity generated here could potentially go as far as Los Angeles via the “Pacific DC Intertie,” supplying 3 million homes there, at a rate double or triple our electricity rate, a windfall for Scout Clean Energy but not much a benefit for the local community.

Electricity is an extremely competitive commodity: When a new technology comes along, prices will drop, and the wind farms could become obsolete.

This happened in the 1980s when the oil crisis sparked a rush of thousands of wind turbines being built with tax incentives at locations such as the San Gorgonio Pass in California near Palm Springs, only to be abandoned a decade later when cheap oil and gas from fracking sent the investors packing.

This could happen again: cheap solar panels, small modular reactors, or another new technology could change the economics of wind energy.

The life span of wind turbines is 15 to 25 years. Where will Scout Clean Energy be when hundreds of obsolete wind towers on our skyline need to be removed? Turbine blades made from composite material are hard to recycle and usually end up in landfills and hundreds of concrete pads and miles of supply roads are expensive to remove.

All this would happen in clear view from the Tri-Cities.

 Electricity is not the only big business in our region: Tourism is major source of revenue and jobs.

“Visitor spending in 2019 was 
$560.2 million, creating 6,370 jobs in Benton and Franklin counties, $54.5 million in local and state tax receipts were collected; $19.3 million in tax receipts were retained locally,” according to Visit Tri-Cities.

Our mild climate together with beautiful views of vineyards and orchards attracts visitors and travelers.

People come here to play golf, walk and bike our beautiful paths along the Columbia River, enjoy a glass of good wine on an outdoor patio and learn about our Hanford history.

Cruise ships dock in Richland and boutique hotels attract a well-heeled clientele. This year alone we saw the opening of several new hotels in the Tri-Cities.

These visitors don’t come here to look at a ridgeline resembling giant industrial operations. Each wind turbine is truly gigantic. At 500 feet, they are much taller than the ones at Jump Off Joe Butte which are 350 feet or less. Think Seattle Space Needle where the observation deck is at 520 feet.

Anyone who wants to see the impact of these wind farms on the landscape should have a look at the Columbia Gorge area where the once-serene Maryhill museum and the peaceful Stonehenge World War I memorial now have giant blades churning close by, a surreal setting that would amaze even Salvador Dali.

Another large industry in our area is the real estate, worth over $400 million per year.

The Tri-Cities is growing at a rapid rate, in part because of the mild climate, the relatively cheap housing and the beautiful setting along our rivers.

It attracts people to raise their young families or to retire here, away from the urban bustle of Seattle and Portland.

Many of these new developments, such as the Southridge area in Kennewick and Badger South in Richland, have beautiful views of western sunsets and the Horse Heaven Hills.

They and other homes with a view, from Rancho Reata to Badger Canyon, all the way to Horn Rapids, could see their skyline change drastically. It is easy to imagine that this industrial-scale wind farm on the horizon could encourage buyers to look elsewhere and have an effect on property values.

Our area with the Hanford site was called the “most polluted place on earth” by a national news outlet in the 1990s.

We have come a long way since then in cleaning up the Hanford mess and now have a quality environment and thriving communities based on our river parks and clean open spaces.

This attracts quality growth companies that pay high wages.

We don’t want to go back and pollute our environment and our hills with industrial-scale wind farms because nobody else wants them on the west side (NIMBY — Not In My Backyard).

We can do better! Please contact your Benton County commissioners who have to approve this project. Go to save-our-ridges.org for more details.

Markus Stauffer, a retired Hanford scientist, has lived in the Tri-Cities for 25 years. 

Rich Gerlitz, who recently retired from the financial services industry, has lived in Prosser/Tr-Cities for 45 years.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

This old article from 2007 about a planned wind farm at the base of Rattlesnake Mountain makes valid arguments still applicable to the Horse Heaven Windfarm project.

 November 4, 2007 • Washington

Group forming to battle windmill farm project   

The wide open spaces and natural terrain and wildlife of Southeastern Washington are fading, and some residents would like the encroaching effects of urbanization toned down, such as a proposed project that would place 35 to 50 turbines on Rattlesnake Mountain.

More than 30 people showed up Saturday at the Richland Community Center for a meeting to oppose a proposed windmill farm at the base of the mountain.

Many in the group, which doesn’t have a name, were landowners, conservationists and other wind farm critics who live in the Mid-Columbia.

“It’s important that we act quickly on this matter regarding the proposed use of wind power on Rattlesnake Mountain,” said Patrick Guettner, the organizer of the meeting. “They are not a fit way to use that mountain.”

Others were more direct in expressing their opposition.

“Windmills, as a whole, rape the landscape,” said one man, who asked not to be identified. His comment was applauded by the other people at the meeting.

James Dillman, a Richland architect, said the giant wind turbines would be out of scale on Rattlesnake Mountain, and that would tarnish the natural landscape, have a negative impact on wildlife and possibly effect tourism.

Rick Leaumont, chairman of the Audubon Society’s conservation committee, agreed that urgency in protesting the project is necessary because about 238 bird species have been documented in the area, and would be effected by the windmills.

“Wildlife needs some kind of solitude, a place that is theirs,” Leaumont said. “Any location on the mountain would be a problem.”

The consensus of everyone in the group was that they would rather look at nuclear power plants at Hanford than windmill turbines on Rattlesnake.

John Becker of Kennewick said wind power was not an economical source of power. Becker, who retired from Battelle as a technology manager, is the project manager for ELR Consulting in Kennewick.

Becker said windmill vibrations affect the environment as well as the visual eyesore from their immense size. He also didn’t believe there was enough profit in wind power to justify the impact to the environment.

“Windmills might be cleaner, but the bottom line is that economically, they are not a smart source of power,” he said. “When I worked in California (in the 1970s) lots of these windmill farms went up and they were eventually taken back down because didn’t prove to be cost effective.”

The group plans to meet every two weeks and share research information in an effort to find ways to stop the project before it gets off the ground.

“It’s up to private citizens like us to make a difference in this matter,” Guettner said. “We must act fast.”

By Dori O’Neal
Herald Staff Writer

——————————————————————————————————————————————

This Guest Opinion by Scout CEO Michael Rucker appeared in the Tri-Cities-City Herald on March 22, 2020

Wind energy myths generate confusion |

Guest Opinion

BY MICHAEL RUCKER

MARCH 20, 2020 01:56 PM, UPDATED MARCH 22, 2020 01:37 P

At Scout Clean Energy, we know that big ideas sometimes lead to big questions. That’s why transparency with the local community about our wind energy projects is important to everyone here at our company and most especially to me.

After many years of developing renewable energy projects across the country, I’ve heard just about every myth and misconception about wind turbines. So when I saw local community leaders were forming positions based on common misconceptions it seemed like a good time to share some important details about what we’re planning, as well as impacts to the local community.

SO WHY HERE AND NOW?

The Horse Heaven Wind Farm project will be located just south of the Tri-Cities and could bring up to 600 megawatts (MW) of wind energy to the region and the state of Washington. Although the proposed wind turbines are tall at 500 feet to blade tip, they will be similar in scale to the newest wind turbines at the existing Nine Canyon Wind Project which are 415 feet high. By seeing the wind turbines near your community, you can be confident that the lasting economic benefits flow to workers, landowners, their families and the local businesses they frequent.

A growing interest for renewable energy has enabled recent development such as the Skookumchuck Wind Project currently in construction in Lewis County near Centralia. The Horse Heaven project will contribute to a diverse energy market that is affordable, reliable and meets the needs of Washington businesses and communities.

But the benefits from renewable energy are about far more than a cleaner future — such projects also translate into capital investment in the local community. Our project will create up to three hundred jobs during construction and up to sixteen permanent family-wage jobs once operational.

WIND ENERGY SUBSIDIES PROVIDE NET-BENEFIT TO TAXPAYERS AND RATEPAYERS

The primary growth incentive for the wind industry has been the Production Tax Credit (PTC), which is a performance-based incentive that attracts more than $15 billion a year in private investment across the country. The PTC has been important to the growth and development of renewable energy resources, and driven improvements in the cost and performance of wind power technology. The PTC currently provides $20 per MWh for the first 10 years of production but is being phased out starting at the end of 2020. Tax credits ultimately provide lower cost power for the ratepayers consuming the electrical output, which has been the primary goal of this incentive.

While Scout Clean Energy’s investors do take advantage of the PTC, we feel it’s important to note that increases in county tax revenue generated by our private investment will funnel substantial benefits to the local community. At current levy rates, the full buildout of the project could generate $60 million in tax revenue for Benton County over the 25-year lifespan. Under current allocations, the largest proportion of those funds would support local schools.

Environmental & Wildlife Studies

As I write this, a team of independent experts is wrapping up more than three-years of environmental studies for the Horse Heaven project. We are excited to share results from this comprehensive review that will be submitted as part of our application to Benton County for a Conditional Use Permit and which incorporates the Washington State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA). In addition to local agencies, our due diligence process includes coordinating with state and federal agencies including the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife, the US Fish & Wildlife Service as well as local stakeholders.

Scout Clean Energy takes potential impacts to the local ecology very seriously. We share the public’s concerns about bird and bat mortality, which is why we site our projects carefully to minimize impacts. Perspective is also important. Studies demonstrate that the Horse Heaven project poses a low risk to avian species relative to other wind energy projects in the Pacific Northwest. According to the US Fish & Wildlife Service, wind energy infrastructure causes a small fraction of all human-related bird deaths as compared to domestic cats, windows, and vehicles. In fact, the Audubon Society strongly supports properly sited wind energy facilities that reduce the threat to birds posed by a warming climate.

GET THE FACTS

Unfortunately, it’s easy to find misinformation about wind energy development which is clearly contrary to the evidence and can easily be refuted, or to ‘cherry-pick’ facts that present a one-sided view. We are proud of our plans to develop wind energy resources in Benton County that are low impact and cost-competitive, and welcome the opportunity to answer questions about the project. I am confident that when armed with the facts, you will find the Horse Heaven Wind Farm represents a win-win scenario for the community and Washington industry.

Michael Rucker is CEO of Scout Clean Energy, a renewable energy developer, operator, and asset owner based in Boulder, Colorado. Founded in 2016, Scout is a young company, but made up of a long-standing management team.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

Natural Gas And Wind Freeze Up When The Going Gets Tough

By James Conca

Forbes Magazine, 2/18/2021

If you live in many parts of Texas, this week was not a good week to need electricity. Rolling power blackouts were ordered across Texas on Monday as a winter storm and frigid temperatures gripped the state and knocked out service to almost 4 million customers.

Natural gas, coal and wind turbines were frozen in the unusual cold snap and snow that hit all the major cities in the state. One of their four nuclear reactors also went offline because of a cold-caused false reading in a pump line from frozen water, not related to the nuclear side of the plant, just to be safe. It represented only 4% of the 30,000 MW capacity lost during this crisis and has comeback online.

The major loss is from natural gas. Wind performed poorly, but that was mostly expected in winter and bad weather.

Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner was upfront with the people of his city, “If you are without power right now, it is very conceivable that you could be without power throughout the rest of today and possibly even going into tomorrow.”

Some households have only had power for three hours over the last three days. With outside temperatures falling to single digits, many have taken to spending all day in their cars with a parallel increase in cases of carbon monoxide poisonings.

Warming Centers have opened across the state.

The NOAA-20 satellite caught the resulting power outages across southeastern Texas. It shows the difference in nighttime illumination of city lights from before (upper) the storm, January 31, 2021, and after (below), February 16, 2021… [+] NOAA

The blackouts were caused because Texas generates most of its electricity from natural gas and wind. Texas’ electricity mix is now 52% natural gas, 23% renewables (almost all wind), 17% coal and 8% nuclear. In this cold snap, gas used for heating increased dramatically, removing much of it from generating electricity, some pipelines froze up and couldn’t deliver, and there just isn’t enough pipeline capacity.

Wind turbine blades iced up and coal stacks froze. In addition, southern generating plants are not hardened against extreme cold.

As to the wind turbines, freezing cold and high humidity cause icing on the blades much the same as on aircraft. As Jeff Dagle, a Pacific Northwest National Laboratory researcher and expert in the areas of transmission reliability and control system security, puts it, “Like aircraft, the turbine blades work as an airfoil. But they don’t have de-icing abilities, so they won’t work if iced up.”

The rotating blackouts could continue until the state’s weather emergency ends, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the major grid operator that controls about 90% of the state’s electric load.

But it’s not just Texas. Southwest Power Pool, which manages electrical grid operations in North Texas and 16 other states, announced rolling blackouts as well.

“In our history as a grid operator, this is an unprecedented event and marks the first time SPP has ever had to call for controlled interruptions of service,” said Lanny Nickell, SPP’s executive vice president and CEO, in a news release.

Among the contiguous 48 states, Texas is the only state with a stand-alone electricity grid. Small pieces of three other grids serve the edges, but the state’s main electricity grid is operated by ERCOT which is largely isolated from the rest of the United States. This isolation means the ERCOT grid is not subject to federal oversight and is, for the most part, dependent on its own resources to meet the state’s electricity needs. 

Texas’ electricity demand has increased substantially since 2010, but increased supply has only come from installing new natural gas and wind, bringing them up to 75% of the total generation.

Besides electricity, more than half of the gas goes to residential use like heating and cooling. The supply of gas is limited mostly by the pipelines, and as weather gets bad, either hot or cold, residential use gets priority. So electricity production gets short-shrifted, which is unfortunate for those three-in-five households in Texas that use electricity for home heating.

But these blackouts will re-occur whenever there is a severe cold snap, which seems to get more frequent as the weather extremes grow. Whether it’s Polar Vortices, Bomb Cyclones or just straight cold and snow, the energy sources most affected are gas, coal, wind and solar. Nuclear is generally not much affected, although one reactor was this week.

Coal stacks are frozen or diesel generators simply can’t function in such low temperatures. Gas chokes up – its pipelines can’t keep up with demand, wind turbines freeze up and there usually isn’t a lot of sun.

And prices skyrocket. Future wholesale power prices in Texas for early this week soared to $9,000 per megawatt hour from a seasonal average of $25.

Interestingly, nuclear prices usually do not go up – the reactors are generally unaffected and just keep running. In fact, they work better the colder it is. They don’t have to worry about fuel supply – they have enough on hand for years – and they don’t have to do anything special to deal with the extreme weather.

The only issues that can occur are in the non-nuclear parts of the plants. In fact, this week such an occurrence happened at Unit 1 at the South Texas Project nuclear power plant where an automatic reactor trip occurred as a result of a cold weather-related failure of a pressure sensing line to the feedwater pumps, causing a false signal, which in turn, caused the feedwater pump to trip.

This event occurred in the secondary side of the plant, the non-nuclear part of the unit. The primary side of the plant (nuclear side) was safe and secured. The other reactor was not affected and Unit 1 is back online.

Rotating or rolling blackouts occur when power companies cut off electricity to residential neighborhoods and small businesses, typically for 10 to 45 minutes before being rotated to another location, ERCOT said. Traffic lights and infrastructure may also lose power during these blackouts.

Oncor, an energy company serving parts of north Texas including Dallas, tweeted Monday that “our expected outage length of 15 to 45 minutes has been significantly extended. Outages due to this electric emergency could last for hours & we ask you to be prepared.”

This is why a diversity of energy sources is important. Just having mostly one or two sources, like gas and wind, leaves you vulnerable to unexpected changes, like this week.

Texas and the rest of the country needs to up their nuclear game, and achieve a diverse energy mix, or we won’t achieve any degree of decarbonization with any degree of reliability.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________