North Carolina legislators ban wind! (turbines)
Posted August 20, 2009 at 7:57 am 
Filed in: Here’s a piece you may have missed while at the beach. According to the NYT (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/08/us/08brfs-EFFORTTOBANW_BRF.html?ref=us ), it appears the North Carolina Senate ”overwhelmingly approved” legislation to ban large wind turbines from the state’s western ridgelines. We already have a US Senator from a nearby state who regularly decries the placement of wind turbines — but at least he supports nuclear and other forms of conventional energy.
The North Carolina legislation won’t be finalized until May, when the N.C. House will take it up after reconvening. The bill amends a 1983 “ridge law” to allow “only turbines that are 100 feet or smaller to be placed on the windy ridges, thus effectively barring industrial-sized turbines.” Wind energy advocates are worried that if the ban is enacted, as much as ”two-thirds of North Carolina’s on-shore wind resource off-limits.”
If on-shore wind is off-limits, can off-shore wind be ok? Let’s hope so, because as the Raleigh News & Observer (www.newsobserver) has reported, the US Department of Interior (DOI) cites the Outer Banks area as home to ”some of the strongest and steadiest winds on the East Coast.”
The paper cites “Dennis Scanlin, a senior research scientist with the Appalachian State University Energy Center,” for the proposition that ”North Carolina is one of the top states in the country for coastal wind resources.”
Experience here on the east coast with off-shore wind has been problematic, though, with the poster child clearly the Cape Wind project near Cape Cod, Massachusetts. This long-running saga began back in 2001, when Cape Wind developers originally applied to the US Army Corps of Engineers for a permit under Section 10 of the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899. After the Energy Policy Act 2005 transferred regulatory authority for off-shore energy projects from the Army Corps to DOI’s Minerals Management Service, the Service issued a Draft Environmental Impact Statement in the spring of 2007 followed by a 60 day comment period and public hearings. The Final Environmental Impact Report was released in January of this year. In between were a raft of protests, counter-protests, court actions (of course) — and even a movie! Assuming financing and no further roadblocks, construction could be completed next year, just before the ten-year anniversary of the first permit application.
The experience puts a little different light on the otherwise supportive statements from environmentalists about North Carolina off-shore wind. Again, as reported in the News & Observer: “We’re very encouraged,” said Jacqueline Savitz, senior campaign director for Oceana, an environmental advocacy group. “We support wind energy,” Savitz said. “It doesn’t mean we want to go willy-nilly in planting wind farms everywhere. They should go through the normal environmental impact process.”
We’re pretty sure there won’t be any “willy-nilly” siting of any type of energy, any time soon. These days, the “normal” environmental impact process, even for projects favored by environmentalists, can take 4-6 years — and that process is a prerequisite for financing and other project development activities that add additional years to what then becomes a decade-long process. And if you’re trying to develop conventional energy sources like natural gas fields, well, good luck!
One day, policy-makers are going to wonder what’s causing widespread brown-outs, black-outs and the resulting consumer (read voted) anger over that electricity unreliability. In hindsight, the reasons will be obvious.
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