Remember that wind farm in Oregon I wrote about last week? Portland General Electric just purchased the project and were attempting to bypass an Oregon law requiring competitive bidding. Now, those plans and the entire project seem to be brought to a halt. By what you ask? The endangered golden eagle.
The Golden Eagle (from Wikimedia Commons)
The Oregonian is reporting that a golden eagle nest has been found in Wasco County, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Oregon Department of Energy recommended in a letter to PGE that no wind turbine be built within six miles of it
In response to these recent events, PGE has given up trying to skirt around the Oregon competitive bidding law and has backed off trying to build the wind farm.
How about this for a development? Many of you have said that PGE’s wind farm plans were more about good business and publicity than an environmental agenda. Nonetheless, this means the odds of another large wind farm being built in the near future have gone from good to slim (if not nil). Is the (potential) risk to golden eagle(s) worth halting a wind farm’s construction?
What do you think? Where do we draw the line between conservation and preservation? Are you glad a potential good publicity-business move described as “caring for the environment” has been thwarted? Share your thoughts below…
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I say it’s a good thing they got stopped. There’s not a lot of point in ‘saving the planet’ if we eliminate wildlife in the process, and long-lived, slow-breeding raptors like the golden eagle are a prime example of the birds these things kill. Take a look at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=na6HxKQQsAM, where a vulture gets clipped by a turbine, and tell me we want that on our hands?
I’d understand there’s a pro/con argument if wind turbines actually made any significant difference, but you need only look at Denmark to realise that they don’t. Denmark have been putting up wind turbines for 20 years. Their electricity is far more expensive than most countries in Europe, and they still get 80% of their supply from coal! Their turbines have not caused a single coal-fired plant to be shut down. Pointless!
While wind turbines are an excellent way to move away from coal, nuclear and hydro, what we do NOT need are large scale industrial wind farms that compromise our natural environment for the profit of companies like PGE and TransCanada in Maine (http://maine.earth-first.net/2010/07/earth-first-blockades-giant-industrial-wind-turbines-in-pristine-wilderness/). If we support wind farms built by companies like PGE and TransCanada, we are also supporting the infamous Boardman coal plant in Oregon and the Keystone and Keystone XL pipeline’s.
So, small scaled locally owned wind that powers communities = GOOD!
Large, corporate owned wind that is focused more on profit than bringing about the clean energy revolution = BAD!!!
I think if we’re going to avoid a climate crisis we can’t be picky about where we build our renewable energy, and who builds it. Given how much of a shift we need and how fast we need it, opposing clean energy on the basis of species protection, and then expecting to prevent catastrophic global warming is unrealistic. We should certainly try and influence these projects so they are in non-damaging areas (there is after-all, a lot of land), and encourage locally owned power sources, but at this point if push comes to shove…given the dire state of things, we need to start deploying clean energy period!
Joe Romm at Climate Progress had some comments about this relating to a controversial solar farm in the desert which I think are spot on
http://climateprogress.org/2010/01/15/green-talk-vs-green-action-sen-feinstein%E2%80%99s-scuttling-of-solar-wind-projects-a-baffling-mistake/
“I have little doubt that the solar resource can be tapped in a way that can preserve endangered species, but I have no doubt whatsoever that failing to take advantage of the massive solar resource in the California desert — and in deserts around the country and around the planet — will wipe out a large fraction of the species on this planet.
So while I am sympathetic to “conservationists,” that extends mostly to those who are trying to conserve what matters most, a livable climate. “
I think it is good that this wind project was stalled to protect the eagles. We have to remember that the climate crisis is a part of a larger ecological crisis. While it is probably true that a wind farm has less environmental impact than a coal plant, that does not make it ok to pursue such projects at the expense of possibly driving a species into extinction.
It is also important to remember that nearly new wind projects are being built for ADDITIONAL CAPACITY for the grid and not replacing fossil fuel plants. So they are not really reducing emissions. Reducing consumption would be far more effective than building new electricity generation, no matter what the source
Whether turbines are built for additional capacity or to replace fossil fuel plants is a meaningless distinction. Putting X MW of wind power on the grid is X MW of wind power, and the suppliers need to decide what to do with it.
When I read sites like climatedepot, tomnelson, drudgereport and other denier/opposition sites, they absolutely love to highlight fights between ‘greenies’, and it adds to the narrative of the right wingnutters (a fair number of them congressmen) that environmentalists aren’t interested in solutions, just opposition to everything that looks a little corporate.
We need industrial scale renewable energy. Building that massive amount of industrial scale renewables will be 1000 times less deadly, less destructive and less stupid than building the current fossil fuel system, but it won’t be a picnic either.