For the third week in a row, overflow crowds filled the supervisors’ chamber for nearly five hours on Nov. 21 to hear the county planning commission discuss the possible permitting of the Terra-Gen Wind Farm Project. Thirty-one members of the public who had not been given time to speak at the previous meeting were allowed their time at the microphone.
About half of the people initially listed did not show up, apparently discouraged by their long wait the previous week. Of the 15 who did, three supported the project, citing the urgent necessity of dealing with climate change; the others recommended denial, basically saying the project was in the wrong location and would do more harm than good. Impacts to wildlife, including the endangered marbled murrelet, fire danger caused by high-tension electrical lines running through forest and desecration of a site deemed sacred by the Wiyot Tribe were the three most commonly stated reasons.
At-large Planning Commissioner Brian Mitchell was absent, which proved significant when it came time for the commissioners to vote.
Terra-Gen Senior Director for Wind Development Nathan Vajdos, before requesting that the commission approve his project, listed several ways in which it had been modified since the last hearing to make it more acceptable to the community.
A bird technical advisory committee would be established to evaluate bird mortality from the project. Herbicides and rodenticides would be banned. Scent detection dogs would be used to locate bird carcasses. To help the county economically, Terra-Gen would establish a “point of sale” in Humboldt County, basically letting the county receive sales tax credit for purchasing the turbines.
Planning staff then discussed the project in great detail, adding a few conditions to the approval documents and removing others.
Then they re-opened the floor for public comment on the applicant’s statements and the staff report. Another 43 individuals commented. Chair Robert Morris limited these comments to one minute each, which meant that the speaker barely had time to adapt the microphone to face level before the warning light started flashing. The vast majority of people used their minute to criticize both the project and the adequacy of the planning documents.
“You’re not sitting here determining the future of the human race,” Dan Berger told the commissioners. “You’re determining the future of Humboldt County.”
“This is a greenwashed false solution to climate change,” said Isabelle Oshoff.
Another speaker, Marie Grottery, cited studies showing the useful life of wind turbines was nowhere near 30 years.
The Wiyot Tribe presented a petition, saying it was signed by 1,800 individuals opposing the project.
One speaker was so vehement that the sheriff’s office had to remove him from the room.
A 9-year-old girl, however, urged the commission to accept the project, “or we will all die,” she said.
After public comment was closed for the second time that evening, the commissioners began their deliberations, arguing with each other and questioning the planning staff for about an hour and a half on every aspect of the project and the ways in which it would be supervised and mitigated if it went forward.
Some of the commissioners seemed most interested in the financial aspects of the project, ranging from the amount of money it would bring into the county to how best to determine the cost of the decommissioning bond.
Others were more interested in the project’s environmental impacts and its effects upon the Wiyot people.
Commissioner Melanie McCavour, after reminding the audience that commissioners are not elected officials and their decision could be appealed to the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors, spoke for a half hour on the project’s flaws and her dismay that so many people in the county were being pitted against one another. She also said she believed the Indigenous people of the county were being given short shrift.
An environmental scientist, McCavour noted that the project summed up the huge double bind our civilization is facing — how to hold back life-threatening climate change without also destroying the biodiversity that maintains life. She also said that the turbine models were old and would soon be considered obsolete, and that the economic value of the project was marginal for Terra-Gen.
“The international community would be appalled,” McCavour said. “The idea that we would be pulling up plants and offering them back to the tribes is embarrassing, shameful and insulting. …. You will make the international news for trying to put an old-style wind farm on sacred ridges in the world’s only temperate redwood rainforest. Is that really what we want to do?”
Fourth District Commissioner Mike Newman said he saw a lot of NIMBY-ism in the project’s opponents. He noted that people do not seem to be cutting down on their electrical usage or driving less. He said he thought the project would make Humboldt more self-reliant and praised Terra-Gen for trying to accommodate the county’s concerns.
First District Commissioner Alan Bongio noted that the project was a way for the Russ Ranch to stay whole and that subdividing the land into cannabis farms was a lot worse for the environment.
Third District Commissioner Noah Levy noted that the Wiyot do not have legal access to the ridges and denying the project would not necessarily save the land from environmental degradation.
Morris, who represents the Second District, noted that the job of the planning commission was to ascertain if a proposed project conformed to existing regulations, not to create policy, which was already done with the General Plan that residents already had ample opportunity to comment on. He noted that even as the commission deliberated, communities to the east were under a red flag alert, and that PG&E was not able to make the necessary changes to keep the state fire safe. Moreover, he said that the Humboldt Redwood Co., one of the property’s owners, had a “sterling record” of land management.
“This project,” he said, “is a giant step in the right direction.”
Fifth District Commissioner Peggy O’Neill said that she opposed the project and if the community clearly did not want the project built, it should be rejected. She supported offshore wind energy as a better alternative.
Levy praised the public for its enthusiastic participation. He said that a great deal of information had come in too quickly for anybody to properly evaluate, including some that had arrived just that morning. He noted that the lack of preparation would make the county vulnerable if a lawsuit were to occur — which several public speakers had promised.
Finally, Newman moved to certify the EIR and approve the necessary permits. The move was seconded by Bongio and a roll call vote was held, with Newman, Bongio, and Morris voting yes and McCavour, O’Neill and Levy voting no.
Since Mitchell was absent, that made a split vote, which Planning and Building Director John Ford said was not a majority. He asked if there were any conditions that could be added to the project that would induce anybody to change their vote. None of the commissioners responded.
Vajdos, moreover, said that he wanted a clear yes-or-no answer that night.
Ford then said the other alternative was to vote to deny the project. McCavour immediately moved to deny the project, with O’Neill seconding. Newman and Morris voted against the motion, Levy after some indecision voted to support it, as did McCavour and O’Neill. After a moment of nail-biting suspense, Bongio voted with McCavour, O’Neill and Levy. The project was denied.
This is probably not the end of the matter. By plunking down $1,250, Terra-Gen can appeal the decision to the board of supervisors. Stay tuned.
Elaine Weinreb is a freelance journalist and prefers she/her pronouns. She tries to repay the state of California for giving her a degree in environmental studies and planning (Sonoma State University) at a time when tuition was still affordable.
This article appears in The Gift Guide 2019.
We do not need big money ad big oil foisting this on us ( red flag) when it could reap havoc on our biodiversity and our Redwoods.
When global warming kills the last redwood folks will wish their grandparents had had better vision. But at least they did not have to worry in their own time and isn’t that all that matters.
Thank you Pat.
Scalping and fragmenting the last great temperate forest for a dysfunctional corporate control
Fragmenting the ancient forest ridges making the “cleared” devastated area 15 or http://mo.re degrees hotter in summer day colder than the night forest by the same amount, , these are NOT green.
Redwoods, if allowed to mature, are the world’s greates single (per area) sequesterers of carbon. Should we ever afford to buy back the logging co. lands (which, by the way, were acquired through fraudulent use of the 1872 Homestead Act – failed miners and sailors were approached by lumber barons with proffer of ticket “home” for filing for 160 acres; fake cabins were built and inspected in 6 months, deed was granted, written over to SImpsons et al. Find info on this fraud in library)
The excellent and laborious work done in the filing of significant harm to some species should be lauded. Those who imagine that humans are the only organism worthy of consideration are in massive error. Turbines whack so many birds that the few returning Goldens and Bald eagles I’ve seen above the lower Eel, will live and raise young again. The smaller birds and the long-suffering night-traveling geese, who once flew in masses down to the southern Bay now occupied by cities and ships and pollution, are others whose lifelines are now more assured (Before the human devastation and overpopulation of the Bay Area, California was a great world for birds, who mostly died as “bushmeat” for worthless yellow-metal seekers a century before this wave of ill began extinguishing life in Africa)
Home -rooftop photovoltaics instead would assist us in understanding that we MUST CONSERVE our power, diminish our usage, rather than expending it in profligate wasteful, circadian cycle-damaging light pollution. I’ve studied the latter physiological effects to some extent, and can tell you that obesity, decreased cognitive capacity, and mood dysregulation occur due to excess artificial day imposed on our necessary but ignored night.
Rooftop photovoltaics have proceeded apace, cheaper now than other, toxic old heating.
Storage – like Tesla’s “Powerwalls” doing better in leaps and bounds, even making it possible to energize the new vehicles that can run silent without stench. And we need so much less than we use.
The forest metabolism heals the earth, or haven’t you heard? Human fragmentation fo forests have brought about excessive motor access, endangering and diminishing many, many species.
Even though the Wiyot alive now do not retain the images of the beauty existing before the exploitation of this land, they carry the memory. This is what is called in this language, “spirit”, and remains the essence of reverence – which is as it should be. We must revere the REAL, whether the Marten leaping and pursuing across the canopy, the silent-nesting seabirds so few of you ever see, the bats, now so vulnerable and losing their insect-balancing numbers across the continent, who travel also, north and east and back here, lives shaped by the seasons.
A community depends upon its members, and long-distance transport is colonization. The green world here must never be colonized further – we have lost 98% of our great climate-tempering redwoods, killed, and taken to make hot tubs in NY and houses house houses far away (not unlike the Port Orford Cedars, who I walk among periodically in their last undiseased refugia along streams I will not identify. Their bodies were taken, for the least of all acceptable reasons. Because they are so resistant to most fungi, they were shipped to the orient for human caskets, for imaginary immortal preservation of remains that should have flown with the vultures to be placed anew. The most ancient bone of your body, the femur is at most composed of molecules ten years old, with most far younger before complete replacement. The forests themselves, take the nitrogen – essentially the protein – of the dead, bodies normally become , here, parts of trees and other organisms in a tiny hidden generosity, becoming others down the ages.THIS is community, of which we are part, when we breathe, that which we ate, expended, are, is taken again, gift, ever. We must never wantonly or selfishly kill this giving)
This decision was good, respectful of the sacred life of earth.
Here today, we thank the Wiyot for remembering what is important, and their courage in protecting us, the evanescent beings of this land.
Would the folks supporting the wind turbines do a bit of research on how much emissions turbines are supposedly avoiding because it really isn’t worth the money or the hassle.
As a person from Canada who visited those redwoods, it is a valuable heritage site to even California itself, and the very idea of -logging- it for a turbine farm of negligable impact seems absurd.
That speaks volumes of the shortsightedness and foolishness of the companies perpetrating this concept of green energy, instead of finding actual real solutions to the energy and climate problems that are more obvious.
Surely they have heard of encouraging solar power on city and house roofing, helping reduce water usage from the vast waterways that help feed California’s famous green valleys with various covering methods, have they not?
Imagine hearing of such wonderous, last of their kind trees to arrive and see a set of turbines twice their height instead. Truly a waste.
Did i read that right? Vajdos wants to sell the turbines to Humboldt? Doesn’t surprise me. 600 foot wind turbines aren’t sustainable.TerraGen won’t give us the cradle to grave figures. Why? Because those figures would prove that it takes more fossil fuel and releases more greenhouse gases to build and maintain these than they say we would save by installing these on our pristine and undeveloped ridges.
These won’t help to reverse our climate change crisis. This is the sort of thing that got us here in the first place. This is industry on a massive scale. The minerals must be mined, factories built, trucks and machinery used, fuel burned. Then there is the maintenance, we all understand what it takes to keep a machine running. Our vehicles require constant care. Most parts can be held in our hands. These machines require massive machinery to make and move and install. Regular oil changes require hundreds of gallons of oil. Blades 225 long have to be inspected and cleaned. It’s insane. What happens to those blades when they wear out? Natalynne says they are thrown out. It’s unfortunate but all in the name of green energy. Vajdos told me July 2017 that now they chop the carbon fiber blades up in a massive chipper instead of stockpiling them. DeLapp joked about making jewelry out of the blade waste. This is no joke. These are huge machines that will eventually be junk. Once the Production Tax Credit expires the industry will die. It’s happening already in Germany. 3000 people have lost jobs in the German wind industry.
At a 350 Humboldt meeting they believe this project will make us energy independent, that it will combat climate change. In the same breath it was said that 30% of California’s energy was from renewables. Solar accounted for over twice as much as wind. Solar doesn’t require maintenance, there are no moving parts. They don’t kill or affect wildlife. Panels don’t need new infrastructure. Energy can be stored in EV vehicles and home battery systems. Mini grids can be established and people can take energy production into their own hands.
When the grid is shut down, we still won’t have power from these machines. The forest that the new transmission lines travel through will have to be maintained, roads will be made to accommodate the huge equipment, birds and bats will be killed. Lights will be blinking at night. Instead of a bucolic ridge line of grass lands and trees we will see widened roads, meteorology towers and wind turbines. Gigantic concrete footings requiring over 300 yards of concrete each will never go away. That’s over 30 concrete trucks per turbine. TerraGen says 1,600,000 gallons of diesel fuel will be burned during the installation of the turbines .
Micro grids fueled by solar, small scale wind and mini hydro systems can create the power we need. We need more PG&E blackouts. It will make people react and realize there is another way of living sustainably by using less power and creating our own. Look around, how many roofs have solar? Not enough. I challenge Humboldt to preserve our wild lands, to invest in small scale decentralized power production. I believe we can become an energy island but not by destroying our precious undeveloped land by allowing wind turbines into our backyard. We have to do it, we can’t stand back and watch Energy Capital Partners take over. It’s time.
Good.
field engineer schlumberger