"Golden Crescent" epicenter of wind farm battles Source: northcountrypublicradio.org This week, Iberdrola Renewables revealed plans to build 75 wind turbines in the St. Lawrence County town of Hammond. ... |
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
"Golden Crescent" epicenter of wind farm battles
Consultant Wants Views On Wind Law
DAILY COURIER-OBSERVER (Potsdam and Massena, NY) SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2010
MORRISTOWN - When the Morristown Wind Committee presented the town board with its proposed wind energy facilities law on May 11, the document lacked noise standards and setback distances.
After members of the committee told the board they felt unqualified to recommend specific limits on noise and setbacks, the wind ordinance was passed along to LaBella Associates, P.C. - a consulting firm hired by the town to assist with the law's development.
Nearly six months later, LaBella has returned the draft law to Morristown with suggestions for improvement - none of which establish noise standards or setback distances.
"Before suggestions for the completion of this section can be offered, further discussion with the committee or with the board will be necessary to understand the town's intent," wrote Mark W. Tayrien, AICP, the director of LaBella's planning division.
"Noise has been correctly identified as one of the most problematic, and difficult to predict, issues raised by Wind Energy Conversion Systems (WECS) ... The committee has perceptively identified noise standards and setbacks as one of the most problematic issues confronted in the development of a proposed law regulating utility scale wind projects...
"The definition of these setbacks and standards is frequently a trade-off which must take into account the community's sensitivity to the risk for unacceptable noise as well as the prospect of precluding utility scale development through definition of 'excessive' setbacks," he wrote.
"Simply put, given the residential density typically found in upstate N.Y., there is no feasible way to simply compute an appropriate setback or constraint that would be acceptable in all instances. What could be seen as too strict in one community could just as easily be viewed as too lenient in another.
"LaBella is unaware of any simple computation or technical model available to define setbacks and noise thresholds. However, we would be happy to review this issue further with the town board and/or the committee in an effort to help understand the town's perspective and then define a setback regime that could be found appropriate in this instance," Mr. Tayrien said.
Town Supervisor Frank L. Putman said Friday that despite not being in a rush, the town board has some serious decisions to make.
"They're (LaBella) in effect saying that these are areas that are going to be specific to our community and that they want us to put something in the law for them to review," Mr. Putman said. "We, in our brain, thought that LaBella would make suggestions for the establishment of these two factors (noise and setbacks).
"This leaves us with that to decide," he added.
Mr. Putman said he believes "looking at similar laws that are working in other areas" is the direction that Morristown needs to go.
"We need to find out what is in place and working," he said.
According to the supervisor, the town board agreed to pay LaBella no more than $3,500 for their services. Town Clerk David J. Murray said the town had not yet received a voucher for payment.
Mr. Putman said LaBella will also assist the town board at any upcoming public hearings in regards to the wind law.
"Part of their value will be assisting us with any questions the public may pose," he said.
No meetings or hearings have been scheduled to continue work on the wind law, according to Mr. Murray.
The Morristown Town Board meets next on Dec. 14 at 7 p.m. in the town offices
Ecogen group unwilling to find middle ground
By Mary Perham
Posted Nov 14, 2010 @ 10:00 AM
Prattsburgh, NY —
Wind developer Ecogen apparently sees no compromise in its ongoing lawsuit with the town of Prattsburgh.
In a written response to state Supreme Court Justice John J. Ark, Ecogen’s attorney Robert W. Burgdorf said the town’s offer of remote location for the turbines would “effectively kill” the project in Prattsburgh.
Prattsburgh officials counter the new location was included in Ecogen’s original plan and would solve a number of problems, including noise issues. “They’re not going to bother anybody down there,” said town Councilman Chuck Shick.
The debate was launched after Ark recommended the battling parties work out a solution, in order to avoid costly future litigation.
Ecogen filed the lawsuit last January against the current Prattsburgh town board, claiming a resolution passed 3-2 in December by the former town board allows the developer to go ahead immediately with plans to put up 16 turbines.
The current town board rescinded the December resolution 4-1 at the beginning of the year, saying it was illegal and violated home rule laws.
Ecogen still sees the earlier resolution as valid, Burgdorf wrote Ark on Oct. 13.
But Ark wants a closer look at why the settlement was approved so quickly – a good sign, Shick said.
The December settlement was drawn up by then-town attorney John Leyden, with the support of former town Supervisor Harold McConnell.
The former board’s action came close on the heels of a lawsuit filed by Ecogen days after pro-wind board members McConnell and Sharon Quigley were soundly defeated in the November general election.
“(Ark) wants to hear why some decisions were made,” Shick said. “He wants John and Harold to explain their actions, under oath. I’d like to know that, myself.”
“(Ark) wants to hear why some decisions were made,” Shick said. “He wants John and Harold to explain their actions, under oath. I’d like to know that, myself.”
Shick and Councilman Steve Kula voted against the December agreement, and voted to rescind it in January as members of the new board.
Prattsburgh officials say Ecogen can put turbines in a remote area in the town originally included in the developer’s site plan. The original plan called for 100 turbines to be set up in town, with 34 potential locations in Prattsburgh’s southwestern corner, Shick said.
Burgdorf dismissed Prattsburgh’s proposal, saying the change would require years of environmental studies, new permits and new land control efforts.
Burgdorf dismissed Prattsburgh’s proposal, saying the change would require years of environmental studies, new permits and new land control efforts.
“(It) would be an insurmountable task,” Burgdorf wrote to Ark.
However, Ark’s effort to get both sides to agree did lead to the first informal discussion this year between the town and Ecogen’s parent company, Pattern Energy.
New town Supervisor Al Wordingham declined to give specifics about the discussion, which occurred two weeks ago, but said it was “very positive.”
The wind farm project has been the source of debate in the town, stretching back to 2002 when the developer announced plans to put turbines in Prattsburgh.
Ecogen also planned to build 17 turbines in the neighboring town of Italy, in Yates County. Ecogen also is suing Italy, which turned down the project a year ago.
The projects were touted in the beginning by some Prattsburgh board members and many residents as a way to provide renewable energy, increase town revenues and provide income for landowners.
Other residents have strenuously opposed the projects on the grounds the turbines could irreparably harm people in the area, the environment, and the landscape.
Other residents have strenuously opposed the projects on the grounds the turbines could irreparably harm people in the area, the environment, and the landscape.
California's Destructive Green Jobs Lobby
Silicon Valley, once synonymous with productivity-enhancing innovation, is now looking to make money on feel-good government handouts.
By GEORGE GILDER
California officials acknowledged last Thursday that the state faces $20 billion deficits every year from now to 2016. At the same time, California's state Treasurer entered bond markets to sell some $14 billion in "revenue anticipation notes" over the next two weeks. Worst of all, economic sanity lost out in what may have been the most important election on Nov. 2—and, no, I'm not talking about the gubernatorial or senate races.
This was the California referendum to repeal Assembly Bill 32, the so-called Global Warming Solutions Act, which ratchets the state's economy back to 1990 levels of greenhouse gases by 2020. That's a 30% drop followed by a mandated 80% overall drop by 2050. Together with a $500 billion public-pension overhang, the new energy cap dooms the state to bankruptcy.
Conservative pundits have lavished mock pity on the state. But as America's chief fount of technology, California cannot go down the drain without dragging the rest of the country with it.
The irony is that a century-long trend of advance in conventional "non-renewable" energy—from wood to oil to natural gas and nuclear—has already wrought a roughly 60% drop in carbon emissions per watt. Thus the long-term California targets might well be achieved globally in the normal course of technological advance. The obvious next step is aggressive exploitation of the trillions of cubic feet of low-carbon natural gas discovered over the last two years, essentially ending the U.S. energy crisis.
The massive vote against repeal of the California law—62% to 38%—supports an economy-crushing drive to suppress CO2 emissions from natural gas and everything else. In a parody of supply-side economics, advocates of AB 32 envisage the substitution of alternative energy sources that create new revenue sources, new jobs and industries. Their economic model sees new wealth emerge from jobs dismantling the existing energy economy and replacing it with a medieval system of windmills and solar collectors. By this logic we could all get rich by razing the existing housing plant and replacing it with new-fangled tents.
All the so-called "renewables" programs waste and desecrate the precious resource of arable land that feeds the world. Every dollar of new wages for green workers will result in several dollars of reduced pay and employment for the state's and the nation's other workers—and reduced revenues for the government.
Christopher Serra
Most destructive of all is the bill's stultifying effect on America's and California's most important asset: the venture capital industry, which accounts for the nation's technological leadership, military power, and roughly a fifth of GDP.
Led by Al Gore's investment affiliate, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers, the campaign to save AB 32 raised $31 million—more than three times the $10 million that the oil companies raised for repeal. Pouring in millions were such promethean venturers as John Doerr and Vinod Khosla of Kleiner Perkins, Eric Schmidt and Sergei Brin of Google, and the legendary Gordon Moore and Andrew Grove of Intel. The campaign even managed to shake down a contribution from the state's public utility, Pacific Gas and Electric, and gained the backing of the GOP's eBay billionaire gubernatorial candidate, Meg Whitman.
What is wrong with California's plutocratic geniuses? They are simply out of their depth in a field they do not understand. Solar panels are not digital. They may be made of silicon but they benefit from no magic of miniaturization like the Moore's Law multiplication of transistors on microchips. There is no reasonable way to change the wavelengths of sunlight to fit in drastically smaller photo receptors. Biofuels are even less promising. Even if all Americans stopped eating (saving about 100 thermal watts per capita on average) and devoted all of our current farmland to biofuels, the output could not fill much more than 2% of our energy needs.
In the past, Kleiner Perkins funded scores of vital ventures, from Apple and Applied Materials to Amazon and Google. But now Kleiner is moving on to such government- dependent firms as Miasole, Amyris Biofuels, Segway and Upwind Solutions. Many have ingenious technology and employ thousands of brilliant engineers, but they are mostly wasted on pork catchers.
Other venturers plunged into solar panel manufacturer Solyndra, which received some $500 million in federal subsidies and a campaign visit from Barack Obama before laying off 17% of its work force and giving up on a new factory that was supposed to create 1,000 green jobs.
Many of these green companies, behaving like the public-service unions they resemble, diverted some of their government subsidies into the AB 32 campaign for more subsidies. Virtually every new venture investment proposal harbors a "green" angle that turns it from a potential economic asset into a government dependent.
A partial solution is a suit by four attorneys general outside of California. They argue that the California law violates the Constitution's interstate commerce clause because of the limits it places on electricity generated by out-of-state, coal-fired power plants. But ultimately the new Congress must act. The Center for American Progress has found that 50 out of 100 or so new Republican congressmen elected earlier this month are "climate-change skeptics." But Republican leaders such as incoming Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor show dangerous gullibility in the face of environmentalist claims.
Co-sponsoring a disgraceful bill introduced in September to force utilities to expand their use of "renewable energy" to 15% by 2021 are Republican Sens. Sam Brownback and Susan Collins. Republican politicians are apparently lower in climate skepticism than readers of Scientific American, which recently discovered to its horror that some 80% of its subscribers, mostly American scientists, reject man-made global warming catastrophe fears.
Republicans may delude themselves that the U.S. can undertake a costly, inefficient and disruptive transformation of the energy economy, estimated by the International Energy Agency to cost some $45 trillion over 40 years, while meeting our global military challenges and huge debt overhang. But the green campaign wastes scarce and precious technological and entrepreneurial resources indispensable to the nation's future. Now it is debauching America's most precious venture assets. It must be defeated, not appeased.
Mr. Gilder is a founding fellow of the Discovery Institute
Investigation of ex-Cape clerk now in hands of state officials
By JAEGUN LEE
TIMES STAFF WRITER
WATERTOWN DAILY TIMES TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2010
CAPE VINCENT — The state attorney general's office has taken over the investigation of former Town Clerk Jeri Ann Mason.Ms. Mason, who was elected to office last November, resigned abruptly Sept. 14 after discrepancies were found in the town's finances.
Lee Park, a spokesman at the attorney general's office in Albany, said Monday that the "Mason case is a matter under review by the attorney general's office" but would not speculate on how long the investigation would take.
The case is being reviewed by the attorney general's Public Integrity Bureau, which is part of the office's criminal division that handles "complex investigations into government corruption, fraud and abuse of authority" at both the "state and local level," according to the attorney general's website.
Jefferson County District Attorney Cindy F. Intschert said that the case originally was brought to her office's attention by Cape Vincent Supervisor Urban C. Hirschey and that she referred the matter to state police investigators at the attorney general's request.
Mr. Hirschey would not comment on whether Ms. Mason was accused of embezzlement and referred all questions to the attorney general's office.
http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/article/20101116/NEWS03/311169981
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