While Dakota War College is busy flogging the tired Michele Bachmann meme of light-bulb oppression and regurgitating central party agitprop, it misses a chance to beat greenies over the head with their own greeniness. Xcel Energy just announced that it is cancelling a 150-megawatt wind farm planned for Dickey and McIntosh counties in North Dakota, just across the border from Aberdeen. What killed this project? A few hundred birds:
Xcel Energy Inc. has canceled a $400 million wind farm in southeastern North Dakota that potentially threatened two endangered birds.
Under federal law, Xcel would be required to mitigate threats to the whooping crane and the piping plover, a step that carried "uncertainty in the cost and timing," the company said in a regulatory filing Friday.
...The whooping crane, the tallest bird in North America, is down to 400 in the wild, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The piping plover is listed as endangered in the Great Lakes area, with just 63 known nesting pairs in 2008 [David Shaffer, "Xcel Cancels Xcel Wind Energy Project," Minneapolis StarTribune, 2011.04.04].
I guess it doesn't work to tell those tall whooping cranes to... duck.
Bird lovers are happy. The "all of the above" Republicans ought to be enraged. Energy independence advocates ought to be hollering about oppressive government regulation and misplaced priorities... but I'm betting a lot of "drill baby drill" conservatives can't bring themselves to apply their principles to the defense of sissy green passive wind power.
The folks at the American Bird Conservancy aren't anti-wind power. They lay out "Bird-Smart Wind Guidelines" that includes siting turbines away from sensitive bird areas, using appropriate lighting (but please, use the slow red flashers, not the bright white strobes that distract drivers and keep folks up at night), monitoring, and compensation in the form of turbine operators paying for habitat conservation projects. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agrees that there are responsible ways to harvest wind power while protecting birds. But apparently Xcel Energy finds guidelines like that too costly, so we miss out on 150 megawatts of homegrown green power.
Bonus Bird Bonks: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates wind turbines whack 440,000 birds in the U.S. each year. However...
Buildings kill 550 million birds per year, while power lines kill 130 million, cars kill 80 million and domestic cats kill 10 million, it said. And wind power is far less risky for bird populations than other sources of energy, [USFWS] said [Nancy Madsen, "Bird, Turbine Battle Builds," Watertown (NY) Daily Times, 2011.04.03].
This is the second time that a major wind farm project has been canceled in Dickey County. Of course, it is part of the big, currently operating Tatanka wind farm that straddles the North Dakota/South Dakota border. The previous cancellation was because of an objection by the developer to some zoning restrictions the county had adopted to lessen the visual and noise effects of the turbines on the people who live near them. I have wondered since the Excel project was announced in 2008 if it would have to meet those zoning restrictions.
Corporations always cite what they fancy as tree-hugger rules when they want to blame something for a failure or change in plans. As one who has been involved in wildlife matters (I was the seasonal naturalist for the Richmond and Mina Lake recreation areas), I find the specific citation of the whooping crane and piping plover in Excel's announcement suspect. It fits the pattern of corporations always trying to make the Endangered Species Act a culprit in development plans. The bird-danger mitigation requirements are something that other enterprises have met in the very same county, and do not seem to pose a cumbersome detraction for them. I strongly suspect that the Excel project does not want to deal with the human-annoyance mitigation provisions established by the county.
Acciona, the parent company of Tatanka, which has a 14,000 acre wind farm in Dickey and McIntosh Counties in North Dakota and McPherson County in South Dakota, has published an Avian and Bat Protection Plan which is available through this link: http://www.acciona-na.com/Corporate-Responsibility
It, pardon the pun, takes the wind out of Excel's stated claim.
I find it interesting that a wind farm was cancelled because of birds! I also found the "Bonus Birds Bonks" interesting! I don't know why Excel would cancel their project when more birds are killed by buildings than by wind turbines!
Brandi, good point: I haven't heard of any major plate-glass windows being cancelled. And David, great links! We clearly have more reading to do....