September 4, 2008
The Town of Barre is about to enter a growing club, comprised of communities that have said YES to wind development. With the passage of their law permitting wind turbines to be built anywhere in the town with minimal setback and noise protections, Barre is ripe for development.
What will Barre’s future look like? Well, now that the Spanish company Iberdrola has managed to bypass the major safeguards usually imposed on utility companies, they are eager to find places to build their tax shelters – er, wind farms. Erecting wind turbines, whether in windy areas or in places where they won’t generate a single kW of electricity (like Barre) will provide them with enough tax credits and subsidies to pay off their investment in a few short years and also shelter them from paying taxes on most of the income that Energy East will earn them in New York State. For some reason, those facts escaped our elected officials, and didn’t deter them from heavily promoting the deal as a good one for New Yorkers (huh?).
But back to Barre, a small, rural, mostly flat township 10 miles south of Lake Ontario in western New York. A few powerful farmers and quarry owners dominate the political landscape here, and soon their wind turbines will dominate the actual landscape. Neighbors are being enticed to sign leases and agreements for a few thousand dollars that will tie up their land for decades and prohibit them from complaining about any of the nuisances that the turbines generate, and from even saying anything to their friends or family members about what they have done. The strain is already starting to be felt: people avoiding one another, refusing to speak openly when asked, or just plain telling others “It’s none of your business.” Funny how putting up a 420 ft. tall machine that may make loud noises just a thousand feet from your home is considered none of your business, but in this community it is. People are afraid to speak out, for fear of severing life-long friendships. Wait until they see what the presence of those machines does to those relationships.
So now the law is passed and Iberdrola has been busy signing people up. Next will come the earth moving equipment to blast and dig holes for the bases, then the trucks carrying 50-ton loads of towers and nacelles and blades, and the giant cranes to erect them. It won’t take long. The parts have been stored off the Thruway at various locations, just waiting for the formality of approval from the Public Service Commission. Now that that charade is over, the trucks will roll!
If it’s not too windy, the towers will go up quickly, mostly by specialized crews from outside our area. Our little restaurants and delis will see a short boom in business while they are here. But before you know it, these workers will be gone, leaving us with several gleaming white towers supporting giant blades that will stand there. And stand there. Our wind in Barre is pretty fickle – too light to drive those giant blades most of the time and too strong for their hubs during times of high winds. So they will produce very little, if any, electricity that can be sold into the grid. We won’t know that, of course, because like the results of the meteorological towers that have been up for a couple years to measure our wind, we will never be allowed to see the results of their meters. The wind industry very carefully guards that information, claiming it is “proprietary” and that releasing it would somehow put them at a disadvantage against their competition. Except that they don’t have any competition. Before Thanksgiving, they will have gotten everyone who can be persuaded to part with their judgment for a few bucks to agree to permit the company to use their land for wind development for decades to come. Why an intelligent person would tie up their land, not only during their lifetime but for the lives of their children, is hard to understand. There is something about having money waved under your nose that makes otherwise good people do truly stupid – even harmful – things.
It probably wouldn’t matter if these greedy fools were the only ones who suffered the consequences. But the tragedy is that the ones who profit the most will probably move south in years to come, leaving everyone else to deal with the mess they have created.
What mess? Well, 60 or more turbines will march across our town in any direction that works for the developer. So expect them all over the most beautiful part of town where the open land and woods harbor all kinds of wildlife. When that room is used up, the turbines will be built 1000 ft. from homes and businesses, so that the maximum number of machines can be squeezed onto the land. If a property is needed for transmission lines, it will be taken by eminent domain and its owner minimally compensated for the loss. No one will be exempt, except those with large parcels who have agreements with the wind developer to keep the turbines away from their homes. Once again, the aristocracy comes out on top, and the rest of us suffer. I thought we lived in a democracy, but I must have been dreaming.
In a decade or two we will look very different from today. Now, we are a bucolic landscape with a few industrial intrusions. Tomorrow we will be an industrial wasteland, with perhaps a few corners of untouched beauty. The aging towers will stand idle, rusting and dripping hydraulic fluid all over the ground, contaminating what was supposed to be returned to farmland when the turbines were no more. But the money that built them will be long gone and its owners untraceable, and the locals will be stuck trying to find a way to finance the demolition of millions of dollars of aging equipment. The bonds and funds promised to pay for this will have proven to be worth no more than recycled paper. Anyone who could afford to leave the area and could manage to find a community where such degradation was not permitted, will have sold and moved away. Those left, the old, the poor, the family-bound, will not be able to deal with the costs. It will be a bleak and lonely landscape, indeed.
But never fear; a savior will rush in! The government of Abu Dhabi, providing Iberdrola with our oil dollars to build their turbines, will be happy to buy our farmland at fire-sale prices. The barren Middle East is facing a food crisis, and fertile farmland, even if somewhat polluted by wind turbines, is exactly what they need to feed their populations.
How will we feed ours, when we’ve industrialized our farmland and then given it away? Apparently nobody in power is concerned about that today. That will be a problem for the next generation to worry about. Our state agencies are more concerned about enriching farmers than they are with preserving farming, or they would never permit the industrialization of prime farmland like that in Barre. And our Barre farmers apparently aren’t very committed to farming, if they would sign deals that will bring such a future to their acreage.
As I read over what I just wrote, I think that I am a lunatic – and you probably do, too. I hope I’m dreaming and will soon wake up from this nightmare. But in case I don’t, hold on to this article for a couple decades and see how much of it comes true. I sincerely hope I am dead wrong, but I have an awful feeling that I have never been so right.
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