6724 Baker Road
Prattsburgh, NY 14873
September 1, 2008
To the Commissioners of the PSC:
I believe that it would be wrong for you to approve the Iberdrola acquisition of Energy East. A wind developer should not have control of the transmission lines.
This letter is being sent to the Attorney General’s office. As you know, they are investigating Noble Environmental and First Wind. It is my belief that as they learn of more and more illegalities, they will widen the scope of their investigation and they will want to understand just why the state of New York, under the direction of the PSC, has allowed a situation to exist that smacks of dereliction of duty at its best and bribery at its worst.
Prior to 1995 the Energy Council was charged with the duty of developing health and safety regulations for renewable energy projects. The PSC was supposed to help in this endeavor and was specifically named. Safety regulations were never developed for wind factories, and in 1995 the Energy Council was disbanded by then Governor Pataki. I don’t know what reasons you had for not developing safety regulations prior to 1995 when the Energy Council existed, but when Pataki disbanded the Energy Council, the PSC never went to the State Legislature and reported that now the State of New York had no way of ensuring the health and safety of its citizens who would live near wind factories.
Even so, you had Article X, which would have helped, but even this means of regulation expired several years ago and the PSC once again did not bother to explain to the Legislature that without regulations and without Article X, the State of New York had no way to regulate wind factories. And there really is no excuse because by the time Article X expired, wind developers were descending on the state in droves.
What you did do was get to work developing the Renewable Portfolio Standard, which, from the outside, would appear to be a good thing. But you neglected to build into the RPS a way for the state to ensure that wind projects would be built in areas where wind is optimal. And, of course, you left health and safety up to the wisdom of small towns across the state – small towns that did not have the knowledge or expertise to be able to handle such a task.
I am also aware that you allowed wind developers Erich Bachmeyer from Global Winds Harvest, a Massachusetts company, and Thomas Hagner from Ecogen LLC to be part of the Renewable Portfolio Standard Committee. There probably were more wind developers but I would not be familiar with their names.
Now I will draw your attention to the specific situation in Prattsburgh, where we have two wind developers – Ecogen LLC (Prattsburgh Wind project) and First Wind (Windfarm Prattsburgh) attempting to build projects which will share the same transmission lines to the transfer station. It has been openly admitted by everyone having anything to do with these projects – including the lead agent, the Steuben County IDA and the developers themselves – that due to the present transmission system it will never be possible for both projects to be up and running at the same time. This has never seemed to bother anyone at the state level, including the PSC.
Each company has other transmission problems because neither one has been able to secure the leases it needs to get the electricity from the turbines to the substations. When documented bullying tactics did not work, Windfarm Prattsburgh convinced the town of Prattsburgh to condemn the property of 7 landowners in order to secure leases to put in underground cables. I’m sure you are aware that the Supervisor of the Town of Prattsburgh, a licensed realtor, openly admitted that a couple of months before condemnation proceedings began, he received a commission for a real estate deal involving the wind company. So, to be short and sweet, the condemnations are fraught with scandal. If the town of Prattsburgh succeeds in condemning the land, you may be sure that Ecogen LLC will demand similar treatment, as will wind developers across the state.
Going back a bit, in the EIS, Windfarm Prattsburgh described a very different transmission route from the one it now is proposing. The earlier one involved overground cables. A year and a half ago, Windfarm Prattsburgh was in negotiation with NYSEG to use NYSEG’s ROWs. However that deal fell through when they all realized that NYSEG’s ROWS are a mere 30 feet wide, and the Windfarm Prattsburgh project would require 100 foot ROWS for tree trimming. It is my belief that NYSEG was unwilling or unable to condemn land to widen the ROWS, so Windfarm Prattsurgh decided to go underground.
Now, if Iberdrola, a huge wind developer, owned NYSEG at that time, that scenario would have been a whole lot different. Do you really think that Iberdrola would have hesitated to condemn the ROWs? Would they have cared about the landowners? 100 foot ROWs would have drastically changed the Prattsburgh landscape so that not only would we have 400 foot monstrous turbines on our ridgetops, but the country lanes would have been lined with 100 foot poles, and acres of forest would have been cut.
In Prattsburgh and Italy and Cohocton the wind conditions just barely meet the standards set by NYSERDA. Just look at the AWS Truewind maps and it will become obvious in a second. So here we have a situation where the wind is minimal and add that to the intermittency of wind and the fact that New York has the highest number of icing incidents in the country – icing incidents which would shut down the turbines during peak wind production months – and you have to ask yourself why on earth a project is being built here in the first place.
The answer is simple – the state, under the guidance and urgency of the PSC, has made it profitable for multi-national corporations to be the owners of wind projects that would never make a dime without state subsidies – projects that will not help the renewable energy needs of our state and of our country. The corporations don’t care if the wind plants are unprofitable because they will then have tax write offs on top of the subsidies.
The PSC has been complicit in this game – levying the systems benefit tax and the renewable energy tax without the approval of the legislature – and leading people to believe that when they voluntarily pay more money for “wind credits” that they are helping to reduce pollution through the use of “clean energy.”
Now you are ready to allow Iberdrola to own wind plants and to control transmission lines. Iberdrola is not going to care whether the wind projects reduce our dependency on fossil fuels. They are building wind plants and want to control the transmission lines for one reason – MONEY. And they will make money no matter how infrequently the wind blows.
One has to wonder what you are thinking.
Very truly yours,
RUTH FRIEDNER MATILSKY
No comments:
Post a Comment