Windmills not so quixotic in Moore; Township prepares law to have control over construction of energy-saving windmills
MOORE TWP. — Township officials are looking into a zoning ordinance that will control the spread of electric-generating windmills.
Actually, they’re looking up.
“Right now we have height restrictions on buildings and church steeples, but there’s no mention of windmills in our ordinance,” zoning officer Jason Harhart said Tuesday.
Theoretically, someone can come into the municipal building and request a permit to construct a 400-foot-tall windmill — about equal to a 40-story building.
Windmills that high exist in Pennsylvania, one of which is in Mahanoy City, Schuylkill County, although they’re not usually found generating power for a farm or single rural home. Also, the vision of wind farms consisting of scores of windmills along the base of Blue Mountain in northern Moore Township won’t be anything to fear.
“That would be a commercial enterprise,” township planning commission Chairman John Becker said, “and we don’t have any commercial zoning that big in the township.”
Still, the township does have six permit requests on file right now for private windmills.
“Fortunately,” Harhart said, “the highest one is 80 feet. The shortest is 30 feet.”
The township on Tuesday gave the go-ahead for several members of the planning commission and the zoning hearing board to meet as a subcommittee and look at how windmills might affect the township’s future landscape.
They’re also studying the implications of geothermal electricity production — just in case.
Harhart said the rush to get a windmill-regulating ordinance on the books is partly driven by the impending deregulation of the electricity-producing industry.
So-called “rate caps” are coming off electric prices, and homeowners can expect to pay at least 30 percent more on their monthly electric bills beginning after next year.
Private windmills would cut that cost, Harhart said.
Harhart said the township, with its wide-open spaces, will be attractive to windmills. Officials don’t want to put a roadblock in front of renewable energy production, but safety is their No. 1 concern.
“For example, we have to make sure they have safe fall zones,” he said.
That means if one would topple over, it would have clear land to fall on.
“You’re not going to see them in housing developments,” Becker said. “They wouldn’t work there anyway because the wind would be blocked.”
At Tuesday night’s supervisors’ meeting, ideas were handed over to Solicitor David Backenstoe to draft the ordinance.
“It’s going to be more than three lines,” Backenstoe told them, referring to what’s in the current ordinance. “It will probably be six, seven or eight pages.”
By Tony Nauroth
Staff Writer
The Express-Times
19 November 2008
Tags: Wind power, Wind energy
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