Wind 'farms' get little backing
A state-sponsored study naming Leelanau County as one of the best areas in Michigan for commercial wind energy development is being looked at askance by some of the “greenest” people around.
Local supporters of expanding renewable energy resources in Leelanau County – including officials of the National Park Service – say they’re concerned about the implications of a study released last month by the state’s newly-established Wind Energy Resource Zone Board.
The study names portions of northwestern Lower Michigan – including almost all of Leelanau County – as ideal for the development of massive windmill “farms” with hundreds of wind turbines over 200 feet tall generating electricity for parts of the rest of the state.
“In general, I’d say we’re a very green organization and naturally support efforts to improve the availability of renewable energy,” said Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore deputy superintendent Tom Ulrich. “But, as part of the National Park Service, we naturally do have some concerns about what so many large windmills might mean for the resources it’s our mission to protect, and to the experience of the many visitors we’re here to serve.”
Ulrich said it was likely that he or other Lakeshore officials would attend a seminar for local planners on the topic of the state’s wind energy study on July 23 at 6 p.m. at the Empire Township Hall, and provide formal input to the state by an Aug. 4 deadline. On Wednesday evening, July 1, the Cleveland Township Planning Commission was soliciting comment from members of the public on the study; and other townships throughout the county were expected to follow suit.
The notion that hundreds of massive wind turbines could dominate the landscape in portions of Leelanau County is nothing new to Mark Zemaneck of Centerville Township. In 2005, a company known as Noble Environmental Windpower completed a study similar to the one recently completed by Michigan’s new Wind Energy Resource Zone Board. Noble’s study concluded that dozens of massive wind turbines located atop the “spine” of Leelanau County – right down the middle of mostly agricultural land in Centerville Township – could turn a tidy profit if the electricity generated was sold to various power companies in the state.
Noble made offers to a number of Centerville Township property owners, and explored options for new zoning ordinance provisions that would allow the use of wind turbines for commercial power generation. Zemanek volunteered to serve on a committee to draft the new zoning ordinance provisions.
“What we came up with was an ordinance that allowed smaller windmills to serve individual residences in Centerville Township,” Zemanek said, “but we effectively zoned out any possibility of establishing massive, commercial wind farms here. We took a lot of public input on that at the time and heard from a lot of our neighbors – and I don’t remember hearing from anyone who was in favor of these massive wind farms.”
Among other restrictions, Centerville’s zoning changes prohibited the installation of commercial wind turbines within several miles of property lines abutting the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore – a provision supported by “public input” submitted at the time by National Park Service officials commenting on Centerville Township’s proposed ordinance.
Noble Environmental Windpower has since developed a wind farm near Bad Axe, in the “thumb” area of Michigan’s lower peninsula. That area of the state was listed as the most promising single area for wind generation in the state study, while northwestern Lower Michigan came in second. Portions of downstate Allegan County, plus parts of Charlevoix and Antrim counties, were also shown to be good sites for commercial wind generation.
Meanwhile, in Leelanau Township, Doug McInnis of the Northport Energy Action Task Force (NEAT) said he and fellow task force members and local officials are paying very close attention to what the state’s Wind Energy Resource Board is up to.
“Like most everyone these days, we to support the availability of renewable energy resources in Leelanau County and are taking steps to make renewable energy more practical here,” McInnis said. “But we’re talking about smaller residential wind turbines and maybe one or two larger turbines that could tap into the existing electrical grid.”
A focus of the Wind Energy Resource Zone Board’s study is to determine whether local units of government will allow construction not only of wind turbine farms, but also the transmission lines and transformer stations required to move electrical power out of “resource zones” such as Leelanau County and into broader areas of the state.
“We live in an area of great beauty,” McInnis said. “We simply don’t want it to become full of massive towers and power lines.”
Burdickville resident Jim Lively, who heads the Leelanau Smart Growth Coalition for the Michigan Land Use Institute, expressed a different sentiment, however.
“We’re inclined to be a little more open than others to commercial wind energy,” Lively said. “We see wind energy as a use that’s compatible with agricultural land – wind is a resource just as the land is. The argument that our land is just too pretty for commercial wind energy is not an argument we will support. If people could go without electricity, then we could afford to be pretty.”
In Empire, a group known as the Empire Renewable Energy Committee (EREC) appears to support the addition of wind turbines to the renewable energy mix. But a proposal on its website mentions only “one or two” wind turbines no bigger than the one currently operated by a local utility company on Bugai Road at M-72 in Elmwood Township.
“The problem with some of these commercial wind energy proposals is that the idea is to ship most of the electricity out of Leelanau County – with very little benefit to Leelanau County,” said Zemanek. “I think people around here are all in favor of renewable energy including small wind turbines to power their own homes – I know I am.
“But commercial wind turbines on the scale envisioned by the Wind Energy Resource Zone Board is going to be a non-starter in Leelanau County,” Zemanek said.
8 July 2009
Tags: Wind power, Wind energy
Some possibly related stories:
The copyright of this article is owned by the author or publisher indicated. Its availability here constitutes a "fair use" as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law as well as in similar "fair dealing" exceptions of the copyright laws of other nations, as part of National Wind Watch's effort to advance understanding of the environmental, social, scientific, and economic issues of large-scale wind power development. For more information, click here.
