National Wind Watch: Wind Energy News » Horse Creek Wind Farm placed on international environmental conflict atlas

The proposed Horse Creek Wind Farm is now part of an international map of environmental conflicts.

The project was recently placed on the Environmental Justice Atlas, which maps more than 2,200 environmental conflicts around the world.

“Anything we can do to magnify the project and show to a larger audience it’s incompatible with the Thousand Islands region is a step in the positive direction,” said Ross Holbrook, a founding member of River Residents Against Turbines, or River RATS.

Avangrid Renewables and its subsidiary, Atlantic Wind LLC, plan to build the wind farm in the towns of Clayton, Orleans, Brownville and Lyme. The project has been discussed for about a decade.

The mapping project is an initiative operated and moderated by the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain. It has collaborations with environmental groups in several countries.

The atlas covers environmental conflicts involving economic activity or legislation with negative environmental and social outcomes, and which mobilize environmental justice organizations about potential harms.

“The EJ Atlas collects these stories of communities struggling for environmental justice from around the world,” the atlas’ website said. “It aims to make these mobilization more visible, highlight claims and testimonies and to make the case for true corporate and state accountability for the injustices inflicted through their activities.”

The placement on the international map comes as the size of Avangrid Renewables’ project faces new questions. A New York Independent System Operator study found the grid only has enough capacity for 120 megawatts of wind-generated energy instead of the up to 250 megawatts the developer initially requested.

The company, formerly Iberdrola Renewables and part of the Iberdrola Group, did not discuss a timetable for when it will submit a preliminary scoping statement for the project, the next key step in the Article 10 review process for the developer.

Mr. Holbrook said environmental justice is one piece of the Article 10 review process, and that the map listing helps raise the profile of the project.

The map can be seen at http://ejatlas.org/.