Pratt, Kan.
BP says it needs a change to regulations in Pratt County before it can move forward with a proposed new wind farm there.
The Pratt Tribune reports the company has withdrawn its application for a special use permit under current regulations.
BP says Pratt County's procedure for securing the permit is too involved and would be too costly, with no guarantee that BP would actually receive the permit.[The Pratt Tribune]
5 comments:
At the town board meeting video they said they would send a delegation to visit a Bp site and investigate the pros and cons.
TI said...
Anyone from here who wants to visit a BP wind project would not find it possible to find one in any location the least bit comparable to the Cape Vincent and Thousand Islands Region.
Wind developers in NY (and some of the politicians who cater to them) behave as if there is essentially no difference between the West, Midwest, and Southwest (where almost all of BP wind development efforts have been) and the St. Lawrence Valley. There is a huge difference. Even the most rural stretches of the St. Lawrence region of New York have much higher population densities than those areas of the US where wind farms have gone up with little if any local resistance.
Most of BP’s wind leaseholders in a certain kind of place. BP’s leaseholders in Cape Vincent, NY live in an entirely different kind of place. BP has had relatively few restrictions in the wide open flat states where wind power is far less intrusive. Here they have an entirely different set of community restrictions they must deal with – those restrictions are known as people. Wind developers and their local leaseholders here find the presence of too many people to be a troublesome inconvenience. And we see evidence of that attitude at every turn.
An obvious point that wind developers and renewable advocates have chosen to ignore -- is that a major wind project is not a form of electric power generation that can be duplicated from one place to another!
All you should have to do is look down from a jetliner flying over the country at 30,000 feet during the night. You can look down and see pretty clearly where people are living and where they are generally not. Moving large wind farms from where very few people live to where many more people live was bound to lead to big problems -- once people (in the Eastern states) became more generally familiar with what a visually massive (and noisy) thing a modern large-scale wind project actually is.
I have looked at the population data for the areas in and around many of the existing and proposed wind power projects in the Western and Great Plains states. I have yet to find one that has been built in an area, or anywhere near a community, that has population density factors that are anywhere nearly as high as those where most wind projects have been proposed or built in the Northeast. They just don't fit here. Popular backlash should not be at all surprising.
This was the stated reason in the linked article for why BP pulled the plug at Pratt:
"BP would like to receive a special use prior to furnishing all of the details called for in the zoning ordinance. Those details are expensive and very time consuming, according to Pierce, and would not in the long run assure BP receiving a special use, even if they were completed."
Aha! Anyone see the similarities with BP pulling out of the Pratt Wind Farm proposal and Cape Vincent?
BP is saying they need some assurances that they comply with local zoning law before they commit to doing all of the things actually required in the law.
Sorry BP, it doesn't work that way. The horse always precedes the cart.
How can BP then move ahead in the Cape with extensive studies, testimony and expensive, involved process without an okay that it abides by our local law?
What's goes for BP and Pratt should go with BP and the Cape. The information in this post and link seem to indicate that BP will not move ahead with the Art. 10 application without some assurances that our zoning law will be set aside, because it's too restrictive.
Can we expect BP will request an early decision on tossing our zoning law? Seems so.
BP has no pilot and no Ptc, without those there will be no wind in the Cape, just saying,
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