Why our senators are wrong about wind power.

As I mentioned last week, a bill intended to allow permitting of wind farms in North Carolina was on the brink of becoming a bill banning wind power in the mountains. Last Tuesday, thanks in part to a call-in effort that impressed the staff answering the phones, the senate Environment and Natural Resources committee did not put in that restrictive language. But they took out language that would have let the permitting process cover mountain counties, perhaps teeing the bill up for what happened yesterday in the Finance committee.

From the Citizen-Times, where Jordan Schrader is doing a great job of keeping up with what our delegation is doing in Raleigh:

State senators today unveiled a proposed change in the state’s ridge-protection law that would ban large-scale wind energy production in the mountains. The Senate Finance Committee added the language to a bill moving through the General Assembly that will shape where windmills are allowed to be built statewide. . . .

“It’s horrible. They just banned wind,” as a source of energy in the mountains, said Crystal Simmons, a Newland resident and Appalachian State University student who manages the school’s project that has erected a 150-foot windmill on campus. . . .

The addition advocated by [Buncombe Senator Martin] Nesbitt would allow only small windmills whose primary purpose is to generate electricity for use within a home.

Most Hooligans would find that they agree with Martin Nesbitt more than they would disagree with him: he has earned his reputation as a fighter for the working man, and he has more often than not been a friend of the environment. But on this, I say he’s being incredibly short-sighted. In fact, to put it bluntly, he’s wrong. He’s wrong because the original bill would have gone to great lengths to protect mountain viewsheds. Wrong because if any version of federal climate change legislation makes it into law this year (and you have to hope it does) wind power will become an increasingly inexpensive way of lighting and and cooling and heating our homes. Wrong because this is a serious blow to a region working to become a leader in alternative energy. Wrong because it’s a blow to the kind of entrepreneurship (industrial) we’d like to see more of and a boon to the kind that doesn’t need any help (development interests).

Wrong for all those reasons, but especially for one more: here in Buncombe, we get more than half of our electricity from coal. And so by axing alternative sources of electricity—in the name of protecting our mountain views—Senator Nesbitt and his western colleagues are contributing to the complete destruction of mountains elsewhere in Appalachia, as illustrated in the picture above.

I believe that Nesbitt is sincerely concerned about the aesthetics of wind turbines. When he says, in defense of the language he pushed to insert in the bill, “It’s not just the tourist trade, it’s our whole culture,” I believe he sees himself defending our mountains from unnecessary and unsightly change. And yet if he’s hoping to preserve mountain culture, he should probably talk to this woman. He might think twice about how he’s chosen to do it.