This press release provided by the County Prosecutor's office of Kittitas County in Washington State discloses evidence of bias on the part of the Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council in its decision to recommend that Governor Christine Gregoire overrule the local authority and approve the Kittitas Valley Wind Power Project.

The Role of Wind Energy in a Power Supply Portfolio

....Wind is primarily an energy resource that makes relatively little contribution to meeting system peak loads. Even with large amounts of wind, the Northwest will still need to build other generating resources to meet growing peak load requirements.......But wind energy cannot provide reliable electric service on its own.
When wind energy is added to a utility system, its natural variability and uncertainty is combined with the natural variability and uncertainty of loads. This increases the need for flexible resources such as hydro, gas-fired power plants, or dispatchable loads to maintain utility system balance and reliability across several different timescales. The demand for this flexibility increases with the amount of wind in the system.

We are in continued public hearings to consider the application of the Desert Claim Wind Farm. I would like to remind everybody that the record is closed at this point for public testimony. What we are doing this evening is we have taken receipt - and we did that actually midpoint last week - of the revised development agreement for the project. What we intend to do this evening is to engage in Board discussion in terms of setting a timeline for further review and any other comment as the Board deems appropriate and then ideally with instructions to staff in terms of how we proceed from this date.

THIS DEVELOPMENT AGREEMENT (“Agreement”) is entered into and effective this __ day of _______, 2004, by and between Kittitas County, a Washington municipal corporation (“County”) and Desert Claim Wind Power LLC, a Washington limited liability company (“Desert Claim”). This Agreement is made pursuant to Revised Code of Washington (“RCW”) 36.70B.170, Kittitas County Code (“KCC”) Chapter 15A.11, and KCC Chapter 17.61A, and relates to the Desert Claim Wind Power Project.

Counsel for the Environment (CFE) appreciates this opportunity to comment on the Kittitas Valley Wind Power Project (KVWPP) Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS). CFE takes no position in support or opposition of the KVWPP at this time. The following comments seek to ensure the Final Environmental Impact Statement provides the public with the most detailed information possible on the environmental impacts of the proposed wind power project.

Q. Has the applicant demonstrated a good faith effort to resolve noncompliance issues?

A. The brief answer is no. When Zilkha Renewable Energy applied to EFSEC for permits in January 2003 they made no attempt at that time to apply to Kittitas County in a timely manner in order to resolve non-compliance issues. It took the applicant five months to complete a short application. The (initial) applications to the County were not complete. They had major flaws like the application not being signed, not providing a list of property owners within 300' of the project site, not providing the signatures of the landowners within the project area, and stating that they were only applying for certain permits from the County but not those required (to achieve compliance). The major flaws within each submittal were the most basic elements of the application and listed on the front page of the application. In all the years I have been a Land Use Planner I have never had an applicant provide an application with so many fundamental flaws so many times. I cannot help but think that this was a strategy of Zilkha's all along. This issue was even brought up to the applicant when they continually delayed submitting a complete application to the County. When a complete application was finally received I sent out the Notice of Application within one week. This was the first and only action that the County had control over and it was completed in a timely manner. Zilkha Renewable Energy knew that we were relying on the DEIS to be published which is why we could not give them a conclusive date when the County would hold hearings. On numerous occasions between June and October 2003 we let Zilkha know how much time it would take the County to process their application once an adequate DEIS was complete and the process was in our hands. When the DEIS completion date was pushed back so was our timeframe.

3.8 Health & Safety

Affected Environment, Environmental Impacts and Mitigation Measures

"A number of comments submitted for the scoping process for the Desert Claim project EIS addressed concerns relating to potential health and safety issues. Specific topics indicated in these comments included certain possible hazards that are uniquely associated with wind turbines, such as blade throw and ice throw; health and safety issues associated with electrical and magnetic fields; more common hazards such as fire; and the incidence and impacts of shadow flicker, another phenomenon specific to wind turbines. Section 3.8 addresses these wide-ranging health and safety topics that have been identified as concerns for the environmental review. "

This document [DEIS] has not provided any demonstrable public need for the insignificant amount of power this facility is capable of producing. No valid, compelling local (or even statewide) economic reasons were offered to potentially offset the overwhelming negative impacts that will result if built. This DEIS is abundant in quantity, but extremely lacking in quality of scientific analysis and entirely deficient in analysis in certain areas. Various mitigations offered are unacceptable or unworkable. The following are areas of analysis that were either deficient or not performed at all:............