Next week, Bath County planners are likely to discuss and review what may be one of the most important new ordinances our county has considered in decades - one to guide them on how applications for industrializing their mountaintops with wind energy turbine towers will be handled. If officials here succeed in passing it, Bath will be the first locality in Virginia to have an ordinance in place addressing commercial wind utilities. And it won't come a minute too soon. ...

On Jan. 31, The Recorder newspaper printed an interview that Judge Theodore "Ted" V. Morrison Jr. gave to Anne Adams, staff writer for the paper. He was one of three commissioners on Virginia's State Corporation Commission, which recently approved Virginia's first industrial wind project in Highland County over well-organized protests from residents and landowners. Morrison has been on the SCC for 19 years ...Morrison stressed the federal production tax credits are what make commercial wind facilities attractive, but the reality is the renewable electricity utilities will never substantially change the country's need for larger power plants.

The evidence is clear. At this juncture in the debate on whether to build industrial wind utilities in the Allegheny Mountains, there is one point on which nearly all experts agree: No one knows enough about the effects these 400-foot towers could have on our unique and sensitive environment and we should do everything possible to find out more before any more are erected.

Any way you cut it, the State Corporation Commission staff’s decision to recommend approval of Mac McBride’s wind project on Allegheny Mountain was a pre-determined cop out. Because Highland County’s supervisors long ago dismissed the concerns of the great majority of their constituents about the negative effects of industrial scale wind power on tourism and viewsheds, the SCC staff was also able to sidestep the heart of the matter in its purely technical support of HNWD’s bid for a state permit to begin construction. All the heartfelt testimony of those who would be directly affected by the project related to the county’s beauty, history, cultural heritage and future opportunity based on these factors was simply ignored. SCC personnel said those things had already been considered by HighSland County supervisors when they reviewed the company’s application for a local conditional use permit. Most Highland residents believe their elected officials failed in this process, and the majority of other appointed leaders who got involved agreed they could not support HNWD’s plans. The examination of HNWD’s application by county supervisors did not begin to sufficiently assess the profound impacts this project could have. Two of the three on our board chose to lean on biased information and a subjective review of the county’s land use plan, and ignore the pleas of their constituents who came to them armed with an army of research showing these leaders they didn’t begin to have all the facts.

The longer Bath County ignores this issue, the more vulnerable it becomes as well. Never mind all the smart growth and good planning — this one kind of industry could cast a dark shadow over all the other promising developments Bath is starting to attract. Fortunately, it appears Bath’s planners are prepared to take the right road to encourage big wind companies to find another place to land.

Those opposed to the industrial development of our mountain ridges — and that constitutes a large majority — worry that government officials are persuaded by the energy lobby’s claims that “green” power on the grid, even if it’s a drop in the bucket, is better than nothing, no matter how adversely it might impact these culturally and environmentally delicate regions and no matter how heavily it must be subsidized by taxpayers to be financially feasible for investors.

The generic arguments about sacrificing for the good of the country made by corporate managers and lawyers working for the wind industry can easily ring true to those so far removed from the reality of our unmatched natural setting. But we believe the state agencies involved in this debate — the State Corporation Commission, Virginia’s departments of environmental quality, historic resources and conservation and recreation, and especially the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service — have come to understand those arguments have no legs in the much bigger picture of alternative energy possibilities.

The bill would basically tell people, especially those who in the past objected to the siting of natural gas transmission lines and windmills, to go fly a kite.

We hope other Virginia localities watching these proceedings will profit from learning that currently unreliable wind power is green only for those who are allowed to siphon off government money at taxpayers’ expense and that as this high-cost energy is fed back into the grid, it will result in higher, not lower, electric bills for users. And we hope the cumulative anguish of Highlanders expressed during the hearings will give other decision-makers pause when they consider the real costs of wrongly-sited wind power.