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. ...

The decision to build the Tranquillon Ridge Wind Farm by county planners was made much too quickly and with the near exclusion of input from Lompoc. Mark these concerns: ...

This afternoon, the Shasta County Board of Supervisors will have a hearing concerning the Hatchet Ridge Wind project. The board's decision will have a significant impact on birds living in and migrating through the West. The Board of Supervisors has not been given the knowledge to make a proper decision on the project. ...The wind power industry learned a lesson from the astounding number of bird kills at Altamont Pass. Instead of pursuing better wind turbine designs that would limit bird kills, it chose a path of cover-up and lies. Today many wind turbine sites have limited access and workers will lose their jobs if they disclose the truth.

Anyone who was paying attention this summer knows how unreliable windmills are, because 90 percent of the time, they just sat there motionless. ...Local media always have a lot of coverage when windmills are triumphantly approved after the usual protests by affected residents. But they never say a word about how often, or what percentage of actual time they are completely and worthlessly still. According to local windmill developers, they power thousands of homes. This summer they didn't.

[T]he developer has offered a contribution to Burney to ensure the town profits from the dramatic change to its landscape. Ideas have included a community hall, a recreation district and town beautification. The developer in July outlined donations to a Burney community fund and an educational foundation ...It sounds promising, but the last-minute scramble doesn't instill confidence in the county's due diligence. And springing details at the Planning Commission meeting doesn't give the town time for a fully informed debate about the pros and cons.

Horns Reef [wind farm in Denmark] is emblematic of enormous subsidies to industries that would not exist in a free market. In the U.S., such industries are being supported by massive government subsidies and tax write-offs that shift the cost of resulting electricity to unsuspecting Americans' tax bills and monthly electricity bills.

For a company that hopes to start construction on Virginia's first wind energy plant in the next few months, Highland New Wind Development appears to be dragging its heels. Recently, the state Department of Conservation and Recreation said it had not heard from the developer after requesting more information in its initial review. Last week, Virginia's Department of Historic Resources said it still awaits a view shed study, among other things, before it can offer recommendations for softening the impact of 400-foottowers on Highland County's tallest summit. In the last three months, updates from the developer to Highland's supervisors haven't yielded much new information. HNWD says it's still seeking investors, has not finalized a power purchase agreement, and cannot complete a final site plan because securing turbine equipment has become harder to do.

Death, destruction and insomnia are marketed as "renewable electricity" to urban consumers. The federal production tax credit drives it all, with additional subsidies on national forest, where no property taxes are levied. ...We'd have to replace nearly every tree with a turbine to offset even a small amount of coal's impact, devastating the forest in the process. Without a national policy on energy conservation and efficiency, we're whistling in the wind anyway.

Forcing a quick decision on the Hatchet Ridge Wind turbine project divides the citizens of Burney. Looking at the recent article in both CNN and the Record Searchlight about the polarizing effects the arrival of wind power has had on the small town of Lowville, N.Y., the situation there is similar to what is taking place in Burney over the Hatchet Ridge turbines. The 195 400-foot turbines in New York state have pitted "neighbor against neighbor and father against son." There are similar strong feelings in Burney.

No matter how much good PR wind energy gets in the U.S., or in Virginia, from politicos eager to jump on the "green power" band wagon, officials and residents in both counties must retain their focus here at home. They should tune out the frenzied and exaggerated scare tactics used so often to shove wind power down our throats. They must keep their eyes squarely in their own back yards when it comes to siting issues. Everything from wildlife and environmental impacts to the majority voices of those who live here must take precedence over the misleading public relations machine that takes the spotlight off the millions of dollars we already spend to subsidize a source of power that cannot meet our needs if developed ...

Oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens is being disingenuous, telling one thing to the American people and another to Congress. He has repeatedly said that no government help is needed to pursue his plan to build the world's largest wind farm in the Texas Panhandle. Yet he is lobbying hard for extension of the Production Tax Credit and National Renewable Energy Zones -- essentially a huge tax shelter for wind industry investors and expedited eminent domain for transmission corridors. The real innovation here is the well-coordinated manipulation of public perception.

The first sentence in the Washington Post article, Wind is Given 2nd Look as Energy Needs Grow, gets right to the point: the energy industry has targeted western Virginia's forested mountains for industrial wind energy development. "Wind is catching fire" said L. Preston Bryant Jr. Virginia's secretary of natural resources. "It is literally all the rage." Although the Washington Post article highlights the "conflict within the environmental community" concerning this development push, it fails to provide much in the way of details concerning the basis for the objections.

Highland New Wind Development (HNWD), developer of the proposed 20-turbine ridgeline wind project in Highland County, Virginia, has taken its search for investors to extremes, posting a website entitled: "The Greenest Windfarm in the World." ...This greenest-of-all posturing puts a new spin on the permit conditions imposed by the State Corporation Commission (SCC). Although potential investors will want to know why the SCC imposed precedent-setting wildlife monitoring conditions on the project, this critical information is missing from the HNWD website. Most of the extensive record, however, including expert reports and testimony submitted to the SCC, is provided here on the Virginia Wind website.

LADWP claims that these transmission lines are necessary to bring renewable energy into the urban city to "diversify their energy portfolio." Development of renewable energy resources including geothermal, solar and wind, should be our highest priority to replace fossil fuels. However, for LADWP to destroy pristine desert and conservation lands in the process, including condemnation of private property, is not a "green" way to go about it. I further disagree that LADWP needs to own its own transmission lines, when there are existing corridors that were established through years of focus and study and could be the shared with other utilities.

Shasta County's decisions regarding the Hatchet Ridge Wind Turbine Project will have a dramatic and permanent effect on the quality of life here in the Intermountain area. The overriding problem is the proposed location. It's hard to imagine a project site that would have greater visual impact. It is difficult to visualize how enormous these monster turbines would be. Their height of 428 feet is equivalent to a 40-story building. Think of up to 68 Transamerica Pyramids, complete with flashing red lights, sitting on Hatchet Ridge! ...

Expanding "alternative" energies would not be alternative if they worked ("Expand energy alternatives," June 30), they would be just energy sources. ...If solar, wind power and biofuels are so great, they would not need the massive, taxpayer funded subsidies they now enjoy.

Gitmo and guns are getting all the press. But energy mavens are talking about another recent far-reaching - but little noted - U.S. Supreme Court decision on the California energy crisis: It took them seven years but they finally figured it out. The revisionist part of the story is well known: Big bad oil traders like Enron gamed the market and drove up energy costs fifteen-fold. ... But the Supreme Court turned this conventional wisdom on its ear and said there may have been misconduct by energy sellers, but no one ever showed that caused the crisis.

The U.S. Supreme Court is about to make its first decision on the worst energy crisis in American history: The California energy crisis of 2000-01. The legal repercussions of this decision could change the way energy is bought and sold in America for generations. For good or bad. As a former member of the California Legislature when this disaster of a law was passed unanimously (yes, I voted for it), I saw first-hand how bad regulators turned this consensus law into such an epic disaster. ...As a state legislator in California when this law was passed, I've seen first-hand how much damage this law - and even more importantly, its implementation - has done, and could continue to do if the Supreme Court does not reverse the Ninth Circuit.

The wind turbine issue is another example of misguided leadership. I've criticized Mike Reagan on this, and with good reason. Instead of having a meaningful discussion about the aviation safety problems being caused by wind turbines, Reagan simply dismisses any concerns as a "phony save Travis" issue. And yes, Mr. Reagan did receive a campaign donation from the wind turbine developer.

In the area of fossil fuel emissions, emotions seem to have obliterated logic. Pollution control laws have brought about necessary changes, much like that of sewage control laws. Virginia and California are the only two states that must buy electricity from other states at the present time. Therefore, when the crunch of limited supply comes, as it will, these two states will be the first to suffer. The experts looking into alternate energy sources are coming up with dismal solutions.