Towers, towers everywhere

The news last week that the Ontario Power Authority has awarded a contract for a 300-megawatt wind farm in the shallow Lake Ontario waters west of Wolfe Island further complicates the work of Cape Vincent and Clayton and Lyme municipal governments that are already struggling to determine how to treat commercial wind proposals in their towns.

Wind Stream Wolfe Island Shoals Inc. is owned by the same developers who built the Wolfe Island wind farm. That 86-windmill farm could be dwarfed by the new proposal; a 300-megawatt farm using generators of 1.6- to 2-megawatt capacity could add between 150 and 187 new towers to a Thousand Islands landscape that is already pretty full when you look north.

The Ontario Power Authority's contract will yield developers 18.5 cents per kilowatt hour for the power produced at Wolfe Island Shoals. Right now, the rate Ontario customers are paying for electricity is 3.44 cents per kilowatt hour. That means this wind farm will be subsidized at an electric rate 537.8 percent of the commercial rate of power in the province. That could hardly be called anything but a sweet deal anywhere. And this is on top of a $10 per megawatt premium that will be added by the Canadian federal government if the project is under construction before next March.

It appears that this project, a bit like the Galloo Island project in the town of Hounsfield, is being moved quickly to take advantage of expiring subsidies. The Canadian government announced on Easter weekend that ecoEnergy, a program of subsidies for both individuals and industry, will end. The individual retrofit program, that gave Canadian households incentives to increase energy efficiency, is done, and the commercial wind subsidies will end next year.

So Wolfe Island Shoals will probably move forward as quickly as the original Wolfe Island project. And adding 150 towers to the 86 towers on the island will very, very quickly move toward the total of 350 towers that the Galloo Island environmental impact statement predicts from current and proposed towers. In fact, adding Wolfe Island Shoals, which was not yet public when the EIS was prepared, will take the total number of towers planned between Galloo Island and Wolfe Island up to more than 500 wind towers – in a 20-mile stretch between Sackets Harbor and Canada.

And here is the rub: every review of wind farm applications thus far has failed to take into consideration the cumulative effect of wind development on Jefferson County. For those who live near or have had the occasion to drive within 35 miles of the Maple Ridge Wind Farm, consider this: Jefferson County is now looking at the possible addition of four times the number of turbines that line the eastern edge of the Tug Hill Plateau.

And those turbines will be smack in the middle of what is one of the dozen or so most impressive visual assets in the United States – the Thousand Islands. I have been in every state in the nation save Alaska, and I can tell you the region matches up favorably with the prettiest vistas in any state. Or at least, it did two years ago. Adding more than 500 wind towers that will all be visible from the Thousand Islands Bridge is probably no way to preserve this unique asset.

To date, the Coalition for the Preservation of the Golden Crescent is the one group that appears to be taking a holistic view of this situation. Their efforts don't focus on Cape Vincent or Lyme or Clayton or the Power Authority's off-shore proposals, they encompass the whole region. In the battle between the wind farm developers and local communities, their voice has suddenly become all the more important.

It's time for local planning boards and town councils to man-up and recognize they have responsibilities that extend past the borders of their jurisdictions. One way to mitigate the clustering of wind farms is to establish setbacks that effectively limit development. Just because some transient developer wants to jam 150 huge commercial towers into a town's rural acreage is not sufficient reason to allow it. If doing that drives developers away, so be it.

The economic health of an entire region is at stake. Wind farm developers come in and wave fistfuls of cash around and people are blinded by the glowing green. But if visitors no longer want to go over the Thousand Islands Bridge because the sight is no longer awe-inspiring, and tourists no longer stroll the streets of Clayton and Alexandria Bay, and visiting boaters no longer ply the waters of Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence, that easy lucre of the hit-and-run developers won't mean anything at all.