The sprawling Ivanpah solar power station in the Mojave
Desert probably never would have been built without environmental activists and
the subsidies and mandates they created, so there's more than a little irony
that BrightSource Energy, Google GOOGL +0.02% and another clean-tech
utility are now getting an education in the green opposition that bedevils
other American businesses. Lobbies like the Sierra Club and Audubon Society are
turning on solar farms for avian mass murder.
Ivahpah's solar thermal technology uses 300,000 giant
computer-controlled mirrors spread over 3,500 acres to follow the sun and
concentrate energy on water towers, where boiler turbines generate electricity.
The problem with this $2.2 billion feat of engineering is that birds that fly
into the 800 degrees Fahrenheit rays sometimes singe or catch fire in midair.
Plant workers call them "streamers" after the trail of smoke that
follows the carcasses to the ground after they ignite, according to a recent
Associated Press investigation.
The Center for Biological Diversity speculates that Ivanpah
will kill 28,000 birds a year. In a study earlier this year, the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service's forensics laboratory calls the apparatus a
"mega-trap" for insects, swallows, road runners, hawks and even
monarch butterflies, "creating an entire food chain vulnerable to injury
and death."
The Biological Diversity folks are suing to force solar
farms to install lights or noise alert warnings to encourage wildlife to adopt
a different flight path. Some California legislators are accidentally sensible
and want to ban plants like Ivanpah, which sounds like a deal for birds and
taxpayers.
We got a no-irony-intended email from a lobbyist friend
working for BrightSource on Thursday explaining "avian
fatalities"—the plant's actual year-to-date body count is all of 321 in
total, and only 133 of them related to so-called "solar flux"—and
Ivanpah's Avian and Bat Monitoring and Management Plan. The company notes that
as many as 3.7 billion birds each year are killed by cats and 980 million by
crashing into walls.
This green-on-green showdown exquisitely captures the reason
that the America that built the Hoover Dam in five years now has so much
trouble building those "infrastructure" projects everybody in
Washington and Sacramento claim to favor. Environmental review and permitting
are often dragged out a decade or longer across a slew of lawsuits and federal
and state agencies. Ivanpah was required to spend $34 million on a "Head
Start" nursery for desert tortoises. Really.
So it is that the same beau monde activists who think the
Keystone XL pipeline is a threat to civilization are now turning on non-fossil
fuel power too. Maybe this time they'll feel cognitive dissonance, but then
they never do.
Wall Street Journal on-line Aug. 22, 2014 6:42 p.m. ET
No comments:
Post a Comment