Eat more sage grouse!
Scott at Ridiculous RICL blog dug up a circa-2009 video over the weekend that Clean Line Energy Partners' President Michael Skelly probably wishes would disappear. In it, Skelly says a whole bunch of things he probably wishes he had not, in retrospect. Too bad, so sad, we've found it now! And we're going to have lots of fun with it! Here's just one of Skelly's verbal faux pas:
In Wyoming, the industry was surprised when the governor came out and said this area of Wyoming is now off limits to wind energy and it's about 28% of the developable wind resources in Wyoming. That's a non-trivial amount This is one of the windiest states in the country, there's lots of projects planned in Wyoming, people are trying to develop transmission lines to Wyoming. People wrote off millions of dollars of development expenditures when this happened, including my old shop [Horizon Wind Energy]. Now you can make lots of arguments about why the governor made the right decision here. Some claim that there were more nefarious motives at work because the sage grouse, as many of you know, its a poster species for areas west of the Rockies.
And then he starts grinning like a lunatic. Apparently, species extinction of a cool bird is funny to uncool people like Skelly.
There's lots of concerns about sage grouse viability and so there are real issues here. The question is we're going to have to make some tough choices here... and some of these tough choices... and think about why we're doing this renewables stuff. We're worried about climate change. And we're worried about climate change because it might cause a massive species die-off. It's possible that along the way, we may have to make very tough decisions about which species are going to do well in this massive renewables build-out and which species aren't going to do well, and those are tough decisions that our current legislation... we don't really have a mechanism to sort of figure that out. That is a real question.
No, the real question is will Skelly's environmental group friends still love him after they hear about his plans for the sage grouse?
And what if there was a way to "do this renewable stuff" that didn't cause us to have to sacrifice people or animals? It's called distributed generation -- the development of small scale on-site renewables, such as adding solar panels to your own roof.
Otherwise, the sage grouse gets it!
And what if there was a way to "do this renewable stuff" that didn't cause us to have to sacrifice people or animals? It's called distributed generation -- the development of small scale on-site renewables, such as adding solar panels to your own roof.
Otherwise, the sage grouse gets it!
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