Siting guidelines needed if wind power is to be ‘green’

One thing that wind power supporters and skeptics alike seem to agree on is that wind turbines should be sited "carefully," "well," or "appropriately." Unfortunately, no one knows what that means, and the state has provided no guidance.

This year, the Executive Office of Environmental Affairs tried to remedy the situation, convening a working group to develop siting guidelines for land-based wind turbines.

The stated goal was to produce guidelines that would protect important natural resources while providing a consistent framework under which wind power could be proposed, reviewed and developed.
BNRC was part of the working group, along with other local, state and national environmental groups. Wind power consultants and developers were also at the table.

To develop thorough siting guidelines, a broad range of impacts must be contemplated. There is no single indicator to identify a bad (or good) site. It is when impacts are analyzed in aggregate that certain sites may prove to be inappropriate.

At its early stages, the group discussed comprehensive guidelines to address landscape-level wildlife concerns such as habitat loss and fragmentation, as well as bird and bat mortality.
This approach soon narrowed under pressure from the wind power developers, who focused solely on the impacts on birds and bats. The developers insisted that existing regulations and local zoning codes address all other possible impacts.

This might be true if all towns had zoning addressing mountaintop development, and if the natural resources of every roadless area in the Commonwealth had been inventoried so that existing regulations would protect critical habitats. But this is not the case.

Further, reliable data on bird mortality and migration ranges from spotty to nonexistent. Under the turbines, small bird carcasses tend to be hidden by vegetation, or eaten by scavenging animals before they can be counted.

Identifying migratory routes is complicated by the fact that many birds and bats migrate at night or during high wind, when they are shrouded by cloud cover. Years of expensive radar study conducted by highly trained ornithologists will be needed before we really know much about bird and bat migration in Massachusetts.

Impacts such as habitat conversion and fragmentation are hard to quantify. Coupled with the spread of invasive species into interior forests, these impacts may pose the greatest threat to the integrity of our last remaining forest blocks and mountain landscapes. Impacts that are hard to quantify also pose the sternest challenge to developing siting guidelines.

BNRC pushed for the use of existing tools, such as the Conservation Assessment and Prioritization System (CAPS) that is being worked up at UMass. CAPS can help identify both areas of high ecological value that should be conserved, and areas with relatively lower value that might be more appropriate for wind power development.

In the end, the working group's guidelines ignored so many potential impacts that BNRC and groups including Mass Audubon and The Nature Conservancy refused to endorse them. The guidelines have not been published, and the state appears no closer to developing a siting process that would guarantee wind turbines at only the best sites - those where the most power can be produced with the least environmental damage.

For more information on CAPS, visit: www.umas.edu/landeco/research/caps/caps.html.

To read BNRC's position on wind power, visit www.bnrc.net.