The existential threat of a warming planet caught up with the Strauss Wind Energy Project at the Santa Barbara County Planning Commission last week. Three of the five commissioners agreed to allow the project to proceed without a federal permit to “take” golden eagles, a fully protected species in California known to nest in Lompoc’s San Miguelito Canyon and have a strong migration through the area in the late fall.
Project developer BayWa r.e. has been working on the 27-turbine project since 2016. It’s virtually the same project that the Lompoc Wind Project had been working on for 15 years before that. The 267-foot-tall turbines can generate as much as 98 carbon-free megawatts, enough electricity to energize 43,000 homes. The power has already been sold to Marin Clean Energy for 15 years, reducing the need for fossil-fuel peaker plants in the energy coalition’s four Bay Area counties — and avoiding approximately 40,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions.
From the get-go, the project faced stiff resistance from residents living near the turbines, as well as from the avian community. Appeals were denied by the Board of Supervisors in 2009, which were upheld in the federal courts. BayWa was close to flipping the “on” switch this fall, until it realized the U.S. Fish & Wildlife permit was going to take one to three years to complete. The company then returned to the Planning Commission to revise its conditions that required the permit. As Commissioner Laura Bridley said, the day’s decision was a “tradeoff between two noble goals, saving wildlife and getting wind energy on the grid.”