CCWC’s Terry Meyer will be standing in for GE Wind’s Steven Taub at the Department of Energy’s Community Wind Webinar on September 15 10 am to noon mountain time.  Terry will be speaking beside such notables as Guy Nelson, Lisa Daniels, Dave Walden, and Robin Rego.  Should be a great Primer to community wind the opportunities and the challenges.

Finally the time has come to turn over some earth!! Please Join us for the ground breaking ceremony for the First Up! Wind Turbine.  It will be at 771 Watt Canyon Rd, Thorp WA at 11 am Thursday September 9.  D&M Coffee, Dakota Cafe Cinnamon rolls, and fresh local fruit from Gibson Produce will be served as a series of celebrity speakers kick off this exciting project.  This along with the 3 Bar G Turbine going in this fall will be the first Farmer Owned Community Wind turbines in Washington state.  Come celebrate with us.  Please RSVP to Info@cascadecommunitywind.com if you’re coming.

Oh and there are about 15 of the original 50 subscriptions to this turbine still available.  Power your home with this landmark wind turbine!

We just completed our custom SODAR haulin’ trailer and picked the bad boy up at our most scenic site on Scott Mountain overlooking the Skagit flat lands and the Puget Sound.  Now all of our sites are scenic, that is something that comes with windy spots but this site takes the cake.  It is off to another beautiful location, the 3 Bar G Ranch, to finish a study we started there last winter,  Should give us more accuracy to our estimates of wind energy production at all of our Kittitas County sites, once the study is complete.

The USDA recently awarded the First Up! Knudson Turbine a $48k grant through its Rural Energy for America Program (REAP).  They need to spend about a month on Tribal negotiations and Environmental review before we can start work, so expect this project to go up later this summer with a ground breaking ceremony next month some time.  There are still about 15 of the 50 origional subscriptions left available for this turbine at $2,500 each so sign up today, any unsold subscriptions remaining after construction will be sold at a higher price.

Onward and Upward.

The State of Washington has awarded Cascade Community Wind Company  one million dollars (30% grant 70% low interest loan) as one of the State’s best bets for spending the states allocation of stimulus money to further renewable energy in the state of Washington.

That feels real good in light of recent setbacks and will keep us on track while we build this business, and build the community supported renewable energy industry in general.

A hint to county governments everywhere (and especially in PSE service territory), we spend this money, and the many times this amount in federal and private money it leverages, in places where community wind turbines have a permitting path.  So get on it put those ordinances together!  We only have just over a year to build as many turbines as we can with this.

Dear Kittitas County Commissioners:

“With abundant wind resources…Kittitas County is ideally suited for a Renewable Energy Innovation Partnership Zone.  The effort and vision for achieving these goals… represents a new era of collaboration among government and private industry leaders and organizations in Kittitas County. Rather than resist change, we are choosing to embrace the development taking place in our region and leverage it for the benefit of all citizens by assisting in ways that sustain these industries into the future and create job opportunities. The current environment of governmental support and mandates for resource-based energy production, significant local investment by related industry developers, continuous technological improvements that are creating new opportunities and new local leadership on several levels have created this opportunity for cooperation and synergy among organizations.”

The above quote is taken from Mr. Jewell’s introduction to Kittitas County’s IPZ designation application, and is only one of dozens of quotes in the same vein from the application, news stories, and interviews.

Thus the recent failure of the Community Wind Energy System (CWES) Ordinance, an ordinance that would allow the development of community wind turbines on private land, has left us dumbfounded.

The IPZ Designation, awarded late last year, clearly states that renewable energy development is a goal of Kittitas County. Do we incorrectly perceive an inconsistency between the County first seeking this IPZ designation and then blocking the first attempt to “leverage” this “abundant wind resource” “for the benefit of all citizens”? Why has Kittitas County turned away the first company to approach it to partner and innovate in renewable energy development by denying any permitting process?

And why, especially during this time of government budget cuts, did Kittitas County staff work for an entire year on a proposed ordinance that not one commissioner voted for, when the goal of the task force was to craft a compromise ordinance that everyone could live with?

Now, with the failure of the CWES ordinance, there is no path by which an individual landowner can economically harvest the wind on their land.   This leaves as their only recourse the state permitting process for distributed projects that is currently on its way through the legislature.  Large wind companies have a path to developing the wind resource in Kittitas County; the local community deserves one as well.

Your stated reasons for failing to pass the CWES ordinance center around not fully understanding the impact of wind turbines on views, property values and the environment, and wanting to wait and see what impacts will come from the KV Wind Power Project and Desert Claim.  The minimal impacts of wind turbines are well documented from the multitude of wind projects already in existence around the globe, and authoritative reports of their impacts were submitted with the proposed CWES ordinance.  This is not new technology; no new surprise impacts will be discovered with KVWPP and Desert Claim.

Another concern expressed was about preserving the existing views. Are they of more value than resource lands? Resource lands, where community wind projects would be developed, need to remain available for resource-based uses, and wind is another resource that farmers desire to harvest for additional income and the patriotic virtue of helping the state and the nation produce its own power. Just as farmers and ranchers have had to accept residential encroachment, people living in windy resource lands will need to accept wind turbines, along with barns and grain silos, as symbols of a productive rural landscape.

These and many other issues were hashed through in the development of the CWES ordinance.  Advocates on the task force made many compromises in setbacks and restrictions to accommodate these concerns.

The State of Washington mandates that 15% of our energy needs must come from renewable sources by the year 2015.  Kittitas County is a windy place, and that wind is valuable.  Community-owned turbines connecting directly to the distribution lines for local consumption are a great way to keep that value local, providing five times more stimulus to the local economy per MW than corporate-owned developments.

The State has already shown that the County does not have the right to unreasonably restrict the development of its wind resource. By failing to pass the CWES ordinance, the County, rather than taking leadership and putting the development of its wind resource in the hands of its citizens, has defaulted to the State to dictate the process by which wind is developed, and by whom, in Kittitas County.

Kittitas County has repeatedly stated that it is keenly interested in diversifying its economic base to include renewable energy. The failure of the Community Wind Energy Systems Ordinance is an action by the Board of County Commissioners that speaks much louder than any of their stated intentions. The landowners of Kittitas County who hope to harvest the wind flowing over their land would prefer a local permitting process, but are prepared to appeal to the State to give them the same access to wind energy the large wind farms enjoy.
Therefore we make a final appeal to the BOCC to support your entire community through the transition to a modern rural economy that includes energy generation.  Please put the power of the wind in your citizens’ hands by reconsidering the CWES Ordinance.

Respectfully,

Terrance Meyer, P.E.

Cascade Community Wind Company LLC

In a surprise decision the Kitttitas Commissioners voted to reject the community wind ordinance they have been working on for over a year with local land owners, advocates, and CCWC.  More on this later once CCWC regroups from this blow, this will have a major impact on what we can do in the near term and CCWC’s strategy going forward.  This is an even bigger blow for the local land owners who were looking to harvest the wind flowing over their land.

Written Comment on the Kittitas County community wind ordinance is open until 5pm Tuesday the 8th with a final vote occurring the 9th at 2pm.

Please email the commissioners with comment at:

cds@co.kittitas.wa.us

The last verbal comment opportunity was last night, Tuesday the 1st and for the first time in the year this has been going through public process the opposition came out to speak.  So even though the sum total of comments are extremely weighted to proponents of community wind the last thing heard was opposition.  Please send the commissioners written comment to remind them how broad based support for community wind is in the county.  A simple short email “I support community Wind” or some such is likely as effective as anything though a follow up with good solid reasons is always helpful as well.

Fingers Crossed Everyone!

CCWC just successfully raised $80,000 in operating capital in $10,000 chunks from supporters, angel investors, and suppliers who believe in what we are doing (and yes they hope to get a great return on the money as well).

CCWC started a year and a half ago with enough cash to last us a year.  Delays in getting our first projects in the ground related to county permitting, Federal Grants, Utility interconnection, you name it, meant that even though things continued to look great for our turbines they were taking longer than we had money to keep the lights on.

This influx of cash will put us back into full gear just in time, since many of our obstacles have recently been or will soon be cleared.  We have several sources of funding in the works for the turbines themselves (including your subscriptions, thank you) and the money recently raised will allow us to bring all of that in.

In addition to the monetary benefit we now have some truly excellent partners in the company that bring a host of talents and perspectives which will make us stronger and wiser.

Go Team!!

Working overtime, Peggy and Geoff put 3 copies of our USDA grant application for $50k in the mail On Saturday May 22.  We feel our chances are excellent for this grant and we will know the results in a few weeks.  We have several other applications which will be going in soon, once we have a lender relationship finalized.