Legalectric

It’s out today, Dan Gunderson at MPR has done an extensive piece on the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission “investigation” of wind turbine noise and health impacts, looking at, per the PUC:

The Commission is gathering information to determine if current permit conditions on setbacks remain appropriate and reasonable.

PUC – Notice WITH SERVICE LIST

Here’s the audio — full text is way below:

What concerns me is that, again, they only gave notice of this docket to the wind industry, and not the people intervening or commenting in PUC wind dockets who raised this issue in the first place, and my comment on that to the PUC, urging them t expand the Notice:

Overland Comments – Request for Broader Distribution of Notice

To see the PUC’s wind turbine setback docket, go to www.puc.state.mn.us, click “eDockets” on lower right, and search for docket 09-845.

And here’s the MPR piece in writing:

Wind turbine noise concerns prompt investigation

by Dan Gunderson, Minnesota Public Radio

August 4, 2009

Valley City, ND — Wind farms are rapidly expanding across the Midwest, and a growing number of residents who live near the wind turbines are complaining about noise.

In Minnesota, those complaints prompted the Public Utilities Commission to investigate.

When Dennis and Cathryn Stillings chose a place to retire, they were looking for solitude and quiet. So a couple of years ago, they bought a farmstead in the rolling hills of eastern North Dakota.

Soon after they moved in, dozens of wind turbines sprouted in a neighbor’s nearby field.

Dennis Stillings said he wasn’t bothered at first because he supported wind energy and he was told the turbines were quiet, no louder than 55 decibels.

“Which is about the same level as your refrigerator running, or the same level as my conversation right now,” Stillings said. “Well, if I was holding a conversation with someone in my living room and someone in the corner was sitting there going bop, bop, bop at 55 decibels, it would drive me nuts and I’d kick him out.”
Larger view
Wind turbines

The Stillings said what bothers them is the pulsating, low-frequency sound. They say it’s like a giant dishwasher, or a helicopter in the distance. Cathryn Stillings said there’s no escaping the sound and that she’s having trouble sleeping.

“It’s a duller sound in the house but it’s still out there,” she said. “You can hear it through the walls. It just kind of gets in your bones.”

The Stillings’ complaints are similar to cases popping up around the country in the past couple of years, as wind farm expansion moves closer to populated areas. Complaints include headaches, dizziness and trouble sleeping.

In Minnesota, a handful of groups have organized to demand tougher regulation. They want the state to require more distance between wind turbines and homes. A report by the Minnesota Department of Health concluded there are potential health concerns.
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The South Heart North Dakota coal gasification is now going to be an ELECTRIC GENERATION plant.  DUH!  The 800 pound gorilla has just started jumping around the room.  This IGCC plant will be up and ready just in time to use CapX 2020 transmission — DUH!  And if you’re surprised, you’re in the wrong business.

Published August 01 2009

A change in plant plans

What was slated to be a coal gasification plant near South Heart will now produce electricity, a company spokesman said Friday.

By: Jennifer McBride and Beth Wischmeyer, The Dickinson Press

What was slated to be a coal gasification plant near South Heart will now produce electricity, a company spokesman said Friday.

Members of the Industrial Commission of North Dakota continue to support Great Northern Project Development/Allied Syngas Corp.’s ongoing development of the South Heart project. The commissioners prepared a letter of support to Chairman Charles Kerr of GNPD, after discussing the project at their Friday meeting in Bismarck. Commissioners have supported the project and $10 million has been committed to it, along with legislative and technical support, according to the letter.

“The site is ideally located to take advantage of the existing transmission infrastructure and GNPD’s unique access to extensive, low-cost coal reserves,” according to the letter.

The plant will be located four miles south and two miles west of South Heart and will be a

coal-to-hydrogen electrical generation plant.

Rich Voss, Great Northern vice president, said the company asked the commission for support because it is applying for U.S. Department of Energy funding for its plant. Voss said this plant will be more marketable and is a very clean project carbon-wise. He hopes plant construction will begin in 2011 and said permits for the 2 million ton-per-year coal mine are likely to be filed late this year or early next year.

“They originally were going to be a power plant, then a gasification plant then a coal-drying plant, so the next logical attempt will be electricity,” said Mary Hodell, a member of Neighbors United, a citizen-awareness group based out of South Heart. “I don’t know what is left.”

Voss said Great Northern and GTL Energy, a company seeking to operate a coal beneficiation plant also near South Heart, are independent companies.

“We are not working together,” Voss said. “We will use their technology in our plant when they build it and prove that it works, but we won’t use their equipment.”

The cost to build Great Northern’s plant is estimated at $1 billion.

“The county does have a comprehensive plan that is in place to protect the livelihood of the people and it would be nice if that was followed,” Hodell said.

Are we going to let them get away with this?  I love it when my hunches are right, but I hate it when anyone has the audacity to propose something so utterly stupid as this.  It will be hard for them to get it up and running… except who has a power plant application ready to rock (except that it’s a joke, but it takes some time to prove that to the PUC)?  Drat… and here I thought Tom would be down in Honduras trying to build Mesaba down there…

Alan Muller, Green Delaware, questioning and commenting at the meeting

Tuesday night, there was a meeting in Delaware City regarding the “Standard Chlorine of Delaware, a/k/a Metachem Superfund Site.”  This meeting was to gather comments on the “OU3 Proposed Plan.”

Here’s a link to the News Journal article about it — and the full story is below:

EPA: Metachem toxins will linger

Comments must be sent in by August 14, 2009, postmarked if mailed by that date, to:

thornton.hilary@epa.gov

Hilary Thornton, Mailcode 3HS23

US EPA, Region 3

1650 Arch Street

Philadelphia, PA  19103

****************************************

Here are my comments, sent just now:

Overland Comments – Metachem

Now, take a few minutes and work on yours!

****************************************

The way they handle these proceedings, it’s misleading and diversionary, a false, technical compartmentalization of the problem and solutions, which leads to a preordained, incomplete, and probably ineffective “clean-up.”  Part of the problem is that it’s  not clear that cleaning up is a priority.  My impression is that they’re just interested in “dealing with it” in some way, the CHEAPEST way, checking off the “OU3 box” and moving on.

Their plan, their PREFERRED plan, is to cover it up and move on to “OU4.”  Their “Preferred Plan” is, direct from their powerpoint slide 8:

2A.  Surface Cap/Institutional Controls

Impermeable Surface Cap

• Cap materials TBD during Remedial Design Phase
• Cap materials and thickness would vary depending on future land use

Institutional Controls

• Future land use must not interfere with ongoing remedies

Five-Year Reviews

• Required for any Superfund Site where contaminants remain

Est. $11.5 – 18.5 Million

Why look! Imagine that!   This is the CHEAPEST of the options.  All options are “cap” crap, with “materials TBD” and, based on prior past bad experience with DNREC’s “hare-brained” ideas (yes, that’s a direct quote)for “beneficial use” and using coal ash and sewage sludge to cap the dump next to the river:

• I asked whether they’d use coal ash in the “TBD” cover material, and they would NOT commit to rejecting coal ash.
• I asked whether they’d use sewage sludge in the “TBD” cover material, and they would NOT commit to rejecting sewage sludge.

This is where that compartmentalization becomes a problem.  They said that was not an issue for “OU3” and that it would be addressed in the “design phase.”  Uh-huh, and the public is involved in that exactly HOW?  And hello — WHAT the impermeable surface is has much to do with the appropriateness of using an impermeable cover.  Rainfall on the impermeable cover will trickle off the cover over the edge, onto and into the ground, groundwater, etc.   Even if it’s asphalt, that should be considered.  Isn’t the EPA is in the process of addressing coal ash, and a rule pending?

Cost… Their “preferred” option 2A costs $11.5-18 million.   The others?

The other options, from their powerpoint:

2B Surface Cap/ICs, with Soil Vapor Extraction

Same surface cap and ICs as mentioned in 2A, plus an in Situ SVE system:

• Est. 200-500 air extraction wells at 50′ depth
• Treat contaminated air from beneath the cap
• treat off-gas from SVE system before discharge
• Additional sampling to identify “hot spots”
• Pilot study first, to test effectiveness
• Est. $19.1-20.2 Million

2B Surface Cap/ICs, with ISTD

Same surface cap and ICs as mentioned in 2A, plus in Sit thermal Desorption:

• Est. 2,800 heater and 1,400 heated vapor extraction wells, 8-12′ apart through 330,000 sq. ft. area
• Additional sampling to identify “hot spots” within 10′ of barrier wall
• Pilot study first, to test effectiveness
• Est. $92.8-99.8 Million

Let’s see… $11.5-18.5 v. $19.1-20-2 & $92.8-99.8.  Doesnt’ take a rocket scientist to see that the cheapest “option” is “preferred,” and since when is cost the primary driver?  Is this an indication of how they value those living here, drinking the water, breathing the air?

Oh, and did I mention they admitted, finally, that the contamination goes down at least 140 feet!  That’s something they haven’t wanted to talk about before.

These options are the only ones looked at, the only ones that are under consideration.

CONSIDER THIS: One other option I want them to consider is to dig up part of the site, the cleaner part, and put a liner down there and take the contaminated dirt from the rest of the site and bury it there with the solid multi-layer liner, and then cover it.

Here’s an example of that in Minnesota, showing that it can and should be done.  This is a scenario where it’s been sitting there since before the mid 70s, it has contaminated ground water in Lake Elmo and Oakdale, Minnesota.  They’re using three layers of liner over packed clay and another three layers of plastic, plus sand with a collection and draingae system.  In the Metachem case, they know groundwater is contaminated, that it’s seeping down, so what, short of this, will stop it?  Take a look — Tom Meersman did a very good job on this:

History-making landfill do-over in Washington County

Hazardous 3M trash buried decades ago in Washington County is being dug up and will be reburied with a protective lining.

By TOM MEERSMAN, Star Tribune

In a $20 million job that’s the largest of its kind in state history, workers in protective suits are unearthing trash in Lake Elmo that hasn’t seen the light of day for more than three decades.

Their mission is not to burn the wastes or haul them off to another state, but to rebury them in a state-of-the-art pit that will keep chemicals that went into Scotchgard and other 3M products from getting into any more drinking water.

Excavating 33 acres of garbage, and then putting it back in the same place, may seem like a curious way to handle trash that has rested undisturbed since 1975.

However, the former Washington County landfill is not your typical dump. Wastes taken there from the 3M Co. in the early 1970s have contaminated groundwater in nearby Lake Elmo and Oakdale.

That has led to one of the biggest attempts to go back and undo decades-old environmental practices that the metro area has ever seen.

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Carleton’s wind turbine goes up (this photo may have been taken by Jonathan Larson, Bruce Anderson or ??? and not moi).

YEAAAAAAAAAA – The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission is going to address the concerns that many groups and individuals have raised about wind turbines, particularly the setbacks required to protect the health and safety of those living nearby.  First, the Minnesota Department of Health release a white paper:

MN Dept of Health – Public Health Impacts of Wind Turbines

Now, following up on that, the PUC has issued notice of a comment period to address “PermitConditions on Setbacks and the Minnesota Department of Health Environmental Health Division’s White Paper on Public Health Impacts of Wind Turbines.”  And here’s their notice — LOOK AT WHO IS ON THE SERVICE LIST, LOOK AT WHAT SERVICE LISTS THEY USED:

PUC – Notice of Comment Period 7-21-09

PUC – Notice WITH SERVICE LIST

The service list used are the ones for 04-1616, a docket regarding multi-state tracking and trading system for Renewable Energy Credits; and  03-869, a docket for electric utilities subject to Minn. Stat. 216B.1691.  Yup, that really gets it out there, doesn’t it… and the service lists for Bent Tree, Kenyon Wind, Clay County, New Ulm Utilities were NOT used… hence my first comment to be filed!

Overland Comments – Request for Broader Distribution of Notice

It’s very good that  they’ve opened this docket, that they even did that White Paper on Public Health Impacts of wind turbines, BUT that they’re only giving notice of this docket to industry parties is problematic to say the least.  Let’s do it right, PUC!

Let’s hear it for California!

They’re getting the message — transmission is not needed and transmission is not wanted.  If they try to push it through on the landowners across the state, well, they’re in trouble.  And so they did a study of what’s necessary to accomplish their Renewable Energy Standard and here it is.

33% RPS Implementation Analysis – Executive Summary

Here’s a statement from p. 10 of the Executive Summary that leads me to think they’re on the right path — just the simple recognition of this point:

California IOUs are currently on a procurement path that in effect prioritizes long-term market transformation over other policy objectives.

Here’s the full report:

33% RPS Implementation Analysis — Interim Report

And here’s a Power Point that hits the highlights:

Power Point – 33% RPS Implementation Analysis