PUC Complaint process? HA!

April 5th, 2020

Association of Freeborn County Landowners filed letters notifying the Public Utilities Commission of prohibited construction ongoing at the Freeborn Wind site, first last Wednesday, and then on Friday, about fiber optic preparation, equipment storage, and stakes:

And Dept of Commerce EERA response:

Friday’s letter was about installation of fiber optic, when supposedly they had been allowed to grade and put in the foundation of substation and O&M building. Here’s the Compliance Filing about that:

From that filing:

Does this look like “project substation and O&M building site preparation (grading in a row crop agricultural field on land owned by Xcel Energy) and pouring of the concrete pad” to you?

Look at the response we got regarding that fiberoptic construction:

And from that DoC-EERA letter:

Complaint process… hmmmm… how did that work for Bernie and Cheryl Hagen? It took, how many complaints, over, what, SEVEN years before resolution through buy-out and settlement? And about the complaints about the MinnCan pipeline construction…

The complaint process was an issue in the Freeborn Wind contested-case, from AFCL’s Initial Brief quoting none other than Rich Davis:

Yes, that’s the testimony of Rich Davis, Commerce-EERA, the same one who wrote both the letters above. Commerce did not revise the complaint process,. Xcel Energy unilaterally provided its “Complaint Process” on December 6, 2019, just prior to the Commission’s December 19, 2019 meeting about the permit amendment:

There was no opportunity to comment on the “Compliance Filing.” The “Complaint Process” as proposed by Xcel Energy was just tacked on to the Permit, Attachment A, and that was the end of it. Review of the complaint process? Nope, didn’t happen. No change, a cut and paste, this time with an Xcel Energy person as the contact. It’s as dysfunctional as ever.

You want to see complaints made under the permit “complaint process?” OK, we can do that. But be assured that they WILL be PUBLIC, and not hidden, as they were for so long for the Bent Tree project, and others too.

Leave a Reply