Bold Action or Green Tyranny?
How Jay Inslee's Energy Policy Delusions and Hypocrisy are Inflaming the Urban-Rural Political Divide and Ignoring the Plight of an Endangered Species
You Can’t Say I Didn’t Warn You!
The title of my first ever Substack post speaks for itself and reveals why I wasn’t surprised by the arrogant tone and selective facts of Washington Governor Jay Inslee’s May 23, 2024 letter to his Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council (EFSEC) regarding the highly controversial Horse Heaven Wind Farm (HHWF).
In summary, Inslee’s letter directs the Council to do whatever it takes to keep as many of the more than 200 Space-Needle-sized wind turbines spread across 25 miles of the iconic Horse Heaven Hills just where Colorado-based-developer Scout Clean Energy wants them.
As for 300,000 Tri-Cities area residents who are already served by better than 95% carbon-free electricity, Yakama tribal members, and the endangered ferruginous hawk, you are nothing more than NIMBYs, and you need to get over it.
The governor who was made king by an equally delusional state legislature has spoken, and he knows best.
And what’s best includes subjugating the interests of Washington citizens to Canadian financial interests. As it turns out, Scout Clean Energy is owned by Brookfield Renewable Partners with corporate headquarters in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Generally speaking, I wouldn’t have a beef with foreign investments in industrial development, as long as it’s in response to an invitation from the local community. In the case of Scout, they came to town unsolicited and operated covertly to lay the groundwork for their project.
And then when they went public with their plans for the largest Washington wind farm in history, they seemed surprised to learn Benton County planning authorities and an overwhelming majority of local economic development interests rejected their proposal.
You would think a company planning to spend nearly $2 billion would have had the common sense to check the temperature of local interest groups before sinking millions of dollars into initial planning and engineering of such an obviously impactful project.
Fear not; Scout knew they had another option. And that’s when they ran to Jay Inslee and his biased EFSEC process to begin force-feeding the HHWF against the will of ‘locals’, and in contradiction to what was promised in Washington’s 2021 State Energy Strategy which declares:
“public and community participation is important to ensure energy policy is informed by local knowledge, meets local needs and is viewed as legitimate by the local community”
“communities and community members must have a seat at the table in designing programs and selecting projects.”
As I have been warning for many years, Washington’s ‘clean energy’ strategy based on a cult-like belief in land-intensive and unreliable wind and solar is fatally flawed, and can never deliver on the utopian promises of energy equity or environmental and social justice.
What is transpiring with the proposed development of the HHWF is precisely the opposite of these promises. And Tri-Cities residents and the Confederated Tribes of the Yakama Nation are experiencing firsthand what happens when all power is in the hands of a single ruler.
This is the definition of tyranny and is precisely what Jay Inslee has been orchestrating for years in his unwarranted and frenzied call for rapid and large-scale development of so-called ‘green’ energy.
In the balance of this post, I make the case for how the HHWF development process represents a text-book case of what I have observed are the four steps to ‘green’ tyranny.
I hope to spark a wake-up call. But my growing cynicism tells me the HHWF is likely to represent a spark that could inflame the urban-rural political divide in Washington State more than ever before.
Step 1 to Green Tyranny - Replace Environmentalism with Climatism
Jay Inslee like countless other climate catastrophizers has convinced the Washington legislature, and apparently the majority of the state’s electorate, that earth’s complex climate systems can be reduced to a single variable; atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
And that there is no price too high to pay to eliminate even a fractional amount of this ‘deadly poison’. Even if the price includes driving an endangered species to extinction.
It’s abundantly clear the self proclaimed “lifelong birder” has lost that loving feeling for the ferruginous hawk.
“The record shows that substantial disturbance from agricultural and residential land use has caused a significant decline in the ferruginous hawk population at the Project site and calls into question whether the ferruginous hawks will return given the considerable, permanent changes to their habitat.”
What Inslee fails to mention in his EFSEC letter is that his own Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife (WDFW) has identified “collision with wind turbines” as one of several direct sources of mortality which has and will continue contributing to the potential demise of the ferruginous hawk.
It’s one thing for Inslee to suggest we should give up on the idea ferruginous hawks will ever flourish in Benton County, but what about the rest of its nesting and migratory range?
In WDFW’s “Periodic Status Review for the Ferruginous Hawk” published in August 2021, they included the following map of the hawk’s breeding and seasonal-migration ranges.
In a quick look at the map, it is clear ferruginous hawk breeding range (shown in red) is highly concentrated in central and south-central Washington as well as northeastern Oregon.
It certainly makes one question, if collisions with wind turbines are already a concerning cause of hawk mortality given the concentration of wind farms in their breeding range today, what will life be like for the hawks if Washington and Oregon policy makers continue to push for more-and more bird killing turbines as critical to meeting clean energy mandates.
Additionally, if you look more closely at the ferruginous hawk’s migratory routes and ranges, and then consider that Inslee and his Department of Commerce (DOC) are proudly proclaiming Washington is expecting to import 36% of its electricity from Montana and Wyoming wind farms by 2050, it is clear the ferruginous hawk (and many other bird species) will have no place to live that is safe from wind turbines.
For those who proclaim a deep concern and passion for protecting and preserving the natural environment, you need to fully grasp what Washington policy makers have established as their clean energy vision of the future.
Without blinking, Inslee, Washington’s legislature and the DOC have shared their dystopian vision for the northwest includes 63,000 megawatts of wind farms which conservatively would cover a land area equivalent to more than 100 times that of Seattle.
So you can see why, rather than accepting EFSEC’s recommendation for 2-mile set backs between HHWF turbines and historical ferruginous hawk nesting sites, Inslee is doubling down on his ‘green energy’ mania and attempting to strong-arm his Department of Fish & Wildlife through the EFSEC proceedings to effectively declare the endangered ferruginous hawk a lost cause.
And all so Washington state can use the HHWF and it’s monstrously sized wind turbines as a giant environmental virtue signal that under ideal conditions might reduce the rate of electricity emissions by 1 million metric tons (MMT) on an annual basis.
While a million of anything normally represents something quite large, don’t be fooled. 1 MMT of CO2 emissions represents 0.019% of the 5,060 MMT of total U.S. annual energy sector emissions in 2022 and only 1.3% of Washington’s emissions.
Sorry ferruginous hawks, environmentalism appears to be dead. It’s being replaced by climatism. And King Inslee has decreed you are just another NIMBY.
Step 2 to Green Tyranny - Regulatory Reforms
While attending a United Nations climate conference in Egypt in November 2022, Jay Inslee was quoted as saying governments will have to overcome “nimbyism,” including in Washington, to achieve clean-energy goals.
He went on to say regulatory reforms are needed to prevent local opponents from delaying projects. “We’ve got to make decisions, and this will be controversial,” he said. “We have to confront it. We have to succeed.”
And regulatory reform is exactly what Inslee and his supporters arranged. For those who are not aware, EFSEC became an independent Washington state agency on June 30, 2022, after the legislature passed a bill authorizing the change “as an important step to achieve Governor Inslee’s carbon neutral goals by 2045”.
Additionally, it’s important to point out the EFSEC council body consists of a governor-appointed Chair along with state agency representatives from the Departments of Commerce, Ecology, Fish and Wildlife, and Natural Resources (Commissioner of Public Lands), and a representative with the Utilities and Transportation Commission. Optional membership on the Council is extended to local governments, the Military Department and the Departments of Agriculture, Health, and Transportation on a project-by-project basis.
Clearly, Inslee’s direct control over the Council, combined with his expressed bias and uncompromising belief that rapid and massive wind and solar farm development represents the foundation of Washington’s energy future undermines the legitimacy of the EFSEC process.
And anyone living under the naive belief EFSEC proceedings can ever truly be an impartial adjudicative process with a sincere goal of balancing the ecological impacts of land-hungry wind farms with those of local citizens and interest groups, you need to get over it as well.
Step 3 to Green Tyranny - Push the Grid to a Reliability Cliff
It turns out if you prematurely shut down dependable coal-fired power plants and demonize 60% cleaner-burning natural gas as a logical replacement, while falsely promoting unreliable wind and solar farms as the primary fix, the risk of power grid blackouts increases dramatically.
By now, most people in the northwest are aware of the close call our power grid experienced this past January, as overnight temperatures plummeted to near or below zero across the region for just over a week.
Relevant key takeaways from this close call are:
Wind power generation across the northwest plummeted just as the coldest temperatures set in. And in some utility balancing areas, wind farms were producing zero electricity all hours of the day.
Blackout risk was not just during peak demand hours. What the previous map from the sourced Powerex report revealed is the northwest imported an average of 5,241 megawatts of electricity from outside the region for all hours (day and night) for five consecutive days of the crisis. This is equivalent to the energy production capability of more than five Columbia Generation Station nuclear plants.
The majority of imported electricity came from dependable and reliable thermal generating plants located in the desert southwest and Rocky Mountain west regions. While California provided a path on it’s grid for electricity to flow from the southwest to the northwest, California generators provided no net energy generation to help rescue the northwest.
After years of ignoring utility warnings and force feeding draconian energy policies pushed by wind and solar lobbyists, Jay Inslee is now feigning great concern over the reliability of the northwest grid.
“Washington state faces the stark reality that without a rapid buildout of new clean energy generation and transmission, the dependability of our electricity grid is at risk. We must come to grips with the fact that we will need to adapt and accept relatively moderate changes to our physical landscape, in order to ensure continued, reliable electricity service.”
The “stark reality” is that Jay Inslee’s climate catastrophizing and panicked clean energy policies based on ‘CO2 is pollution’ dogma are a major contributor to the recent and unprecedented increase in northwest power grid blackout risk.
And to anyone with common sense, Inslee’s claim the HHWF and a rapid and extensive buildout of “new clean energy generation” is critical to ensuring power grid reliability is utter nonsense.
As I have covered in previous Substack posts, grid reliability is about power generation that is highly controllable and can be counted on to match supply with demand on a minute-by-minute basis. This is an unforgiving law of power grid physics.
But rather than operate in the theoretical realm of how much generation we could expect from Inslee’s beloved HHWF during a future polar vortex impacting Washington, lets take a look at the actual generation from the Nine Canyon Wind Farm during the coldest days of the January event.
For those who don’t know, Nine Canyon is located south of Kennewick in Benton County, and is immediately adjacent to the proposed HHWF development area.
Yes, you are seeing it correctly. The Nine Canyon Wind Farm was producing below or near zero megawatts for nearly four-and-a-half days of the five coldest days. And the generation levels before and after the cold snap were far below the nameplate generating capacity, and of course was intermittent and variable.
And it wasn’t just Nine Canyon that zeroed out. If you want to take a deeper dive into how poorly wind farms across the northwest and middle of the U.S. performed during the January event, check out my Substack post from January 21st.
Washington Wind Farms are Uniquely Deficient When it Comes to Reliable Generating Capacity
Yes, we can sacrifice vast land areas to wind farms and can get a lot of average energy as a result. But averages do not get the job done when it comes to power grid reliability on critically cold and hot days.
What happened to the wind generation at the Nine Canyon Wind Farm during the deeply cold days in January was not a surprise to anyone who has lived a few years in eastern Washington and/or is intellectually honest. Low or no winds during deeply cold temperature inversions is always what happens.
Poor performance by wind farms located in Washington is also not something that surprises utilities who are working through the Western Resource Adequacy Program (WRAP) to try and make sure the lights stay on during extreme cold and hot temperatures in the future.
WRAP has ranked Washington wind as having the lowest dependable winter generating capacity of any other geographical region they are evaluating, with only 8% of combined nameplate capacity expected to show up during the coldest hours of winter. Of course the January 2024 cold snap showed it can actually be near 0%.
You can read more about WRAP’s reliability assessment of Washington-based wind farms and things I had to say about the HHWF back in November 2023 by clicking on the graphic below.
So what Jay Inslee wants you to believe is that a rapid and massive overbuild of wind farms requiring the sacrifice of vast natural and open landscapes is the answer to grid reliability. A claim, in spite of the evidence, that he and so many wind power supporters and zealots continue to make.
As their basic logic goes, the wind is always blowing somewhere. Until it isn’t. And if we bet grid reliability on Washington wind farms, it’s abundantly clear it will be a losing one.
Step 4 to Green Tyranny - Propaganda
One definition of propaganda is “information, ideas, opinions, or images, often only giving one part of an argument, that are broadcast, published, or in some other way spread with the intention of influencing people's opinions.”
Earlier this year, Kathleen Drew, EFSEC Chair, revealed the Council was leaning toward recommending a large number of the proposed HHWF turbine locations be eliminated from consideration due to multiple negative ecological impacts, and that EFSEC would be holding firm on a recommendation for a 2-mile setback between wind turbines and ferruginous hawk historical nesting sights.
Once EFSEC tipped their hand, Scout Clean Energy’s President and CEO Michael Rucker publicly complained that reductions of the turbine count inside the 113 square-mile HHWF project boundary would make the project infeasible.
“If applied to future projects, (these standards) would restrict renewable energy siting on nearly a fifth of the state’s Columbia Plateau Ecoregion,” Rucker wrote.
It’s sure warms the heart to know Mr. Rucker from Colorado has such deep concern for the Columbia Plateau Ecoregion.
Here is what former Washington Democrat Norm Dicks who represented Washington's 6th Congressional District from 1977-2013 had to say once Rucker publicly complained, and mobilized his lobbyists.
Unfortunately, for the Horse Heaven Clean Energy Center — the largest renewable project in state history and actively covered by The Seattle Times — EFSEC is making poor decisions that will jeopardize project viability and set dangerous precedent for additional clean energy projects that our future depends upon.
Beyond EFSEC’s flawed process for this vital project, I am alarmed by the council’s seeming inaction toward the imminent impact of climate change to our world and state. The council’s decisions show little consideration that we must quickly build a remarkable amount of renewable projects to meet our energy needs and reduce our dependence on carbon-based sources.
March 18, 2024 Norm Dicks, The Seattle Times Opinion
And to nobody’s surprise, here’s what the Seattle Times Editorial Board had to say.
Washington state is taking pains and bold steps to cut carbon emissions, as climate change accelerates. Those laudable goals are now challenged as new demands for electricity are surging. That growing paradox — a higher load with a lower supply to meet it — will send energy costs higher for residents around the state, and worse, holds the potential for blackouts if the electricity grid is overwhelmed. Leaders must double down on development of green energy sources to maintain grid reliability.
State leaders, including Inslee and his successor, must act urgently to approve clean energy projects that meet the needs of surging load growth. The choices those leaders make today will determine whether Washington leads on green energy, or if its efforts on climate are merely virtue signaling at a great cost to the state’s residents.
May 3, 2024 The Seattle Times Editorial Board
You will notice the Seattle Times uses the words “boldly pursue” and “bold steps” in what appears to be an attempt to redefine what it means for Jay Inslee to use the EFSEC process to steamroll the interest of ‘locals’, aka NIMBYs.
Of course I would never expect the Seattle Times to carry water for Jay Inslee, but it’s almost like he coordinated with someone before crafting his letter to EFSEC.
“In short, the statute directs the Council to balance the environmental impacts with bold action to meet our state’s pressing energy needs.”
So, I have a question for west-side citizens, ‘journalists’ and politicians. What “bold actions” are you ready to take? More solar panels in sunny Seattle. Or maybe learning to live with rolling blackouts is what you have in mind.
FINAL THOUGHTS
What Democrat Party operatives, the Seattle Times and fellow Inslee environmental virtue signalers from the Capitol call “bold actions”, to us living in what feels like Panem District 5 from the Hunger Games, it's ‘green’ tyranny plain and simple.
And for the record, EFSEC has not had a single in-person meeting in Benton County or the Tri-Cities involving the public. All “public meetings” have been conducted over Zoom.
Maybe the 2021 State Energy Strategy promise that “communities and community members must have a seat at the table in designing programs and selecting projects” needs to be updated to make sure there is no misunderstanding.
Of course state officials couldn’t possibly have meant EFSEC members would actually sit at the same table with NIMBYs. What they meant to say is the Council’s table will be located in Olympia, and the community members tables will be in their dining rooms or home offices.
Besides, NIMBYs can’t possibly understand what’s good for them, and they are clearly just a predictable obstacle to the collective good as determined by those in the Capitol.
So, as the Council keeps NIMBYs at arms length via Zoom meetings. And the deliberations concerning the HHWF predictably descends into the deepening and partisan political divide. Those of us who are facing the prospect of living with a daily reminder of the egregious encroachment on our beloved Horse Heaven Hills for decades to come, have a sneaking suspicion the odds are clearly not ever in our favor.
Hello Rick --
Thanks a grand for your continued dedication to exposing the Green Tyranny of the Climate Cult. I own 40 acres in West Richland that will be negatively impacted by the industrial wind debacle - my property value will drop dramatically as no one, including me, cares to look out over to the Hills in the West and see these economically unjustified hulks polluting the landscape. It appears to me, based on my understanding of history, that all peasant rebellions are for naught. We, The People, have been given the opportunity to let off some steam -- to engage in the illusion of action -- in an effort to put a halt to one more example of the Climate Cult's campaign toward Greenification. I predict that the HHH Wind / Solar / Battery system will be implemented as initially proposed by the applicant. All the signs, money raised and spent by Tri-City Cares, public comment periods, letters to the editor and any other actions by The People will be ignored. Gov. Inslee will retire from his Kingship and settle down for some quiet years on his property in Cle Elum ... far away from the sight of the turbines. TriCitians will suffer with the eyesore on the horizon and the knowledge that wind and solar power are economic frauds. Eventually, the hardware will need to be replaced, some 15-20 years down the road. I also predict that the energy and priority to replace the turbines will be absent . . . and so the horizon will be lined with these rotting hulks as the wind blades deteriorate and fall to the ground. This was never about the environment or the climate. It has always been about the power and control exercised by a small regiment of sociopaths. As long as there are ample distractions for the peasants, in terms of food and entertainment, there will be no measurable counter forces to the actions of the sociopaths. Things will continue to get worse, in terms of having a reliable power supply, inflation of the fiat currency and corruption within the Administrative State, until such time as there is serious breakage. I will leave the definition of the term "breakage" to the pragmatic imagination of the reader.
How about Benton County declaring itself an Environmental Sanctuary?
Anyone, including contractors, violating its land use policies are subject to immediate arrest and seizure of their equipment by the County Sheriff.
If cities and states can declare themselves sanctuaries for law breakers and ignore laws in place, why can't Benton County push back against the overreach of the Governor who is choosing to ignore local authorities, land use regulations and public rights?
The fertile agricultural Horse Heaven Hills land must be preserved for its current use, and for future generations. Protecting this unique and precious land area is the right of the local citizens.
End this insanity now by declaring Benton County an Environmental Sanctuary. Benton County Commissioners can do this, now, with County Sheriff enforcement.