Online Messenger #189
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Friends,
Just north of Great Basin National Park in Eastern Nevada lies a public landscape called Spring Valley. Spring Valley is a miraculous place, renowned for its magnificent skies and as critical habitat for sagebrush obligate species such as sage grouse and pygmy rabbit.
Spring Valley Wind, LLC, a subsidiary of Pattern Energy of San Francisco, is proposing to build a wind farm called the Spring Valley Wind Project. The Project's claimed generation capacity is 149.1 megawatts and would be constructed on 8,565 acres of public lands in north Spring Valley. On October 15, 2010 the Bureau of Land Management issued a final decision authorizing the Spring Valley wind project.
To facilitate this development, Spring Valley Wind intends to grade almost 30 miles of new roads, construct an operations and maintenance building and substation, a new gravel pit, and make many other irretrievable disturbances that would significantly impact and alter the natural character of this public landscape.
In the Snake Range just a few miles from the proposed wind development lies the Rose Guano Cave, important habitat for over a million Brazillian free-tailed bats who migrate through the area. A growing body of science demonstrates that Wind kills bats by the thousands. The sudden change of air pressure surrounding wind turbines is responsible for Barotrauma, a sudden explosion of blood vessels in the lungs of bats causing them to drown in their own blood.
The impacts to migratory birds including robins and many raptors is equally appalling and is in stark contrast to characterizations of Wind Energy as "green".
Construction of the turbines will permanently degrade and obstruct the remarkable views in Spring Valley.
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In support of alternative energy, Western Watersheds Project has and will continue to encourage Spring Valley Wind to relocate its project to already disturbed and degraded private agricultural lands in Nevada that provide equally good wind resources without destroying native wildlife habitat on public lands.
In the meantime Western Watersheds Project has filed an Appeal and Petition for Stay of the Bureau of Land Management's October 15th, 2010 final decision approving the Spring Valley wind project in order to bring some semblance of reason to the development of renewable energy projects on public lands.
