Community Wind or Mountaintop Removal?

Where does this story start? —with mountain top removal? —with investment tax-credits? —with our growing need for energy? How do we balance ecological security with appropriate technology? How do we live within the scale of our environment?

We think of mountain top removal in Appalachia, but it has come home to Vermont in the form of the Kingdom Community Wind project. This project includes removal and leveling of 40ft of mountain ridge for turbine generators similar in size to those installed at Wolfe Island, Ontario and double the size of those in Searsburg, Vermont.

The rotors on Wolfe Island in the St Lawrence began spinning last June after more than decade of dreaming, negotiating, public and private meetings, planning and building. The wind farm is the Kingston, Ontario’s largest-ever construction project with each tower at 80m (263ft), a school-bus size nacelle, and three 45m (148ft) blades. According to the organization Wind Concerns Ontario, the Wolfe Island Turbines installed by Ontario Hydro crank out enough electricity to power 75,000 homes per year. What started as a 24-turbine, 36-MW wind farm became a 86-turbines at a cost of approximately $450 million after the Ontario Power Authority (OPA) awarded Canadian Hydro a 20-year contract to supply 200 MW of power to the provincial grid.

The Kingdom Community Wind (KCW) project in Lowell, VT is based on an overall height of 410-443 ft (80m tower with 90-100m blades) with flashing red lights (FAA regulations for structures over 200ft) and according to the website a “worse-case” scenario of 21 turbines along the 3.2 mile ridge of the Lowell Mountain range.

We read that the project is “a grid-connected wind energy project proposal on 3 miles of ridgeline on a portion of Lowell Mountain in southwestern Orleans County, Vermont. The project could consist of 16 to 24 wind turbines, each capable of generating between 1.5 to 3.0 megawatts of power for a total of 63MW. The wind farm holds the potential to meet the annual electrical needs of approximately 20,000 average households, that’s about 48,000 Vermonters!”

But who are those Vermonters? 48,000 people do not live in Orleans County. In a presentation by the GMP on Oct 18, 2010 we heard that the project is designed for RECs or Renewable Energy Credits that will be sold to investors in Massachusetts. While I am a proponent of wind generation for power, I am also a proponent of transparency in decision-making and corporate finance. Who are the beneficiaries of a project this scale?

Over ten years ago, Jeanne Vissering, Landscape Architect, surveyed Vermonters about their reactions to cell towers and wind generators—and we overwhelmingly preferred the working landscape of kinetic wind towers to that of cell towers. But, we also continue to prefer sensitive and scale-driven choices over mega-projects and that continues to be the conflict—whether big box stores, large-scale farming, or wind projects. In the case of the projects in Chateaugay, NY and Wolfe Island, Ontario the wind farms, despite their size, are contained within a working landscape. The towers are scaled by the topography and one never sees the whole series as the viewshed is continually framed by farms, trees, and rolling hills.

How do we make decisions for the common good? How do we determine appropriate scale of both investment and of intervention in the landscape? Why is it so hard to base our human interventions on appropriate scale design and local environmental conditions? I ask this not just for the Lowell Mountain range, but for the estuaries in Korea which are being filled in, for the tundra in Alaska which under threat, for the tidal flats in the Emirates, the list is long…

And I answer that it is easy to colonize someone else’s landscape. As long as global economic conditions drive decision-making, local communities (natural and human) will suffer.

Diane Elliott Gayer, AIA

Burlington's Moran Plant

I have been in love with the Moran Plant ever since I moved here in 1988. 1988 was a time when the waterfront was at its most derelict, when the Coast Guard building was still a blue box built on heavy piers sunk into the lake, when the gas tanks were just starting to disappear, and when the community boathouse was but a mirage. It was the waterfront’s post-industrial time.

Walking there late one February night during a snowstorm that fell thick and quiet over Burlington the waterfront was a moment in stillness—a moment of black silhouettes in a white landscape—an emptiness before the romance of possibilities, before the dream of reclaimed buildings, before the land began to breathe and take life. The imminence of change was not yet felt.

Change can be welcomed or feared. It depends on where one stands, one’s attachment to and knowledge of existing conditions, and even one’s perception of the possible. The art of becoming, of transforming possibilities, of changing existing realities is the art of development.

In the case of the Moran Plant the dream of possibilities looms large—it is a dream that could be transformative. The raw space inside the concrete and brick walls is larger than life, the opportunity is of something greater than self.

Having been an architect through the 1980s and 90s when every square inch of space had to be cost accounted I understand the effort of allocating every inch, but when something is inherited from the past and offers a volume of space such as we would never build—wow, what a gift. The Moran Plant is big open unmitigated space that no one would build today. We are not comfortable with an empty vessel of unclaimed space and no obvious “purpose.”

So to fill this void of imagination and play with the romance of the possible, I offer a handful of ideas from places that could inspire the regeneration of our Moran Plant. Examples of reclaimed industrial places, at this scale and larger, range from parklands such as Seattle’s Gas Works Plant and Germany’s reclaimed industrial zone in the Ruhr Valley to art museums (London’s Tate Modern and MassMoca, North Adams, MA); farmer’s markets (Ottawa, Quebec City, etc.); and community theater venues (Chicoutimi, Quebec).

To take just one example: the Seattle Gas Works in Washington is on a promontory of land facing south into Puget Sound with a view of Seattle, the mountains and the San Juan Islands. It was once covered by gas tanks and a large refinery. Today it is a cleaned-up environmental site with open grasslands, 30 ft. diameter sundial made by artists and children, AND the “Gas Works” buildings and equipment left as history lesson, shelter, destination point, and playground. The equipment was made-safe, painted in bright reds, blues, yellows and purples, and left for people to explore and climb on.

My personal hope for the Moran building is that once again generates energy—that it becomes a demonstration site for wind and solar, becomes part of the lake clean-up effort, and sports a greenhouse on the south roof for productive gardens. There are so many ways this building can contribute to Burlington as a sustainable city that to do otherwise than make it glow with energy and life again would be to deny all the work that has happened to date.

In 1994 Burlington passed a Resolution Relating to Sustainable Economy that included among other things a directive to maximize conservation efforts and to help develop and use renewable resources. This building is a place where these dreams can come together. It is big enough to handle the Community Sailing Center, offices for Parks and Recreation, innovative efforts for lake clean-up efforts using the old water intake and outtake in the lower level, growing trees and micro-climates within the main part of the building, energy monitors and equipment for photovoltaic solar arrays (on the south roof) and wind generators (on the ground), sod or “green” roof on the tower building, super-graphics on the outside walls, greenhouse gardens, and a cafe serving locally-grown food.

The gas tank pads and dog park become an arboretum with wild lands—leaving the North 40 “undeveloped for future generations.” In this regeneration of the building—there is no destruction of a public resource, no removal of history, no decisions based on short-term socio-political gain, and no costly landing-filling all the acres and acres of concrete, brick, and steel from Burlington’s lack of imagination.

Reprinted from Burlington free Press "It's My Turn" by Diane Elliott Gayer

November 2005