Unless the obscure but powerful Ohio Power Siting Board rethinks a wrongheaded move, the panel, whose voting members are Gov. Mike DeWine’s appointees, will -- for unclear reasons -- likely end a pioneering plan to install six power-generating wind turbines offshore of Cleveland.
Backers of the Lake Erie Icebreaker project have spent years raising money and perfecting engineering plans -- with support from the U.S. Department of Energy, Case Western Reserve University, an early NASA wind-energy scientist, environmentalists and overseas investors, along with the city of Cleveland. Aim: to test the economic potential of wind power in Lake Erie and the Great Lakes as a whole.
Greater Cleveland’s leaders understand the economic and job-creating potential and the care with which this project was designed, eight to ten miles offshore of Cleveland, to minimize disruptions for boaters, birders and others.
Project leaders with the Lake Erie Energy Development Corp., or LEEDCo, also had to surmount challenges from winter ice to finding a viable way to supply electricity to the local grid.
DeWine needs to show that he understands this project’s importance, too, by making it clear that his appointees – and that’s who they are, his people – should stop obstructing this renewable energy project.
Otherwise, the power-siting board’s May 21 decision effectively kills the $130 million Icebreaker demonstration project.
Icebreaker’s fans are many. It won a $40 million U.S. Energy Department grant, bringing its federal DOE money to more than $50 million. It earned sign-off from the U.S. Coast Guard, the Army Corps of Engineers and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Mayor Frank Jackson recognized that Icebreaker would put Cleveland on the wind-energy map, helping to complete a deal by which the demonstration project would supply the electricity it generates to Cleveland Public Power via an 11.8-mile cable buried in the lakebed.
Three major environmental groups in Ohio -- the Ohio Environmental Council, the Sierra Club and the Environmental Defense Fund, all exacting stewards of Ohio’s natural world -- support the project.
If built, Icebreaker would be the “first offshore wind facility in the Great Lakes, the first freshwater wind farm in North America, and only the second offshore wind project in the entire U.S,” according to LEEDCo.
Unfortunately, words such as “first,” “innovative” and “new,” when applied to electricity production, seem to alarm rather than please Ohio regulators.
Yes, the project had its share of opponents, including powerful coal and electric utility interests. When some yachtsmen, boat dealers, lakefront property owners and bird conservation groups added their challenges to the Icebreaker wind project late in the process, LEEDCo officials spent months negotiating a compromise with the Ohio Power Siting Board staff. The deal they struck would have added safeguards but not killed the project.
Yet when the board itself “approved” Icebreaker May 21, this compromise was nowhere to be seen. Instead the siting board voted -- unanimously -- to impose a killer condition that would require the turbines to be turned off every night for eight months to lessen bird and bat collisions.
LEEDCo President David P. Karpinski said Icebreaker’s backers were “stunned by the order,” which he said reneged on the agreement reached with the Siting Board’s staff and would likely make the project financially unviable.
Voting 6-0 to approve Icebreaker with the project-killing requirement were: Public Utilities Commission of Ohio chair Samuel Randazzo, who also chairs the power-siting board; Natural Resources Director Mary Mertz; and designees sitting in for Agriculture Director Dorothy Pelanda, Development Services Director Lydia Mihalik, Environmental Protection Director Lauri Stevenson and Health Director Amy Acton.
Those board members are all Mike DeWine’s appointees. Their actions or inaction, deservedly or not, reflect on the governor.
Unless Gov. DeWine is OK with the panel’s mystifying decision to kill this pioneering wind project for Ohio, the governor should step forward and require the board to reconsider its Icebreaker ruling – promptly.
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