On April 13, 2010, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service presented recommendations to Secretary Salazar of the Department of Interior on minimizing windfarms’ impacts on wildlife and habitat, reports the Las Vegas Sun The lengthy report available here recommends development of a tiered system for selecting project sites, evaluating project impacts and monitoring post-deployment impacts.
I’m still reading through the report, but what surprised me was FWS’ claim that project location, rather than size, is more determinative of impacts. The report states that small projects can have substantial adverse impacts depending upon location – and therefore, evaluating impacts at the outset is very important. The issues of size and impacts is troubling, since I’ve always assumed that in the ocean, 5-10 buoy arrays will have far less impact than deployments of ten or twenty times the size.
The report relates only to land based wind siting, but nevertheless, the tiered approach is intriguing and could potentially serve as a useful tool for marine renewable developers as well.
My name is Carolyn Elefant, owner of the Law Offices of Carolyn Elefant in Washington D.C. and I do FERC Fights. Whether a matter requires an appeal of a FERC ruling in federal circuit court, a request for rehearing, a vigorous defense in an enforcement action, the pursuit of a refund or general protection of interests in a FERC proceeding, I act as a tenacious, thorough and persistent advocate for my clients.
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