Guest Opinion | Permanent, until inconvenient

||| FROM ALAN MIZUTA |||

OPALCO bought land with a recorded Native Growth Area covenant and open-space protections intended to preserve a wildlife corridor. Its solar project conflicted with those restrictions. San Juan County has now approved moving the open-space designation to accommodate the project.

The protections dated to 2012. OPALCO bought the property in 2025.

Apparently, the forest was in the wrong place.

And what project warrants this accommodation?

A solar expansion approaching $6 million that, even at peak production, would contribute less than 1 percent of countywide demand. It descended from a Bailer Hill project that never got built, supported by a Commerce grant that began at $1 million and was subsequently reduced to $430,000.

The grant-funded effort moved to Decatur. The recorded restrictions were already here.

On October 1, the County approved relocating protected open space on OPALCO’s property, including placing portions of the replacement designation over land already protected by a separate Native Growth Area covenant.

Two conservation labels can occupy the same acre. They do not turn it into two acres.

Every resident who has relied on recorded open-space protections should pay attention. When the next applicant wants to move an inconvenient restriction, what principle will distinguish that request from this one?

A cooperative’s failure to plan around the property it purchased should not become the County’s reason to move the protections.

In May, OPALCO announced there were “no legal reasons the project cannot move forward,” while acknowledging that conditions remained. Months later, advancing its chosen configuration has required County approval to relocate recorded open-space protections.

That development deserves the same fanfare as the permit announcement. Members should hear what had to change to make the next “win” possible.

I am an OPALCO member and an original subscriber in the existing Decatur solar installation. I invested in the promise. I expected the experience to produce useful lessons before we financed a larger version.

Here is one lesson that deserves considerably more attention.

OPALCO describes the existing array as producing approximately 570,000 kilowatt-hours annually. Its own cumulative dashboard data through the present indicate average annual production of approximately 468,000 kilowatt-hours.

Roughly 18% less. Nearly eight years of operating history.

That compares actual generation with advertised annual production. It has nothing to do with confusing nameplate capacity with output.

How much of the shortfall comes from shading, maintenance, downtime, equipment, or optimistic assumptions? What has been corrected, and how have the results changed the expansion’s forecast?

A projection does not become an operating result through repetition.

Yet members are being asked to accept another multimillion-dollar investment while the first installation’s production discrepancy remains publicly unreconciled.

The financial story needs the same daylight. Members deserve a complete accounting of what Bailer Hill cost, what transferred to Decatur, what grant money has already been spent, and what remains to be paid.

The projected low-income benefit was revised to approximately $50,000 annually. That assistance matters. So does explaining the full cost of delivering it.

Members should not need a public-records request to understand what their cooperative is financing.

They have also expressed a preference about where these investments belong. In OPALCO’s representative survey, 60% of respondents selected disturbed or industrial sites as preferred locations for renewable projects. 13% selected forested land.

That was useful member feedback. What decision did it change?

Nor should regional energy concerns substitute for demonstrating the value of this particular project. Our submarine cables and electrical infrastructure will still need investment. Solar panels do not replace a cable. They do not generate electricity through a winter night.

We deserve a credible plan for the system we depend on, with the contribution and limitations of each investment stated plainly.

Then there is the battery.

Battery energy storage can sound like tomorrow’s planning problem. On Decatur, it is already operating, beside the substation and beneath the lines that distribute mainland electricity onward to the other islands.

On Decatur, there is no fire engine coming down the road.

The island shares the isolation of many outer islands. But for this battery installation, OPALCO has identified no outside agency committed and equipped to respond, no response agreement, and no assured means of getting the necessary equipment to the site.

Naming DNR does not create that commitment. Neither does estimating how long a boat trip might take.

Even if outside help could be arranged after an incident began, getting people here would not get their equipment here. Heavy equipment would require a private barge, potentially many hours or days later.

The fire will not wait for the barge. And there is no agreement assuring us that a response is coming.

At Bailer Hill, OPALCO contemplated a water-based vanadium-flow battery it described as nonflammable, in an open field accessible from all sides, with a fire department on the same island. Planning addressed the battery and emergency response as parts of the facility.

Decatur has an operating lithium-ion battery beside critical electrical infrastructure, yet the fire plan presented for the expansion omitted that battery.

The more difficult site received the narrower treatment. OPALCO and DCD should explain how that makes sense.

The County Council has adopted a Community Wildfire Protection Plan identifying the Decatur substation, solar installation, and battery installation as critical infrastructure. Residents should read it and ask how its warnings are reflected in the arrangements on the ground.

Adopting a plan is easy. Preparing to act on it is the part that matters.

An emergency will not respect the paperwork boundary around the proposed expansion. A monitoring system can report a problem. The response still has to exist.

OPALCO’s board has already shown that it can change course. It directed staff to leave the Native Growth Area covenant alone. It can show the same judgment about the recorded open-space layout.

Bailer Hill did not get built. Decatur’s existing production falls roughly 18% below the annual figure OPALCO publishes. The expansion has required repeated revisions and now an accommodation of recorded conservation restrictions.

At what point does this history become a reason to reconsider the project, rather than another reason to insist it must proceed?

The board should end the expansion in its present configuration and pursue a location or design that respects the recorded conservation layout. It should publish the operating results, the complete financial history, and a credible emergency-response plan for the facility already here.

The County should explain what confidence residents can now place in recorded open-space protections.

A permit is permission. It is not an obligation to spend the money or cut the trees.

The board still owns that choice.

Permanent, until inconvenient, is a poor conservation policy. It is an even poorer excuse for a project that should have confronted these realities before the land was purchased.