||| FROM BRIAN L. GRANT, M.D.
I am a longstanding homeowner on Decatur Island. I and a great many others strongly oppose the project proposed for the heart of Decatur, to create a solar farm of significant scale.
Given our small population, it is worth noting that a petition against the proposal currently has over 200 signatures. While there are some in favor among our neighbors, they are in a minority relative to those who have voiced strong opposition.
You will hear and read from many on this project as currently proposed. I urge you to review carefully these views. There is so much wrong with the proposal on a both a macro level as well as from a process and impact standpoint.
In no particular order I offer the following thoughts:
- OPALCO has been secretive and opaque about their efforts to build on Decatur. They proceeded with virtually no notification to the island with plans and efforts to justify their efforts.
- There was an effort to have this farm at Bailer Hill on San Juan. For various reasons this did not proceed, and OPALCO then immediately attempted to launch on Decatur. If this was not suitable for the original location, why should one assume it is suitable for a much smaller island, in a central location that would have severe environmental, ecological, aesthetic and fire risk exposure and impact.
- OPALCO makes a spurious case for the need for such a project in lieu of other alternatives. Absent a battery array with the attendant fire risks on an island with minimal fire-fighting capacity, power would be generated based upon the sun and not necessarily be there when needed.
- OPALCO has suggested that they need many similar installations across the islands. If this is the case, they should proceed with other locations where populations are centered, and in recognition that Decatur has an installation
already, that is less than appealing and where OPALCO has failed to deliver on a number of representations and promises, These include visual shielding, and a working battery component to provide load balancing. OPALCO has not even kept the grass mowed and claims it is hard to find people to do the work. That is correct, Decatur has few people available for public works and maintenance, and it is expensive and cumbersome to travel people
over for routine tasks. - The impact of the proposed project on drainage, fire danger and heat creation by clearcutting a substantial acreage can’t be tolerated or accepted. To date, an Environmental Impact Statement has not been performed and other similar studies, public hearings and regulatory measures that are common have been ignored. In fact, OPALCO is railroading this project with few answers to the many questions posed and to be posed by those who oppose or are skeptical about the merits and specifics of the project.
- Somehow, and for unclear reasons, OPALCO is using as an excuse for the site selection the fact that Decatur has a solar installation already. In reality the proposed project is a magnitude larger and can’t just be hitched on to the current project. And if OPALCO is sincere about the need and intent to have such installations all over the islands, now is the time to walk the talk, and not impose this on Decatur.
- OPALCO is using a grant of a million dollars for this project and claims that there is a deadline to use the funds. OPALCO’s failure to plan does not constitute a reason to act in haste and opacity. Rather they should slow down, look at all options including doing nothing, and ask the grantor for an extension to allow them to be prudent and fair in their efforts. This is a grant from our state. The worst thing that can happen if the grant goes away is that the state gets their money back. The best is that the grant is extended and they go back to the drawing board and start over.
- On a macro level we anticipate more need for power by the state, and our undersea cables are getting old. But we are part of a larger statewide and regional grid. The assumption that solar is the answer to local energy production is not to be relied upon absent far more study. For example, should we invest in new cable(s) financed by bonds and ensuring a steady supply of power from the grid? Will the overall grid be enhanced by added capacity in the form of solar, wind, and even on modern nuclear, based in the wide open spaces of our state and region, rather than the small islands of the San Juans?
- You will hear from many others with their own observations and concerns. Proceeding as desired and planned by OPALCO is not necessary or emergent. They have been evasive, have incomplete information, have misbehaved in their actions and communication, patronized, offended and alienated many. Decatur as a result has been bullied and disrespected.
- By stopping this now you will be doing your job in holding public agencies to account, and give all parties including the entire OPALCO region the opportunity to study our power needs and make the wisest decisions for the future of the islands. The proposed Decatur Solar array is not justified in light of a deficit of facts and transparency. I must emphasize that any concerns are not emergent and this deserves to be halted and the many questions and objections be seriously addressed.
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My sympathies to Doctor Grant for his and other Decatur Islanders’ complaints. Our condo is next to Friday Harbor’s sewage treatment plant (fortunately, the prevailing wind doesn’t come our way). But the reality is that facilities for he common good have to go somewhere. More to the point, Dr. Grant is not up against OPALCO, he is up against a legion of people elsewhere in the county who feel exactly as he does. In theory, there would be no solar farm anywhere, faced with unanimous preference for (1) solar free views) and consequently (2) imagined property values.
The oppositional approach (this post being an example) is to throw a complex and darkening picture involving power engineering at an untrained population and let them vote their preference, tilting the numbers and relevant trends (usually omitted) to effect the desired result. “Let the people decide!”
But it is not so simple. Our population is not unanimous in interest. Summer people will not be here when in January the Northwest Grid is again tested.
There are facilities that must be placed whether people want them or not. Our level of civilization and the safety of those who commit not just their money but also their lives requires certain facilities: water, sewer (next to us) and power being primary, and upon those essential facilities, our economy and health and welfare are built. Many whose real economies are elsewhere do not see things this way, and their reasoning (hard-eyed on the mainland, emotional here), though understandable, is limited.
Those who live here for a day, a month, a season, are in it with the rest of us. We’re all in it together.
Since the May 10th meeting with the Decatur community, we have been compiling and organizing the information that was requested. Here is a link to the web page we are working on for this project: https://www.opalco.com/decatur-island-solar-project/. As this is very early in the process for this project, much of the information is not complete but this provides an outline of the information we are committed to providing. We continue to modify the plans based on the feedback from the community and as we progress in the project.
While infrastructure like sewage and water systems must be placed where they serve, large-scale solar installations are more flexible. Siting them in less sensitive areas can reduce their impact on communities and the environment without compromising the goal of clean energy. Concerns about views, ecology, and rural character aren’t just emotional reactions. They reflect values that make these islands special, and deserve to be part of the conversation. Bill mentions that technical arguments can overwhelm the public. That’s fair but some in this community have technical backgrounds related to this project and can grasp the essential facts. Others are working hard to understand the implications and offer well-informed input. A transparent, inclusive process helps ensure that we get this right for the community, which should always be the goal. I’d suggest that all who care about these islands, whether here year-round or seasonally, deserve a voice. We have a stake in successful outcomes and a shared responsibility for protecting what makes this place unique. We all want a sustainable future. The question isn’t if we pursue clean energy but how we do so in a way that honors both people and place. Dr. Grant’s point about fire safety is not a small one. Placing large electrical infrastructure in this location exposes residents to heightened risk on an island without local firefighting capability. In my opinion, such a siting decision without thoughtful consideration of alternative sites with more robust fire fighting capacity would rise to the level of gross negligence on the part of the county, utility, and professional engineers for the project. Unfortunately, it appears that in this case the vital siting question isn’t receiving the careful attention or community engagement that it deserves. I believe this is the unfortunate result of OPALCO’s decision to prematurely commit grant funding to the Bailer Hill project—an outcome that places an unfair burden on a small island community like Decatur. The Decatur community should not shoulder the costs and risks of organizational missteps that they did not make.
I have been a full time resident of Decatur Island for 25 years.
I agree we must all do our part…and Decatur Island has stepped up. We are the ONLY island of the 20 that OPALCO serves that has a solar grid. I feel we have done our equitable share.
The current 3 acres solar array on our island of 2240 acres is equivalent to 48 acres on San Juan Island.
The intended site for this grant was a treeless field on Bailer Hill. This site is a forest in the heart of our tiny island.
OPALCO is currently negotiating w/the county to lease our ONLY public parcel. They propose to lease 3 of the 5 acre parcel for $100/months for 25 years! However, “OPALCO will clear, grub and grade the entire 5.5 acres”. That quote is directly from the proposed lease. This is a beautifully wooded parcel of public land.
To give you the comparison again…This 5 acre clear cut on Decatur equates to a 79.2 acre clear cut of public property on San Juan Island.
In March OPALCO purchased an adjacent 20 acre parcel… I’m sure you can see why we are upset…it’s not just NIMBY…it is completely out of scale for our small rural island.
Again Decatur Island has already hosted the ONLY OPALCO solar installation.
While I do not know why other locations are not being actively considered, I agree with Dawni. Decatur has done their share of the lifting, and the issue of fire that Dr. Grant raises is a serous one given the small resources that Decatur has to fight a potential fire.
My concern is the urgency of Opalco to secure the 3 acres of government land before any environmental studies have been made. Apparently, according to the information released due to the FOIA, the county and oPalco have been talking about this for many months, yet it was just brought before the council. In reading the said communications, one gets the impression that if OPalco “gets the lease” everything else falls into place for OPalco. Is this the way government is run?riding slipshod over environmental issues, county regulations , the health and safety and thewishes of the people affected by such a project? Most of us approve and encourage the development of solar energy. But the people of Decatur Island have already stepped up to the plate and done our share. Opalco needs to take a step back and do this the right way: look for a more suitable piece of land; be up front and honest with the people that will be affected; do the studies required to ensure they are not doing more harm than good. Trees and habitat will not magically appear after oPalco is finished with this land. Do the right thing. Do not clear cut the five acres sited on the proposed lease! Do not cut one tree in the name of progress! For more than 209 of us- it doesn’t wash!
Thank you for allowing me to express my heart felt concerns in this matter
I haven’t done my research about why the Bailer Hill location is now off the table but there was clearly a lot of San Juan Island opposition. That parcel was long ago cleared, is currently used for grazing and the operators worked with OPALCO on the design to allow grazing to continue. It is not designated Prime Farmland. It is not significant native habitat other than for farm use. As pointed out, San Juan has fire services so it is much safer. I just think this was my San Juan neighbors doing a NIMBY while under the guise of “protecting farmland”. In my view, every one of the people who protested the Bailer Hill location should be either contributing solar to the grid or be off-grid. The vulnerability of our energy grid is not recent news. San Juan is likely the largest electric power user in the county and they need to do their part. I hope this decision is not final.
OPALCO has been attempting to locate more Solar Projects for YEARS. Without them, we can expect brownouts and blackouts; let’s avoid them. We’re out of time!
Thank you, Nick, for your thoughtful analysis. Another important point about fire danger is that all of the power—including the solar installation—flows from Decatur. If a wildfire or a battery energy storage system (BESS) failure occurs there, it could potentially knock out power for the entire county.
After speaking with several people involved in fire services and the island communities, no one seems to know of any county-level plan to address this risk. And as we all know, Decatur doesn’t have a fire department.
It’s honestly shocking how little planning and foresight OPALCO seems to have shown, and how lucky we’ve been so far that nothing has gone wrong. But that luck won’t last forever—just look at what’s happened in California and, more recently, Oregon, where utilities have been responsible for devastating wildfires.
If something happens here, in a location with no emergency access and no response plan, it’s OPALCO members who will be left holding the bag.
I am not interested in passing judgement on others who as individuals or groups express “not in my backyard” concerns often backed by specious arguments and incomparable examples from afar as to what could possibly happen. First world successful retirees are more generally than not a highly self-interested lot and threaten legal actions at the drop of a hat making local decision making about siting of community infrastructure more and more difficult. I agree fully with Amanda and certainly hope that the Bailer Hill site is still in serious consideration. As a fan of Pogo cartoon strips in newspapers I wondered what had happened to Pogo but now think he retired right here in the San Juans to remind us all of our common hubris, our entitled attitudes, our selfish concerns real or imagined even in facing certain disruptive community emergencies if effective actions are not taken. I hereby propose that we mount a campaign to change the name of this archipelago to the Pogo Islands and reorient our summer tourism swarm to touring hundreds of sites with humorous interpretation as the bus slows then moves on.
I appreciate hearing from folks who live on Decatur. So often, those who sway the county direction live on the more populated islands.
Never do the billions of wild residents of these islands have any say at all as we destroy them, their homes/habitat, their water and food supply, their places of privacy and rest. their ability to reproduce, their freedom to roam. And humans who speak up for them are usually belittled or ignored. Not so different from people who live on Decatur, as you all seem to be treated by OPALCO.
It seems to me that the best solution to the problem of insufficient supply of reliable electricity for an unlimited population of humans in the county is to focus on ways to limit the number of humans demanding electricity in the county, limit the amount each can demand, and regionally decrease support for the energy hogs of AI, data centers, and cryptocurrency.
My cynical side says that as long as there’s money to be made, including on the technology of so-called clean energy, the people who stand to make that money will force legislation supporting or at least allowing it, and will drive marketing campaigns to brainwash others into enthusiastically supporting it. Note the number of people who have bought into the idea that we can switch to an all-electric future (we can’t unless we can figure out how 10 billion people can live without steel, concrete, plastic, fertilizer), that we should all switch to “clean” energy because it’s less impactful (not when you take into account the impacts of mining, manufacturing, transporting, maintaining, and disposal of the parts required), that technology will allow us to be “climate-resilient” (really?) and that we need not be concerned about biodiversity collapse, the introduction of massive quantities of unnatural, poisonous substances to our planet, the bio-geochemical flow disturbances (nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizers and manufacturing emissions)–each of which is a greater danger to our living planet’s integrity than climate change–or the loss of the forests, free flowing rivers, wetlands, prairies as land has been converted to other uses, all of which contribute to climate instability. These, along with climate change, are symptoms of what’s been called ecological overshoot–meaning that the level of recent and current human consumption is unsustainable.
Thinking we can keep our economy growing, keep our population growing, keep expanding our use of technology, if only we’d switch to “clean” energy, is misguided and inaccurate. It sets us up to waste our time and energy fighting over how to pursue a path (e.g., where to put more solar panels & wind turbines) that research shows has only been accompanied by an exponential increase in fossil fuel emissions.
Fewer people, fewer and smaller new buildings here, of course, doesn’t help the global situation if it just means those people pursue the high consumption American Dream elsewhere. But it would relieve some of the pressure to keep finding places in the county to install community solar panels.