||| FROM SALISH CURRENT |||
A change in San Juan County’s comprehensive plan would ease one of the biggest barriers for new energy projects in the county: siting issues.
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON SALISH CURRENT
The county is likely to approve a request from OPALCO to add renewable energy generation and storage facilities to a list of essential public facilities.
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More pushing of massive growth of electricity. Why? Who profits? What for? here are the top two or three reasons for the big push to all-electrify:
1) global proliferation of AI database centers; haha. You can’t make this stuff up. It’s all about the AI!
2) Defense… errr…I mean War. We need weapons. Lots of weapons, all reliant on AI weapons- even with AI’s huge error margins
3) Smart Cities.
The databases will be massive – everything on everyone and everything will be kept there. No one’s talking about it in the push for these massive solar projects and allowing OPALCO to gain Essential Public Facilities status, and what that actually means.
Where are the dissenting voices in Salish Current? Is the choir preaching to the choir or will they heed or listen to others who look at patterns and recognize them? There are many more kinds of science than THE science – that are not quackery. There are also many ways of knowing. Some of us choose following the money and digging deep. Climate resilience, if it doesn’t include other facets of a story, is incomplete.
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Please let us pause. There is a lot more research needed before we lock into the idea of granting this to a private coop acting like a Public facility. We are not discussing unscrupulous mining practices literally stealing minerals from Africa or the problems inherent in explosive lithium ion batteries. We are not talking about privatization in OWNERSHIP that is happening since energy companies decided to have at least 60%++ investorship, not only in stock but in actual ownership of the facilities themselves, including private ownership of water. Please let us not rush into this without letting dissenting voices speak, and actually listening to their concerns.
I went onto Bonneville’s website and was shocked to learn that they are using this investor model to pay for costs. Am I the only one alarmed by this?
More needs to be revealed before making decisions where the weight of the costs will fall on citizens and the environment. Once done, this can’t be undone. I get it that we are now MANDATED by law to grant these things. But we were left out of the discussion, as was conservation and privatization of essential PUBLIC facilities.
I wrote in another comment on AI about the two biggest drivers of need for massive increases in electricity generation:
AI databases and weapons/warfare.
Slow down on making such an important decision!