From Silicon Valley to Sámi lands in Norway, victories against Facebook and for reindeer herders!

November 17, 2021 From Silicon Valley to Sámi lands in Norway, victories against Facebook and for reindeer herders! Welcome to the latest CorpWatch bulletin! We start with the good news - Facebook has agreed to shut down its decade-old facial recognition system following years of complaints because of how the data can be misused by private corporations, governments, and law enforcement. The company says it will delete face scan data of over 1 billion users. Back in April 2015, Carlo Licata sued Facebook for misusing his data under Illinois state privacy laws. The case was eventually awarded class action status in California - and 1.6 million people signed a claim against the company, almost a quarter of the eligible users in Illinois. Faced with these overwhelming numbers, Facebook agreed to pay $650 million to those affected. “Corporate use of face surveillance is very dangerous to people’s privacy,” Adam Schwartz, a senior lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties organization, told the New York Times. But perhaps more importantly - for Facebook - was the real possibility that it could be sued in other states for more money. On November 2nd, Facebook announced it was shutting down the system for good. In other positive news, the Norwegian supreme court has stripped Storheia and Roan windfarms of their operating licenses over harm to Sámi reindeer herders. The two farms are owned by BKW, Energy Infrastructure Partners, Stadtwerke Muenchen, Statkraft and TroenderEnergi. The 288 megawatt Storheia wind farm and the 255 megawatt Roan wind farm on the Fosen peninsula of western Norway began operations in 2010. Today the two farms operate 151 wind turbines which have impacted the reindeer herds that the indigenous Sami people graze on Fosen's pastures. “Reindeer are very shy, and a bit wild, too,” Leif Arne Jåma, a Sámi herder, told Earth Island Journal. “The animals steer clear of the turbines because they are disturbed by their view and noise. On top of that, in the coldest months large chunks of icy snow can be thrown into the distance as the blades turn. It is dangerous for humans and animals alike.” The case went before local courts and even the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, before landing at the Norwegian supreme court. "In this case, there was no question of a collision between environmental considerations and the reindeer owners' right to cultural practice," the judges ruled. These two inspiring victories, years in the making, were the result of determined challenges by impacted communities who refused to accept the status quo. Stay tuned for more stories of people helping hold corporations accountable!  The CorpWatch Team Pratap in Tokyo, Tyler in Santa Barbara, Elena in Calgary, and Elisa in Andalusia

 

 

Dirty Energy, Big Polluter KOCH & ALEC have supported efforts around the nation to oppose CLEAN, CHEAP RENEWABLE ENERGY, even going as far as promoting ANTI-ELECTRIC CAR campaigns.

Watch who's involved.

MASS FISCAL ALLIANCE has funded expensive glossy postcards with an out-of-state postal permit and lots of misinformation. Their lack of disclosure of donors should raise questions.

Is it Cape Wind all over again?

Nantucket residents file suit to block Vineyard Wind

BRUCE MOHL Aug 25, 2021\

TWO NANTUCKET RESIDENTS, backed by a network of think tanks and beachfront property owners along the East Coast, set in motion what appears to be a Cape Wind strategy for derailing the nation’s first industrial-size offshore wind farm and others that are lining up behind it.

Vallorie Oliver, a home designer on Nantucket, filed a lawsuit on Wednesday seeking to block construction of Vineyard Wind until federal regulatory agencies can assure the safety of North Atlantic Right Whales and other endangered species. She and Mary Chalke, a physical therapist and the co-director of Nantucket Residents Against Turbines, said their priority is protecting the right whale, but also indicated they oppose the industrialization of the ocean off of Nantucket with turbines close to 900-feet tall.

“Can you think of a worse place to put the first-in-the-nation, largest-in-the-world wind power plant?” Chalke asked. “We are playing Russian roulette with our environment.”

David Stevenson, policy director at the Delaware-based Caesar Rodney Institute, a “nonprofit committed to protecting individual liberty,” joined Oliver and Chalke at the press conference in front of the State House. He said he is helping to coordinate a fundraising operation for the Vineyard Wind lawsuit and other wind farms that may follow elsewhere along the coast, reaching out to individuals and groups up and down the coast who are opposed to offshore wind for a variety of reasons. He said $70,000 has been raised so far and the immediate goal is $500,000. He said the names of donors will not be disclosed.

The website of the fundraising operation, the American Coalition for Ocean Protection, indicates the goal is to push wind farms farther out from the coast or ban them entirely. “The overall objective of the fund and other ACOP activities is to at least create a permanent offshore wind exclusion zone to 33 miles off the entire eastern seaboard of the United States,” the website says. “Given the premium cost of offshore wind, the likely abandonment of commercial fishing in any lease area, and the negative impacts on marine life, we expect no suitable lease area will be found anywhere off the East Coast.”

From left, Mary Chalke and Vallorie Oliver of Nantucket Residents Against Turbines and David Stevenson, policy director at the Delaware-based Caesar Rodney Institute. (Photo by Chris Van Buskirk of State House News Service)

Paul Craney of the conservative Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance showed up at the Wednesday press conference. He said he is personally supportive of what the Nantucket residents and the Caesar Rodney Institute are doing but his organization hasn’t signed on in any formal capacity.

The still-emerging game plan against Vineyard Wind appears to be strikingly similar to the game plan used by opponents of Cape Wind close to a decade ago. Cape Wind aspired to be the nation’s first offshore wind farm, but it ran into a relentless legal attack by the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, a nonprofit supported with more than $5 million from billionaire William Koch, whose biggest concern was that the turbines would spoil the view from his Osterville compound.

Koch’s strategy was simple. “One is to just delay, delay, delay, which we’re doing and hopefully we can win some of these bureaucrats over,” Koch said in a 2013 interview with CommonWealth. “The other way is to elect politicians who understand how foolhardy alternative energy is.”

The litigation delays scared away investors and cost Cape Wind its power contracts with Eversource and National Grid in 2015. A year later, after a regulatory snub by the Baker administration, Beacon Hill delivered the final blow, passing new offshore wind legislation that barred Cape Wind from competing for new contracts. The hope was that moving offshore wind projects out of Nantucket Sound and farther offshore would defuse opposition to them.

In 2017, Cape Wind developer Jim Gordon finally threw in the towel after investing close to 10 years and $100 million of his personal money in the project.

Will what happened to Cape Wind happen now to Vineyard Wind and the other wind farm projects lining up behind it?

The context for offshore wind in 2021 is very different from what it was in 2015. The Baker administration, which back then was skeptical about the cost of Cape Wind, is now totally supportive of offshore wind, which is central to the administration’s effort to decarbonize the state’s economy.

The Biden administration, for similar reasons, is also on board. Former president Donald Trump’s administration delayed action on Vineyard Wind  for several years while it studied the potential impact of wind farms up and down the cost, but once President Biden was elected Washington bureaucracy did an about face and quickly pushed Vineyard Wind across the regulatory finish line.

A sign posted at the State House press conference by two women from Nantucket Residents Against Turbines. (Photo by Bruce Mohl)

Oliver said the Biden administration’s quick approval of the project is one of the reasons she’s filing her lawsuit. She said the federal regulatory agencies she is suing failed to address environmental concerns associated with offshore wind

“It hasn’t been given its due diligence,” she said, calling the environmental impact statement on Vineyard Wind “1,000 pages of insignificant suppositions and a whole lot of let’s wait and see what happens.”

Concerns about the fate of the right whale, whose population is dwindling, are not new. The downturn in the whale population is already happening without any wind farms being built, primarily because the whales are being hit by boats or becoming ensnared in fishing nets.

Still, officials from 17 prominent environmental groups wrote a letter to the National Marine Fisheries Service in September 2020 raising concerns that regulators were failing to protect environmentally endangered mammals, including right whales, in their review of offshore wind projects. It’s unclear whether any changes were made in response to the letter; efforts to reach two of the signers were unsuccessful.  Erica Fuller of the Conservation Law Foundation in Boston did not return calls over a two-day period.

Jake O’Neill, a spokesman for the Conservation Law Foundation, issued a statement saying “climate change presents an existential threat not only to right whales, but entire ecosystems across the globe. Offshore wind is a key element in reducing the emissions that cause climate change and meeting New England’s clean energy goals. We’ve been vigilant in pushing offshore wind developers to ensure that any potential impacts on right whales and other marine life are minimized, and we will continue to do so as more projects are developed.”

A spokesman for the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, one of the agencies being sued, did not return phone calls. A spokesman for Vineyard Wind also said he would have no comment on pending litigation.

The regulatory approval received by Vineyard Wind requires the company to shut down pile-driving operations near the turbines during times of the year when right whales are active in the area and minimize the noise impact when pile-driving does occur. The approval also requires Vineyard Wind vessels to reduce speed near the turbines and to have spotters on board on the lookout for endangered whales and turtles. The federal environmental impact review concluded the measures being required would result in “negligible” impact on right whales.

Chalke said her concern about Vineyard Wind extends beyond right whales. “What I thought was 84 turbines off our beaches, the actual intent is 2,000 skyscraping turbines covering 2,000 square miles of pristine, unspoiled ocean,” she said, referring to the full buildout of the area.

Stevenson said the visual impact of Vineyard Wind, despite being roughly 15 miles off the coast, remains a concern. He said some members of his group don’t oppose offshore wind but want turbines to be kept at least 30 miles off the coast. “Visual is always the one that gets the attention because oh it’s just a bunch of rich people that don’t want to look at this,” he said. “Let me tell you, there are tens of millions of people who go to the beach all across the East Coast every year and one of things they want is that ocean view.”

Stevenson said other proposed wind farms off the coast of Long Island and Kitty Hawk National Park have been pushed farther out to sea, 30 miles off the coast, because of the visual impact.

“At 15 miles, these things would dominate the horizon,” he said.

Vineyard Wind officials in the past have suggested the turbines would rarely be visible from land. Chalke raised concerns about red lights flashing atop the turbines, illuminating them on the horizon and attracting migratory birds who could be killed. But the federal approval for the project indicates Vineyard Wind is required to install an aircraft detection lighting system, which would turn the flashing lights on only when aircraft are in the area, which is expected to be a rare occurrence.

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Exposed: China’s Useless Wind Turbines

Published on January 19, 2017

Written by Javier C Hernandez

JIUQUAN, China — On the edge of the Gobi Desert, the Jiuquan Wind Power Base stands as a symbol of China’s quest to dominate the world’s renewable energy market. With more than 7,000 turbines arranged in rows that stretch along the sandy horizon, it is one of the world’s largest wind farms, capable of generating enough electricity to power a small country.

But these days, the windmills loom like scarecrows, idle and inert. The wind howls outside, but many turbines in Jiuquan, a city of vast deserts and farms in the northwest province of Gansu, have been shut off because of weak demand. Workers while away the hours calculating how much power the turbines could have generated if there were more buyers, and wondering if and when they will ever make a profit.

“There’s not much we can do right now,” said Zhou Shenggang, a manager at a state-owned energy company who oversees 134 turbines here; about 60 percent of their capacity goes unused each year. “Only the state can intervene.”

China, the world’s largest emitter of ‘greenhouse gases,’ has pointed to its embrace of wind and solar power and other alternatives to coal to position itself at the forefront of the global effort to combat climate change.

More than 92,000 wind turbines have been built across the country, capable of generating 145 gigawatts of electricity, nearly double the capacity of wind farms in the United States. One out of every three turbines in the world is now in China, and the government is adding them at a rate of more than one per hour.

But some of its most ambitious wind projects are underused. Many are grappling with a nationwide economic slowdown that has dampened demand for electricity. Others are stymied by persistent favoritism toward the coal industry by local officials and a dearth of transmission lines to carry electricity from rural areas in the north and west to China’s fastest-growing cities.

That has left China unable to generate enough renewable energy to make a serious dent in air pollution and carbon emissions, despite the state-driven building spree. Even with its unmatched arsenal of turbines, China still lags the United States. Wind power now accounts for 3.3 percent of electricity generation in China, according to the nation’s National Energy Administration, compared with 4.7 percent in the United States.

Chinese officials have described the challenges facing the wind sector as growing pains, and they say the investments in renewable energy will pay off in the long term. The costs of wind projects are falling rapidly with advances in technology and more efficient construction, making them more competitive with plants powered by fossil fuels like coal and natural gas.

And the government has vowed to continue investing heavily in renewable energy. It said this month that it intended to spend at least $360 billion through 2020 on developing renewable energy sources.

Analysts said that China’s success would depend on its ability to overcome both political and practical obstacles, including resistance to renewable energy from local governments and a lack of turbines near major cities.

“This is partly a political fight,” said Paolo Frankl, head of the renewable energy division at the International Energy Agency. “Still, it’s a very, very robust and solid trajectory.”

Sebastian Meyer, research and advisory director at Azure International, a renewable-energy consulting firm in Beijing, said China was “leapfrogging everybody” with its investments in renewable energy but needed to push through painful policy decisions, such as allowing more flexibility in setting energy prices.

“For years, they’ve been talking about power-sector reform,” he said. “But really they need a different market approach that incentivizes more use of renewables going forward.”

The Jiuquan Wind Power Base, approved by the government in 2008, epitomized China’s ambition to become a global leader in clean energy. The government vowed to invest $17.4 billion by 2020 and build a vast farm capable of generating 20 gigawatts of power, more than the combined wind capacity of several countries.

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Painting and assembling wind turbines in Gansu Province in 2009. Some of China’s most ambitious wind projects are underused. Credit Doug Kanter/Bloomberg

But the unfinished project has been slow to take off, even as the government continues to build it out.

Part of the problem is the location. Gansu is a barren, mountainous province, chosen for its strong winds and potential for growth. But it is far from the booming cities of eastern China, making transmission of electricity difficult.

Gansu now has some of the highest rates of underutilization in the wind sector in China; in 2015, 39 percent of wind capacity in the province was wasted, according to statistics compiled by the National Energy Administration.

Mr. Frankl said inefficiency in Gansu was “astronomically high” and underscored the need for China to build more ultrahigh-voltage transmission lines to carry electricity long distances, and to position new turbines closer to major metropolises.

In Gansu and elsewhere, the central government has also run up against local resistance. Advocates for the wind industry contend that local officials have reduced production quotas for wind farms to give an advantage to coal companies.

The coal industry, a major driver of economic growth in many provinces, wields significant influence in China. While the government has pledged to curb the spread of coal plants as part of its plan to make 20 percent of China’s energy renewable by 2030, it has continued to add them in some places.

“The cake is only so big,” said Yan Jing, a Greenpeace activist in Beijing who studies climate change and energy issues. “It’s hard for new energy companies to take a slice from traditional players.”

Even if more transmission lines were constructed, Ms. Yan said, the government would have trouble persuading businesses along China’s heavily developed eastern coast to buy electricity from faraway provinces.

“The authorities failed to consider the demand factor, namely, ‘How can we get closer to buyers?’” she said. “There should be more development of clean energy in eastern parts of China so electricity can be absorbed locally.”

In introducing a new energy plan last week, officials acknowledged that the focus on building turbines far from urban centers had created imbalances. He Yongjian, an official at the National Energy Administration, said the government would now build a majority of new turbines in the east, partly to reduce the need to transmit power long distances.

But building wind farms in the east might be difficult, given the preponderance of coal plants, a lack of strong winds and a scarcity of undeveloped land.

The tepid demand for electricity in an economic downturn has also exacerbated the troubles for renewable energy. Demand for electricity grew by only 0.5 percent in 2015, the slowest rate of growth since 1974, and it is expected to remain weak until consumer spending picks up.

At the Jiuquan Wind Power Base, Mr. Zhou oversees a small wind farm for a branch of China Resources Power Holdings, a state-run energy company based in Shenzhen that operates two wind farms in Gansu. He said the wind industry’s problems had hurt morale and productivity. The branch in Jiuquan has made small cuts in salaries and benefits for its 32 employees because of its challenges in selling electricity. Other wind farms in the area have resorted to layoffs, according to interviews with workers.

Read more at www.nytimes.com

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