A false sense of security So far, at least, Bath County has paid little attention to the desperate battle being fought by its neighbors to the north to keep industrial-scale wind facilities from desecrating their Allegheny ridges. There is the sense here that because most of our mountains are within the boundaries of national and state forests, we don't have a dog in the fight. But we would be wrong.
Even if federal ridge lines were forever protected, and that is a very dangerous assumption, there is sufficient privately-owned mountain terrain here with attractive enough wind scales for developers to significantly downgrade the scenic values that are the backbone of Bath's economy and the promise of its future. The stakes for Bath could be every bit as high as they are now for Highland.
In that light, it was good to hear newly appointed Bath County planner Miranda Redinger tell her planning commission it would do well to consider just how wind power might or might not fit into this county's comprehensive plan. Currently, there is no mention of the wind industry anywhere within the document - a document, she aptly points out, already short on specifics of how to deal with development of any kind. In its current state, the plan offers wind utility developers the kind of political vulnerability they have readily exploited in other localities throughout the Mid-Atlantic region.
If planners take Redinger's advice, they have the opportunity to put a face on wind power and distinguish between the potential benefits of small wind projects and the potential disaster of the giant utilities now being proposed to our north. They can see where one may offer a way for the farms, schools, and businesses of small rural communities to establish environmentally friendly energy independence on a human scale. The other, they will learn, plunders state, local and federal treasuries, along with the environment, to contribute relatively small and inefficient power generation to the national grid on a scale grotesquely out of proportion to the mountains it despoils.
Small wind has great promise, but it has yet to be engineered in a way to make it practical for general applications. It lags behind utility-scale wind research because the big government subsidies all go to a wind energy lobby that promotes its clear self-interest. There is big money for the taking under the guise of green energy. Power companies have little interest in human-scale technology that might, in the long run, reduce their customer base rather than expand it.
As Bath's planners go down this road, they should consider what wind power might do for the county, not what it can surely do to it. It would not be hard to envision a few 100-foot wind towers in several strategic locations providing or supplementing power for our schools and perhaps even for our villages. Farmers in wind-favored locations would do well to explore the possibilities of small, efficient turbines that will be made available down the road if the demand is established.
Highland has served as the guinea pig for how industrial wind power will be applied in Virginia, and the jury is still out as to how the pig will fare. Bath has the opportunity to learn from its neighbor's experience and the very first lesson it needs to absorb is that time is an ally in the wind struggle. The more that has been discovered about big wind over the years as the Highland debate unfolds, the less appeal it has except for the very few who will exploit the temporary access to our tax dollars in the false name of the common good.
Bath can do much better. It's good the county is tuning in.
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