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Highland New Wind Development launches web site for utility plans
By Anne Adams • Staff Writer
MONTEREY — The company that might become the first to build a commercial wind energy utility in Virginia has a Web site in place, touting its proposed project in Highland County as the "greenest windfarm in the world."
Highland New Wind Development LLC, owned by H.T. "Mac" McBride of Harrisonburg, plans a 39-megawatt wind generation plant on family property here.
The Web site shows a simulated photo of what the utility might look like after construction on Red Oak Knob and Tamarack Ridge, looking west from Monterey Mountain.
"We see a future unclouded by global warming, air and water pollution, acid rain and oceans, and dependence on foreign energy," the site explains. "HNWD claims that vision and is taking action to generate that future for Highland County and all Americans, now and for decades to come."
The company's Web site also states the facility will take advantage of "highest wind speeds on the mid-Atlantic seaboard," and that it will not be built in "wilderness," but on a "working private property with a centuries-long history of profit-making extractive land use: farming, gas exploration, grazing, hunting, and sugaring.
"Like most of Highland County, it has been and still is extensively logged," the site continues. "Many of its hollows once held railroad tracks for transporting cut timber by steam locomotive. Today the property is transected by miles of logging roads. Wind power, by contrast, will be its most renewable and least intrusive land use ever."
The Web site characterizes the project: "zero deforestation; a generations-old, bald, cow pasture; 50-year ownership and stewardship of the land by the developer; power line in place decades ago; adjacent to a U.S. highway; close to the markets it serves; and the first electric generation facility of any type anywhere to be required under its state permit to perform daily surveys for bird and bat mortality for the life of the project."
The site features logos and links for the American Wind Energy Association, the Virginia Wind Energy Collaborative, and Allegheny Mountain Radio.
To see more, visit the site at: www.highlandnewwind. com.
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