OPINION: Jubilation over wind project’s demise aimed at wrong entity

The probable demise of the Lava Ridge wind power project has been the prompt for a raft of celebration by Idaho’s top elected officials, who for months have campaigned, alongside many Magic Valley people, against it.

Idaho Gov. Brad Little said, “Five years ago, when the massive Lava Ridge Wind Project was first proposed on federally managed land in the Magic Valley, Idahoans displayed that hard-wired skepticism of the federal government yet again and consistently showed up to beat back the feds.”

Idaho Sen. Jim Risch argued, “The Interior Department cannot continue to push through a project without considering the impact.”

Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson said, “The Biden administration and the Bureau of Land Management blatantly disregarded the voices of Idahoans, the Japanese American community, and the Magic Valley community directly impacted by the out-of-touch Lava Ridge Wind Project.”

And so it went, commenter after commenter, taking aim at this project which was being pushed by the Bureau of Land Management, which controls the federal land where the wind project was to be built. It sounds like a huge federal development, or as Little described it, “federal government overreach.”

There’s something highly peculiar in all this.

Without getting into the question of whether the project (at some level or another) ought to have been approved — and rational arguments can be made both ways — there’s an oddity in how the criticisms and blowbacks have been structured:

All these people have pointed their fingers directly at an organization that didn’t propose it, didn’t advocate for it, would not have owned or run it and would not have built it.

Before we move on to the next fury de jour, let’s recall where and how Lava Ridge got started.

It began in February 2020, when Magic Valley Energy LLC sent a plan of development to the BLM. MVE is a subsidiary of the New York-based business LS Power, which owns energy production, storage and transmission lines nationally, and is one of the bigger national players in the business. Noting the increasingly favorable marketplace economics for renewable power such as wind and solar, it has been moving into that field. This is who has proposed and pushed for the Lava Ridge project.

The original proposal undeniably was large in scale, involving about 400 wind turbines, located across a vast (though generally unpopulated) area. It would have been one of the largest in the country, but wind power is not unusual in the region. Magic Valley Energy has pointed out, for example, “Idaho Power’s December 2021 integrated resource plan states that over 3,700 MW of new non-carbon emitting resources consisting of wind, solar, and storage technologies are needed to meet energy demand and achieve 100% clean energy by 2045.”

The project didn’t get a BLM green light as originally proposed. After receiving a mass of public comments — which almost certainly were overwhelmingly negative — and reviewing its own rules, the federal agency held off approval. Magic Valley Energy submitted a revised proposal, much smaller and covering about half of the footprint of the first, in 2022. The BLM approval reflected the smaller-sized project. (Little of that seems to have been much noted by the opposition.)

The BLM has neither pushed or promoted the Lava Ridge project. What it did do was respond to a land use proposal from the company much as it would for grazing, mining or any other. That’s not at all unusual. BLM lands are used for a wide variety of purposes, including commercial and even industrial uses, including cattle grazing and mining.

Lava Ridge from the beginning has been a private enterprise project. What’s interesting here is the unwillingness of Idaho’s public officials to reflect that in their statements, targeting instead the federal agency that, if anything, has constrained what the private company wanted to do.

Imagine all those Idaho elected officials saying about almost any private business what they said about BLM.

And keep imagining.

But saying whatever you want about a federal agency? Well, the sky’s the limit.

Stapilus is a former Idaho newspaper reporter and editor who blogs at ridenbaugh.com. He may be contacted at stapilus@ridenbaugh.com.