After years of going through the Santa Barbara County planning process, the Strauss Wind Energy Project is officially running—generating enough electricity to power about 40,000 homes, said Errin Briggs, supervising planner for the Energy, Minerals, and Compliance Division of the county Planning and Development Department.
“I think it’s just really impressive that they were able to build this project and have it turn operational after all the challenges they’ve been through,” Briggs said. “To me, the planning process was very rigorous and between the county and [California Department of Fish and Wildlife], we placed a lot of mitigation requirements for restoration and protection of natural resources.”
The 27 turbines generating about 95 megawatts of electricity on more than 5,000 acres near Lompoc is the first wind energy project on California’s coast, according to BayWa’s website.
“What it does is it adds a renewable energy source to the grid, displacing a nonrenewable energy source. By adding wind here, we can take away coal or gas energy somewhere else, improving the power on the grid by making it more renewable than it was before,” Briggs said.
Power generated by the station has been purchased by Marin Clean Energy in Marin County, but the actual electrons generated by the project are going to be used by the people closest to it, he said.
“Electricity is used by the closest source; you can’t send electrons [to] Marin County [from] Lompoc—it just adds energy,” Briggs said.
Formerly known as the Lompoc Wind Project, the project’s development began in 2001, according to BayWa’s website, but the project was denied by the Santa Barbara County Planning Commission in 2008, and the Board of Supervisors later denied appeals to that decision in 2009. These decisions were also upheld by both the District Court and Court of Appeals, according to BayWa’s website.
BayWa acquired the rights to this project in 2016 and renamed it the Strauss Wind Energy Project, which went before the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors in 2020.
However, one of the approval conditions was to get an incidental intake permit from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service—designed to mitigate significant impacts to golden eagles—which caused the project to go back before the Santa Barbara County Planning Commission in July 2023.
The commission approved the project in August, and it was appealed to the Board of Supervisors, but discussions stopped after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wrote a letter to the county stating that an eagle take permit is expected to be issued for the project—giving the project the green light to move forward, according to the project overview.
Now, the project includes a software program called IdentiFlight, which recognizes flight patterns of birds, like eagles, and shuts the turbines down to protect them, along with measures to protect oak trees, the Gaviota tarplant, and other woodlands, Briggs added.
“They applied in 2016 and it’s been a seven-year adventure to get this done, and it’s impressive what they’ve been able to accomplish,” he said.
This article appears in Feb 1-11, 2024.