At least 47 animal deaths, including one known golden eagle fatality, brought the Strauss Wind Energy Project back to the Santa Barbara County Planning Commission to see if the project’s operations need to be adjusted to better preserve birds and bats.
However, the Planning Commission decided that it needed more data before any significant operational changes would occur.
“This facility has been operating for a year. It’s giant, almost 6,000 acres, 27 turbines—I think looking at the take after a year of 47 [fatalities], I’m sure there are some who would like that to be zero, as we see in a lot of mitigation requests for other sorts of projects, is not feasible,” 4th District Commissioner Roy Reed said during the Dec. 11 Planning Commission hearing. “I think it’s operating pretty well right now.”
The Board of Supervisors approved the commercial scale wind energy project owned by BayWa in 2019. It sits in the 3rd District, southeast of Lompoc near San Miguelito Canyon and Sudden roads. It’s been operating since November 2023.
Part of the project’s approval included an adaptive management plan, the first of its kind, which requires the operator to track the number of bird and bat carcasses found around the turbines and report to the county once the quantity meets certain thresholds, which depend on whether the species is protected or considered non-sensitive, said Jacquelynn Ybarra, a planner with Planning and Development’s Energy, Minerals, and Compliance Division.
BayWa has to tell the county and increase carcass counts from monthly to every three or four days if it finds one federal- or California-listed protected species; two non-listed sensitive species and local species of concern; three raptors without designated conservation status; and four nonsensitive bird or bat species.
In an attempt to lessen the project’s impacts, Strauss agreed to modify the carcass surveys for half of the turbines to twice a month and all of them once a month; conduct a feasibility study for painting the blades black to help improve birds’ and bats’ ability to see the turbines; monitor golden eagle nests within 1 mile of the project; and evaluate the performance of Identiflight—the technology used that identifies golden eagles and stops the turbines to give them safe passage.
“Identiflight is very open to discussing the technology, however they have a nondisclosure agreement with the applicant so there is this veil of secrecy over the operation of the units at the site and how they’re performing and what’s happening,” Energy Minerals and Compliance Deputy Director Errin Briggs told commissioners. “There’s a ton of data there [that] they are not sharing with us that we are just in the dark on. They are very very careful in talking with us, however, they can discuss the technology in general.”
Gordon MacDougall, managing director of BayWa, told commissioners that the wind turbine team is required to sign a nondisclosure agreement with all of its contractors on that site “given the proximity to Vandenberg” Space Force Base.
Initially, commissioners discussed modifying the thresholds to trigger responses earlier, but the operator pushed back on this motion—claiming that it would hurt operations.
“We believe the information made to guide those decisions is faulted and is … pulled from data on very outdated wind farms, actual data on the bird and bat conservation strategy is listed as far as what the average impact per megawatt average was at the time,” said Jeffery Carroll, an ecologist with BayWa. “We went through average fatalities, there is a significant difference.”
Strauss Wind had one eagle fatality documented while the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service projected that 15 golden eagles would die from the turbines. Commissioners agreed that the project needed more time to produce more data that would paint a better picture of its impact. The project will return to the Planning Commission in a year with an update.
“This has been a substantial learning experience for me, and I think for all of us, and all in all, I think we’re better prepared to monitor ongoing operations than we ever would have been in the past,” 1st District C. Michael Cooney said. “I’m much more concerned about what we do not know. Is there evidence of more strikes than what we’re hearing? Mr. Briggs’ comments about limited information really concerns me, … but we should recognize it’s a process and we’re not going to complete it today no matter how much time we spend.”
This article appears in Dec 19-29, 2024.