Letter: Solar opponents’ failed case

No doubt that this letter will generate responses, but just remember that the letter came first. Think about this: Can you explain, exactly, why the Sierra Club and a small number of people in the county oppose the Panoche Valley Solar Project, PV2?
I bet eight or nine out of 10 of you can’t explain it specifically because they have been conducting a shadow guerilla campaign against PV2 after losing two court battles. For instance, the site will be fully mitigated with other lands 10 times larger than the project and those lands will be devoted to the same habitat forever. What’s the matter with that, the Sierra Club has not said; isn’t 10 times big enough and isn’t forever long enough – do they demand forever and a day?
The opponents do say that the project area is “unique grassland.” How much of the mitigation property they are getting forever is grassland too? Grassland is the one thing the county has plenty of, over 600,000 acres of it. More than 90 percent of the “farmland” in the county is grassland because it is marginal farmland and the water and economic conditions to make it productive have not been available for many decades and won’t be in the future. It’s very funny that the PV2 opponents have even attacked their landowner neighbors for selling out, but they never bought the land when they could have; now they want to control it from afar.
Opponents say the project could have been built outside the county in the Westlands; it’s simply not true because the Westlands did not have the transmission capacity. Of course if it were built outside the county we would get none of the local benefits. What are those local benefits? Well, there are both temporary and permanent jobs, substantial sales taxes, and annual fees. Opponents argue that there will only be a few jobs, at the same time they argue that there will be so much construction it will cause traffic jams; how can both be true?
The truth is that there will be hundreds of construction jobs and, like the courthouse project, many of the firms and workers will be local. After construction, the taxes and annual fees that go to the county will fund badly needed services and pay bills and all of that spending generates jobs; maybe not at the project site, but certainly locally. Those jobs count too.
I have no personal direct or indirect financial or political interest in the project; my only interest is as a resident who supports renewable energy and hopes that this project will also bring some prosperity to the county and our residents at the bottom of the economic ladder.
The other environmental benefit is that the project will save more than 1 million barrels of oil a year, and the accompanying pollution and foreign exchange expanse. No project, no savings, more pollution, more blood and money for foreign oil.
Finally, the worst adverse environmental impacts in San Benito County are the unemployed. Almost anything we can do to find them jobs—directly or indirectly—in the private sector will improve their lives and community directly. You have to have good, specific, reasons to oppose all those benefits, especially when the impacts are mitigated with so much land and renewable energy is the wave of the future. The opponents need to get out of the way and stop encouraging the state and federal governments to run out the clock on the required subsidies.
Marty Richman, Hollister