Harm to animals feared with proposed wind farm

Monday, Aug. 12, 2002 | 8:53 a.m.

The Nevada Wildlife Commission has dealt another blow to the embattled effort by a company to build wind-powered electric generators in Southern Nevada.

The commission unanimously voted Friday to ask MNS Wind Power to do more to mitigate the feared impact on animals from the company's proposed Table Mountain wind farm near Sandy Valley in southwestern Clark County.

About three dozen Sandy Valley residents attended the commission meeting to make the point that the proposal could affect wildlife, including bighorn sheep, in the area.

MNS recently received a blow to plans to put hundreds of electricity-producing windmills on the Nevada Test Site when the Air Force decided that the project could not go forward. The company, according to consultant Tim Carlson, still hopes to go forward with the test site project in perhaps three to five years, but in the meantime is shifting its focus to the Sandy Valley effort.

The Sandy Valley proposal must receive federal and county regulatory authority before construction can begin.

At Friday's commission meeting, Sandy Valley residents and outdoor enthusiasts blasted MNS for not doing enough to work out environmental issues.

Daniel Swanson, a member of the Clark County Advisory Board to Manage Wildlife, said company officers have been unwilling to work with the Nevada Division of Wildlife and are willing to spend only a fraction of the money needed to study and mitigate the wind farm's environmental effects.

Nancy Knight, a Sandy Valley resident, said the company is ignoring "significant impacts on wildlife" that have been identified in the company's own environmental impact studies.

Some environmentalists fear that wind farms in Nevada and in other parts of the country will affect wildlife, including birds that they fear can fly into the huge blades of the wind turbines. Company officials, however, argue that the risks are overstated.

MNS officials did not attend the meeting, but Carlson said he had asked and believed the issue would be taken off Friday's agenda for discussion at a later time. He said the lack of communication between the state's wildlife officials and his company is because the state officials have cancelled a number of scheduled meetings.

More meetings are scheduled, Carlson said.

He said the company wants to help animals in the area, not hurt them. One way the wind farm could help bighorn sheep, for example, would be to use the windmills to draw water to the surface for them to drink.

"Our interest is to help the animal," Carlson said. "You're not in this business because you don't care about the environment."

The test site and Table Mountain projects could eventually provide enough power for about 250,000 homes.