Wind and solar permits paused by Twin Falls moratorium - Times-News

Wind and solar permits paused by Twin Falls moratorium

With numerous wind and solar energy projects proposed for public and private lands in southern Idaho, commissioners of several Magic Valley counties fear a renewable gold rush could have a negative impact on the health, safety and welfare of citizens, as well as displace a rural lifestyle based in agriculture and ranching.

Twin Falls County commissioners unanimously voted Thursday to pause the county permit process for large-scale energy projects on private land.

The commission has no jurisdiction over public lands.

The pause will give the county time to update codes and provide guidance for permitting wind- and solar-energy projects. No such code exists and projects such as Jackpot Solar and the Bell Rapids Wind facility were permitted using guidance from the county’s hydroelectricity codes, which were last updated in 1998.

People are also reading…

“We do not have an ordinance right now that gives our planning and zoning professionals any guidelines to work through these large-scale projects,” Commissioner Jack Johnson told the Times-News after the commission's public hearing.

Filer Mayor Bob Templeman testified that many Filer residents were supportive of the moratorium and code rewrite.

"I hope that this is enough to put a plug in this and stop these projects from desecrating our public lands," Commissioner Jack Johnson said.

“A majority of us are in support, and hope that this will help out in a lot of different ways and help our community,” Templeman told commissioners.

The commission held a hearing on the moratorium in July and tabled it for one month in order to more fully define what constitutes a large-scale energy project and to provide for some exceptions in the case of utilities connecting or reconnecting services.

Before coming back to the hearing on Thursday, the county provided a definition for "large scale" as any project with a nameplate capacity of 10 megawatts or greater, or requiring an area of 100 acres or greater.

Four residents testified at the hearing, plus another 14 people testified at the July 26 hearing. The commission also received comments by electronic and postal mail.

Johnson said when he and the other commissioners learned that previous planning and zoning boards had approved permits under code created for hydropower projects, they knew it was time to act.

“It became even more apparent that we needed an ordinance in effect for planning and zoning and our community to know what kind of standards are there to build a large-scale project like these,” Johnson said.
Long before a Chinese spy balloon captivated and spooked the U.S. public, Kyle Bass foresaw what he deemed another foreign danger slated for skies above the Texas-Mexico border: wind turbines. Dozens of them, roughly 700 feet (213 meters) tall _ as big as San Antonio's tallest skyscraper _ were set to sprout across thousands of scrubby acres near the pristine Devil’s River. Protests that a wind farm would foul one of the cleanest waterways in Texas flopped, but when attention turned to a Chinese billionaire behind the project, state lawmakers raced to pull the plug.