Rantz: Is this the worst local energy investment ever?

At the new Port Angeles Waterfront Park, the City Council unanimously approved the $107,516 price tag to install three “windmill-like turbines” to generate electricity. Their monthly energy production? Just $1.50 worth of savings. Wow.

According to the Peninsula Daily:

‘The turbines will power the 31 lights that illuminate the park,’ Deputy Power Systems Manager Shailesh Shere said last week.

‘They can generate up to 3 kilowatts an hour but under normal conditions will generate a quarter of that,’ Shere said.

Shere said they are expected to generate $1.50 worth of electricity a month, based on current retail Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) rates.

The Peninsula Daily News has since updated the story with more accurate information. Though still low savings, they now say it’s $1.39 worth of savings a day.

Of course, this is quite embarrassing but, according to the City Councilmember Sissi Bruch, the turbines “… were also meant to educate folks about wind power.” Something tells me she doesn’t think the lesson that “wind power is useless and costly” was the education she had in mind. She now regrets the expenditure.

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Alternative energy needs to be explored and investments in the technology and infrastructure need to be made. Traditional forms of energy will not be here forever. But perhaps we can take off our blinders for long enough to see that advancing completely useless forms of alternative energy projects only sets your long-term agenda back. But that message is lost on Mayor Patrick Downie.

“Maybe we’ll discover that if we had another three somewhere else down there on the waterfront, we could begin to generate something, and it might become more meaningful,” he told the Peninsula Daily. “I still like the notion that we are using new technologies here and that some [electricity] may be going back into the grid.”

Something tells me he wouldn’t take this ludicrous position if he were working with his own money. He’s so blinded by his ideological marriage to this cause that he’s rendered himself incapable of taking a reasonable position on this issue.

If it were me, I’d shift the narrative and lie: Claim the turbine was meant as a sculpture. It’s harder to claim art isn’t worth the subjective price tag you put on it. It’ll at least save you the embarrassment of trying to talk your way out of the useless energy being created by the turbines.

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