Sunday, April 08, 2012

The ugly battle between rural residents and alternative energy mandates in California

Seems the Mojave evictions were to make way for solar and wind projects

 by Alec Rawls
 
In 2006 California’s Senate Bill 107 codified a requirement that by 2010 all electricity retailers in the state were to procure 20% of their electricity from “renewables.” That same year L.A. County Supervisor Michael Antonovich established Nuisance Abatement Teams that started combing the Mojave desert hitting isolated residents with ever-expanding lists of code violations, imposing whatever it took to drive residents out, and they made their intentions perfectly clear:
As her ordeal wore on, she heard one agent, looking inside their comfortable cabin, say to another: “This one’s a real shame — this is a real nice one.”
A “shame” because the authorities eventually would enact some of the most powerful rules imaginable against rural residents: the order to bring the home up to current codes or dismantle the 26-year-old cabin, leaving only bare ground.
“They wouldn’t let me grandfather in the water tank,” Jacques Dupuis says. “It is so heart-wrenching because there was a way to salvage this, but they wouldn’t work with me. It was, ‘Tear it down. Period.’ ”
The immediate object in this case was actual confiscation of the land:
In order to clear the title on their land, the Dupuises are spending what would have been peaceful retirement days dismantling every board and nail of their home — by hand — because they can’t afford to hire a crew.
As the de facto evictions and confiscations multiplied, Antonovich’s motives were questioned. Was he trying to clear the land for redevelopment? In August of 2011, Antonivich Press Secretary Tony Bell denied it (at 8:40):
The county is simply responding to code violation complaints from neighbors in the area and any speculation about redevelopment was purely a conspiracy theory.
I did some Google searching at the time to see if any major wind or solar developments were planned for the area where the evictions were centered (the western Mojave’s Antelope Valley), but couldn’t pin down the connection. When First Solar recently cleared a permit for a massive Antelope Valley project I tried again and found some things I should have seen before.

It seems the wraps were already off when Antonovich issued his denials. Newspapers had reported just a month before that Antelope Valley had “33 utility-scale renewable energy installations” in the works. The updated map above shows how much of the valley has been sectioned off for various wind and solar projects.
These are presumably the anonymous “neighbors” who were asking for previous residents to be evicted. Apparently it is not enough that our green crony capitalists are getting billions in taxpayer subsidies, or that that rate-payers are forced to buy their “renewable” energy at extra-high prices. They also need their pet politicians to steal the land for them.

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