Radar Ridge, one of the first large-scale wind projects to be proposed in the forested, coastal hills on the west side of Washington state has been scrapped, because regulatory mandates to protect a threatened seabird were “untenable”, according to Jack Baker, vice president of Energy Northwest, which was developing the 82MW project with a coalition of four public utilities.
The group invested $4m and four years of effort into development before being told by the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) that the project would have to shut down for more than half the year to avoid harming the marbled murrelet, which nests in the region, though Energy Northwest maintains that “extensive, independent, scientific studies found that no murrelets nest atop...
