News

Aug 18, 2023

Wind farm in Botetourt County delayed again

The site of Apex Clean Energy’s proposed Rocky Forge wind farm is near this spot along Blue Grass Trail on the Botetourt County and Rockbridge County line. If giant turbines atop a Botetourt County

The site of Apex Clean Energy’s proposed Rocky Forge wind farm is near this spot along Blue Grass Trail on the Botetourt County and Rockbridge County line.

If giant turbines atop a Botetourt County mountain ever convert wind to electricity, it will not be until late 2025 – a decade after the plan was first announced.

Apex Clean Energy says it hopes to begin major construction of its proposed wind farm next summer or fall, and complete it by the end of the following year. Earlier plans had called for work to begin this summer.

A detailed site plan for how 13 turbines, each 643 feet tall, will be arranged and built along a ridgeline of North Mountain has yet to be approved by Botetourt County’s community development department.

“We are still working through the site plan process with the county and expect to conclude that review later this year,” Brian O’Shea, a spokesman for Apex, wrote in a recent email.

Called Rocky Forge Wind, the renewable energy project has been slowed by permitting delays, legal action from opponents, design changes, the COVID-19 pandemic, and a lengthy search for a buyer of the power it will produce.

When Apex first announced its plans in 2015, the Charlottesville-based company said the turbine blades would be spinning by late 2017 – making Rocky Forge the first onshore wind farm in Virginia.

It’s not uncommon for such projects to be delayed for years, often by a slow-moving approval process, according to the American Clean Power Association.

“A permitting system that was designed to protect against harm has paradoxically become the greatest obstacle to modernizing our energy infrastructure and achieving our environmental goals,” the association’s CEO, Jason Grumet, wrote in a recent opinion piece for Utility Dive, a news source for the energy and utility industry.

O’Shea said discussions with Botetourt County officials about the Rocky Forge site plan have included “adjustments and refinements along the way, so the timing isn’t unusual from our experience.”

The county recently received resubmitted plans from the company and is currently reviewing the material, according Nicole Pendleton, director of community development.

Headwinds confronting Apex are not limited to permitting issues.

In January 2016, the Botetourt County Board of Supervisors granted a special exception permit for Rocky Forge. Final approval came in March 2017 from the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality.

Construction never started, as Apex spent the next two and a half years looking for a utility or other purchaser of the 75 megawatts of electricity the wind farm would produce at peak capacity.

A deal was finally struck in October 2019, with Dominion Energy agreeing to purchase the power and then sell it to the Commonwealth of Virginia as part of the state’s plan to fight climate change by using more wind and solar energy.

By then, changes in wind technology prompted Apex to reduce the number of turbines; current plans are for 13 instead of 25 as originally proposed. But they will be taller – at the 643 feet per turbine, about twice the height of the Wells Fargo tower in downtown Roanoke – than the earlier maximum of 550 feet. Those changes required a new round of permit applications, which have since been approved.

Then the pandemic hit, delaying construction again. The contract between Apex, Dominion and the state expired at the end of 2021 and was not renewed.

At the time, Apex said it was confident a new buyer would be found in the next few months. A year and a half later, the company is still looking. Discussions with potential customers are ongoing, O’Shea said.

Meanwhile, the company and DEQ have faced lawsuits from opponents who say the turbines will mar the scenic landscape of northern Botetourt County, kill birds and bats that fly into their rotating blades, cause other environmental damage, and produce low-frequency noise and shadow flicker.

A group of about a dozen Botetourt County and Rockbridge County residents have three cases pending. They are asking the Virginia Court of Appeals to reverse a decision by a Botetourt County judge upholding DEQ’s second approval of the wind farm.

And in the county’s circuit court, they are seeking to overturn two decisions from the Botetourt County Board of Zoning Appeals: a finding that Apex was entitled to an extension of a site plan deadline because of the pandemic, and an approval for a concrete-making facility near the construction site.

The plant would be temporary, existing only long enough to produce concrete needed for the bases of the turbines. Opponents say it would nonetheless pollute a nearby creek and cause other damage to the surrounding forestland.

In their court filings, opponents have outlined what they call “Rocky Forge’s laissez-faire attitude toward both regulatory compliance and environmental conservatism.”

On the other side of the debate, clean energy advocates say fast action is needed to address a growing climate change crisis.

Dan Crawford, chair of the Sierra Club’s Roanoke Group, said the continuing delays “are confusing, at best.”

The International Energy Agency ranks wind as second only to hydropower as the world’s most productive source of renewable energy, said Crawford, whose group has endorsed Rocky Forge.

“It is no surprise that all neighboring states except Kentucky have wind farms,” he wrote in an email. “We’re running out of time, and the disturbing uptick in extreme weather globally due to rapid climate change is making more believers by the millions.”

Although there have been other proposals to build wind farms in the mountains of Virginia, none has advanced as far as Rocky Forge. Apex is the sole developer so far to seek a permit from DEQ, said Irina Calos, a spokeswoman for the agency.

Only nine states in the country currently have no land-based wind farms, according to the American Clean Power Association. All are in the Southeastern region, where wind strength and duration is relatively low.

Off the coast of Virginia, Dominion Energy is planning a major, 176-turbine wind farm in the Atlantic Ocean, about 25 miles east of Virginia Beach.

Efforts to test the wind in Botetourt County date back to at least 2009. BP, a multinational oil and gas company that is expanding to renewable energy, placed a meteorological tower in the northern part of the county to gauge the wind power. Nothing ever came from that.

“We’re in a marginal area for wind power to be efficient,” said Steve Clinton, who was on the county’s Board of Supervisors at the time and has since rejoined the governmental body.

That may be why the only offer to date for the electricity to come off North Mountain has been from the state government. “Maybe,” Clinton said, “they can’t find a buyer without the commonwealth subsidizing the cost.”

Laurence Hammack (540) 981-3239

[email protected]

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Utility-scale, onshore wind farms can be found in four of the five states that border Virginia — North Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia and …