The Holy Grail of clean power for Cook County

Considering the wind turbine comments in last week’s letter to the editor, I find it interesting how our collective memory fades.

Since the aughts, the possibilities of wind turbines on the hills over Lake Superior has been studied. Much of those studies were led by Cook County’s own Cook County Local Energy Project (CCLEP). You can find the various studies on MNDNR and UMD’s websites.

One of the issues that came up during the studies is that the ridgelines to about a mile inland are one of North America’s largest bird and specifically raptor migration corridors. Before wind turbines could be installed, mitigation strategies would need to be developed or possibly new technology, such as the promising bladeless wind turbines that have made the news recently. Another reason was that the infrastructure and transmission lines don’t currently exist, and the cost to develop and maintain the infrastructure would be significant and could outweigh the benefits of installing large turbines. We’d also need to solve the housing issues before we could tackle the additional jobs needed to maintain that level of infrastructure and turbines that would populate the hills near Lake Superior with wind turbines.

Luckily, there’s another way Cook County could produce more of its own power. It’s solar and battery storage. Many of the houses in Cook County are ideally orientated to have solar installed on their roofs. The advantage of doing this would go beyond generating our own local power. One advantage would be that the power generation would be distributed throughout the county and with that distribution comes more resiliency for the community. Instead of depending on transmission lines and centralized power generation, we could all generate power. During an emergency, the community and your neighborhood could pull together for the common good.

In addition to the advantages of distributed power, it also makes sense from a cost perspective. For the cost of 32 wind turbines along the hills of Lake Superior – not including the new infrastructure – we could put solar on over 4,800 houses in Cook County. According to the US Census Bureau, that would be all the owner occupied houses in the county.

Bryan Hansel,
Grand Marais