Now Wisconsin Loses a Wind Farm

March 26, 201113 years ago susan 18 Comments

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!

Poor Wisconsin. When a new Tea Party Governor Scott Walker and a matching Tea Party majority was shoe-horned in by the Koch brothers, that speedily reversed the economic benefits that former Governor Doyle had approved to develop new progressive infrastructure. First they disconnected the high speed train connection and then busted the remaining public employee unions, dismantling an educational infrastructure that had been the envy of the nation.

Now a 150 MW wind farm is giving up on the state and taking that clean energy infrastructure elsewhere. Chicago based Invenergy has just withdrawn its plans for a 100 turbine wind farm, originally announced in 2009, to build the second largest wind farm in the state, according to JSOnline:

The company said it was concerned about moving forward because of the state of flux in Wisconsin’s regulatory climate when it comes to wind siting. Governor Walker has proposed a bill that would sharply curtail wind development, and a legislative committee comprised of the newly elected GOP majority, with an apparent fear of wind energy, moved this month to block an alternative bill, that would be less harshly anti wind.

“The absence of regulatory stability has made it imprudent for Invenergy to proceed with investments in a project which unknown regulations might make infeasible to construct,” the company’s director of development, Kevin Parzyck, said in a letter to the state Public Service Commission.

It’s risky to invest in developing nation-states because of “absence of regulatory stability”. But Wisconsin was a state in a developed nation – and we expect the normal trajectory of progress to be from “developing” to “developed” nations or states. But now, we are finding, that the developed status of nations or states can reverse, as well, and the reverse trajectory is just as destabilizing.

It’s just too risky to create infrastructure in states that are un-developing!

Susan Kraemer@Twitter