October 25, 2016
Dear Erie County Council members,
Wind turbines in Lake Erie would be extremely destructive and would serve no purpose except to make subsidy sucking energy companies such as LEEDCO even richer. Wind energy cannot be stored or regulated and adds nothing to the electrical grid that must be fully available at all times. Studies have shown that they don’t reduce fossil fuel emissions at all. On the contrary, turbines have to be backed up 100% of the time by traditional mostly fossil-fueled power plants
because the wind must blow at the perfect speed for them to kick in – about 25% of the time. Would you buy a car that only works 25% of the time and you never knew when it would work or not?
LEEDCO has now become a subsidiary of Fred Olsen Renewables headquartered in Norway. They are licking their chops at the possibility of installing 1,700 turbines in Lake Erie starting with the Icebreaker project outside of Cleveland. They do not know or care about what Lake Erie means to the citizens of Erie County.
Please protect our seventy-two miles of Erie County’s Lake Erie shoreline. Please protect the drinking water we and eleven million other people get from the lake. Please protect the millions of birds and bats that would be chopped to pieces by blades going two hundred miles an hour at the 150 foot tips. Please protect the fish and waterbirds that would be harmed by the noise, vibration, and pollution that would be caused by the underwater trenching necessary to set thousands of high-power electrical lines crisscrossing the lake floor.
Pennsylvania is one of only three U.S. States that places citizens’ environmental rights on a par with their political rights. Our environmental rights are secured in Section 27 of Article 1 , the state Constitution’s declaration of rights, which reads:
“The people have a right to clean air ,pure water, and to the preservation of the natural,scenic,historic,and esthetic values of the environment. Pennsylvania’s public natural resources are the common property of all of the people, including generations to come. As trustee of these resources, the Commonwealth shall conserve and maintain them for the benefit of all the people.”
It would be in the best interests of the citizens of Erie County, whom you represent, to direct Erie County Executive Kathy Dahlkemper to immediately resign from LEEDCO’s board of directors.
Pat Hersch
PLEASE RESIGN: THIS IS A CLEAR CONFLICT OF INTEREST. YOU CANNOT REPRESENT LEEDCO, THE DEVELOPER, AND BE IN A FAIR AND OPEN MANNER, REPRESENTING YOUR COUNCIL AND CITIZENS. IS THIS DOUBLE DIPPING?
