A landmark interregional transmission line project has broken ground this week to carry high-voltage electricity 732 miles from the largest wind farm in North America to Nevada.
The TransWest Express Transmission Project (TWE) will take electricity generated by the $5 billion, 3,000 megawatt, 600-turbine Chokecherry and Sierra Madre Wind Energy Project (CSMWE) located in Carbon County, Wyoming, to the Market substation in Eldorado Valley, Nevada, which lies within the largely untouched region of the Mojave Desert.
The line that will run through Colorado and Utah will power California, Nevada, and Arizona.
Though the project—among others that the Biden administration’s incentives have kickstarted—is being celebrated as a new frontier of clean energy to combat climate change, there is a darker side as voiced by environmentalists whose unpopular opinion on the impacts of these projects have been quelled to support a narrative promoting an energy source that may not be as clean as it’s promoted.
“The scope and size of these projects are mind-boggling,” Judy Bundorf, a resident of Southern Nevada, told The Epoch Times. “This will do so much environmental and visual damage, not to mention killing eagles by the hundreds in the Wyoming area.”
In 2008, Bundorf discovered there would be an 87-turbine, 200-megawatt windfarm called the Searchlight Wind Energy Project built near her home in Searchlight, Nevada, surrounded by the Piute-Eldorado Area of Critical Environmental Concern (ACEC) on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land.
She and the Friends of Searchlight Desert and Mountains (FSDM) and several other plaintiffs began what became a 10-year battle and five-year lawsuit against BLM, the U.S. Department of Interior (DOI), and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) on the grounds that the federal defendants had violated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the Endangered Species Act (ESA), the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, the Bald and Golden Eagle Protect Act, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
It began with opposition at a local level, with the Searchlight Town Advisory Board voting against the project, a vote which was later overridden by the Clark County Commissioners, Bundorf said.
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