Idaho wind project pits climate against farmers and Japanese internment memorial

The Biden administration is advancing a massive wind energy project planned for southern Idaho that pits President Joe Biden's environmental priorities directly against one another.

The Bureau of Land Management finalized a draft "environmental impact statement" and said Thursday it will begin taking comment on Magic Valley Energy's proposed gigawatt-scale Lava Ridge Wind Project, which would be built mostly on federal lands. The project is a microcosm of the tensions between expanding utility-scale renewable electricity generation and respecting the interests of local farmers, landowners, tribal groups, and, in this case, Japanese-Americans in particular.

The Biden administration set a goal of permitting 25 gigawatts of renewable energy on public lands by 2025 to help displace fossil fuels within the power sector, and the Lava Ridge project would go a long way toward that target.

Project developers want to construct up to 400 wind turbines with an estimated generating capacity of more than 1,000 megawatts across approximately 84,000 acres of federal, state and private land in south-central Idaho. Almost 90% of the acreage of the proposed project covered BLM-managed lands.