How One Woman Is Stalling Green Energy Projects in Oregon — ProPublica

During the outcry against nuclear power in the 1970s, liberal Oregon lawmakers hatched a plan to slow an industry that was just getting started. They created a burdensome process that gave the public increased say over where power plants could be built, and the leading anti-nuclear activists of the day used appeal after appeal to delay proposed nuclear plants to death. It had a huge impact: Oregon’s first commercial nuclear plant, the one that spurred lawmakers into action, was also the state’s last.

What those lawmakers didn’t plan for was that 50 years later, an Oregon citizen activist would use that same bureaucracy to hinder some of the very energy projects that today’s liberals want: wind farms and the new high-voltage lines needed to support them.

They didn’t plan for Irene Gilbert.

The 76-year-old retired state employee, former gun store owner and avid elk hunter from La Grande, Oregon, is on a mission to keep turbines and transmission towers from blighting the rural landscape. She has filed more challenges to energy projects — 15 in all, including lawsuits — than anyone in the state, according to Oregon’s Department of Energy.

“I kind of have a reputation,” Gilbert said.

Renewable energy advocates treat activists like Gilbert as relentless gadflies who need to be stopped for the good of the planet.

They say Oregon’s slow process for approving energy projects, with its endless appeals, is one reason the state ranks near last in the country for green energy growth despite setting a deadline to eliminate fossil fuel use by 2040.

Democratic leaders up and down the West Coast are reckoning with liberal policies of the past that they say clash with today’s progressive agenda. In California, for example, Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed a rollback of environmental review laws to expedite the construction of affordable housing. Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek has been pushing to roll back her state’s vaunted land-use restrictions for the same reason.

But Oregon leaders have been far less aggressive in confronting the historical artifacts that critics say hold green energy back. One, the Depression-vintage federal agency that runs most of the Northwest power grid, which has set a sluggish pace for upgrades; the other, the energy siting system Oregon created long ago for nuclear power. (The federal agency says it makes financially prudent decisions about construction.)

In the past five years, the Oregon Legislature has repeatedly rejected or watered down bills to streamline permitting of energy projects. The efforts included legislation supported by renewables advocates as well as farming and land conservation groups, both of which share Gilbert’s concerns about development in rural spaces.

In response to questions from Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica, the governor’s office acknowledged “existing significant impediments” to renewable energy growth in Oregon.

Kotek is “carefully considering opportunities to streamline Oregon’s energy siting processes,” spokesperson Anca Matica said in an email, “while maintaining opportunities for community input and preventing detrimental impacts.”

In the meantime, Kotek and lawmakers let another effort to modernize the system fall through the cracks this year. A proposal to limit public appeals and speed up permitting decisions resulted in only minor changes to the process. The status quo means developers remain locked in battles with Gilbert and others for years on end.

“I figure I can lose a thousand cases,” Gilbert said. “Even if it doesn’t look like it, I have made a difference.”

An Old Lady With a Laptop

Gilbert was retired from a career in state government and was running the Oregon Trail Trader gun shop with her partner in La Grande when she first heard about the Antelope Ridge wind farm. It was 2009, and only a handful of wind farms existed in the state. But an energy company suddenly wanted to erect 180 turbines across the scenic Grande Ronde River valley just outside town.

Energy infrastructure was a sore spot for Gilbert. Decades ago, she’d married into a ranching and timber family, and a chunk of the forest she owned was bulldozed for a transmission line. She blamed the line when she couldn’t get the timber to grow as she wanted.

She also had a stark memory of how quickly a business can erase a beloved part of rural Oregon. The company that owned Kinzua, the timber town where she grew up, razed it without a trace after shutting down operations in 1978.

Now that she was older, she said, she wanted to give back, and she was motivated by the idea of helping farmers and others protect their land from the government and electric companies.

“I feel like my reason for participating now is to do what I can to help these poor folks,” she said.

Gilbert became the legal research analyst for an opposition group known as Friends of the Grande Ronde Valley.

The tangle of rules governing energy siting was no problem. She’d worked as a trainer for the Oregon Department of Human Services and later Oregon Occupational Safety and Health, where she taught people how to understand the statutes that guided their work.

“So I know how to read government regulations,” she said.

She also enjoys it.

“It keeps my brain working,” she said with a laugh.

Gilbert spoke against the wind farm at public hearings. During one meeting in which she tried to add to her previous comments, she was cut off because the time for public testimony had passed.

She argued against the wind farm before the Oregon Energy Facility Siting Council, which has ultimate authority over whether major pieces of infrastructure like wind farms, solar projects, power plants and transmission lines get built. She sent a letter to the governor’s office stating she would sue and make all of the state’s dealings with the energy company public along the way.

That wind farm never materialized. The company backed out in 2013, citing poor market conditions.

“We were successful in stopping that,” she said. “The company would say that it was a financial decision. I think it was more than that.” (The company told OPB and ProPublica in a statement that it was “the lack of strong commercial prospects.”)

Proposals for new wind farms kept cropping up, and she contested as many as she could, even ones three hours from her home. She’s missed only a handful of the energy siting council’s monthly meetings in the past decade, driving all around the state before video conferencing became common. Developers have approached her after meetings, she said, and asked her what it would take to make her happy.

“I’ve been called ‘an old lady who has access to a computer,’” she said. “That’s kind of, I guess, how I’m viewed, and OK … I guess that’s OK.”

She sometimes works at the antique desk in her home office, sometimes from the couch in a living room filled with her grandchildren’s artwork. She’s filed multiple challenges to five wind farms plus one big transmission line since the demise of Antelope Ridge. The transmission line is moving forward. Two of the wind projects were scuttled by developers, while three others got built.

Landowners and lawyers from around the region eventually began seeking her input for filing their own objections to energy projects.

“And my advice is free,” she said.

A committed Republican, Gilbert said she doesn’t do all this because she opposes the idea of clean energy. She owns a cabin powered by rooftop solar panels. She said she doesn’t believe in the need for large-scale solar, but said she did support a solar farm in the scenic Columbia River Gorge after developers listened to public input and took steps to reduce the project’s impact.

But she finds herself quite often at odds with the work of major wind, solar and transmission players, “Just because it’s taking so much land.”

Fuji Kreider, a self-described liberal Democrat who relocated from New York, started a friendship with Gilbert while both campaigned against a major transmission project.

“She calls herself a redneck environmentalist,” Kreider said during a visit at Gilbert’s home.

Kreider’s husband, Jim, chimed in: “A redneck, gun-toting environmentalist.”

“Something like that,” Kreider said.

The Boardman to Hemingway Line

In late summer 2023, Adam Richins, the chief operating officer of the electric utility Idaho Power, sat down in a black leather wingback chair at Paddy’s Bar & Grill in downtown Portland to swap horror stories with other Northwest leaders in the industry on a niche podcast called the Public Power Underground.

One of Richins’ doozies involved Irene Gilbert.

Richins at the time was in year 16 of trying to build a 300-mile transmission line through eastern Oregon, known as the Boardman to Hemingway line, or B2H for short. It is the crucible of Oregon’s energy growth, the single piece of infrastructure that utilities and renewable advocates are most eager to see built. It would connect Idaho green energy suppliers with Oregon data centers that demand loads of electricity.

“Anybody want to guess?” Richins asked his fellow power execs at one point during the show. “State process application. How many pages?”

“10,000,” one offered.

He shook his head, raised his thumb upward. Higher. And higher still.

“It was close to 20,000 pages,” Richins told them.

By the time the executive finished his tale of environmental reviews and land use certificates, he joked that he had tears running from his eyes.

“But then, guess what happens?” Richins said. “We got sued.”

By Gilbert.

Gilbert’s fight against B2H has been her biggest yet. Slicing through 300 miles of land Gilbert desperately wants to keep undisturbed, the line illustrates the stakes she and other rural Oregonians see in ridding grasslands and forests of massive new energy projects.

One of Gilbert’s “Stop B2H” allies, John Williams, owns the last remaining swath of what was once a sprawling family ranch and timber estate, just a few minutes’ drive from Gilbert’s home. Bushwhacking through wildflowers along his property line on a recent day, Williams, Gilbert and the Kreiders looked out on Twin Lake, its surface carpeted in yellow pond lilies and dotted with nesting birds. The activists worry the line will harm birds and that construction and maintenance crews driving through the transmission line corridor will carry in noxious weeds and invasive species.

Williams said Idaho Power’s proposed path, which runs through his property, has evolved over time — for the worse. “It’s lipstick on a pig,” he said, “but the original route I think made a lot less damage. It was lower in elevation. It took less timber.”

Idaho Power spokesperson Sven Berg told OPB and ProPublica the company has altered the transmission line’s path numerous times in response to public feedback and that the project is better for it.

About an hour west of Twin Lake the next day, Gilbert sat with Sam Myers, who runs a fourth-generation wheat farm that the B2H line would transect. Myers said he worries the high-voltage lines could spark wildfires or electrocute people operating farm machinery nearby. (Idaho Power says planting and harvesting crops near the B2H will still be safe but cautions farmers against using machinery taller than 15 feet underneath. The company says its equipment meets or exceeds industry standards, that this equipment is closely monitored, and that the tall, metallic structures used for lines like B2H pose less fire risk than with smaller ones.)

Myers said he’s turned down developers offering “huge amounts of money” to put solar panels on his property.

“I don’t want to change farm ground to solar,” he said he’s told them. “Is there a way we can have a coexistence?”

Gilbert’s Stop B2H coalition, with 1,000 members, raised more than $350,000 against the project. (Kreider, the group’s treasurer, said the vast majority of donations — aside from larger checks from a few landowners and two historic preservation organizations — were less than $1,000 and came from individuals in Oregon and Eastern Idaho. She said the money went mainly to legal fees.)

B2H opponents filed a total of 117 challenges to the power line project, keeping the appeals process going long after the state approved construction in 2019.

In late March, though, the opponents lost their final appeal in court. Idaho Power began construction last month.

If Richins, the utility’s COO, feels exasperated by the two decades it took to overcome complaints from Gilbert and others, Gilbert thinks mainly about the outcome for her side.

For all its delays, the state’s energy council, in practice, does not reject proposed projects. And despite the claims that she’s gumming up the state’s process with her appeals, Gilbert has never actually reversed a council decision.

“My perception is that I’m ignored,” she said.

Oregon’s Energy Law

It might seem paradoxical that Gilbert considers herself an environmentalist while standing in the way of what most environmentalists today see as progress. But her right to do so has its roots in Oregon’s storied conservation movement of the 1970s.

Portland General Electric, a leading utility, prompted a fierce public backlash when it announced construction in 1967 on the Trojan Nuclear Plant about an hour outside of Portland. To address concerns about the safety of nuclear power and radioactive waste, Oregon lawmakers created the Nuclear and Thermal Energy Council.

PGE would eventually shutter Trojan after decades of regulatory violations, forced shutdowns, construction flaws, costly repairs and constant harrying from antinuclear activist Lloyd Marbet through the state council. Marbet’s tactics also delayed PGE’s efforts to build two more plants on the Columbia River until voters passed a ballot measure in 1980, creating strict rules for nuclear power that effectively killed the industry in Oregon.

The council lived on, rebranded as the Energy Facility Siting Council to cover more than just nuclear power.

Oregon is one of only 10 states with statewide energy standards, and renewable energy developers consider its approval process one of the country’s most rigorous. Covering everything from environmental safety and wildfire risk to sites of archaeological significance , Oregon’s law requires developers to follow many of the same steps federal regulators require.

The process is supposed to take no more than a year. But the energy siting council will suspend the deadline anytime someone formally objects to a project’s approval. A protest triggers a hearing, after which an administrative judge can ask the council to reverse itself, after which the council can agree or disagree, after which anyone can file a lawsuit, after which years of litigation may begin.

Oregon’s assistant director for energy siting, Todd Cornett, said public involvement can slow projects down, but that’s what the Legislature intended. While most of the power gets consumed on the more populous west side of the state that includes Portland, he noted, the new windmills and solar arrays are generally destined for dry, windy and rural eastern Oregon.

“We want to make sure that we’re taking into consideration all of the issues and concerns that people who are going to have to live with these facilities raise in the process,” he said.

Cornett denies this process has held back renewables, noting that projects have stalled even after the council’s approval. But he also acknowledged such holdups arise because new wind and solar farms will need more transmission lines to carry their output. There aren’t enough, in part, because it’s so difficult to get new ones through Cornett’s agency.

Some Oregon progressives give a nod to the bureaucracy that once mired nuclear reactors and say it’s time to give windmills and solar panels a faster pass.

“The process back in the early ’70s was meant to be a little bit more plodding,” said Oregon Rep. Ken Helm, a Democrat from the Portland suburbs, during a House floor speech in April. “Now that we are many, many decades past that time, we’re finding that the procedures EFSC operates under are really too slow for the relatively low-risk renewable energy that we’re seeking.”

Yet lawmakers have balked at meaningful changes.

Two years ago they rejected a bill to create committees of farmers, developers, tribes and conservationists to identify places in each county for transmission lines and energy production. The bill also would have directed state agencies to streamline the renewable energy approval process.

This year, lawmakers rejected a bill to promote solar farms that coexist with cropland. Research at Oregon State University has found that the shade from solar panels increased crop yields and that, in turn, the crops can make solar panels work more efficiently by keeping the air around them cool.

With Gilbert’s long battle against B2H dragging on earlier this year, some lawmakers became galvanized. The 20 years it had taken to get the project on track was “ridiculous,” said Rep. Mark Gamba, a Portland-area Democrat who is vice chair of the House Committee on Climate, Energy and Environment.

In February, Gamba introduced legislation to overhaul the state’s approach to siting and permitting energy facilities. Among the proposed changes: a tight restriction on appeals from members of the public. The provision would require that any lawsuit challenging the state’s approval of a project be fast-tracked to the state Supreme Court.

“So the NIMBYs will only get one bite at the apple,” Gamba said, using the acronym for “not in my backyard” that refers to people considered reflexively opposed to development near them.

The Legislature was coming after the gadflies like Gilbert.

An Overachiever for the Underdog

When members of the Stop B2H coalition gather in Gilbert’s living room, a computerized display of properties in the path of the project sits on a chair just beneath a portrait of a Native American man in a headdress of fur and bison horns. One of Gilbert’s brothers made the canvas from the hide of an elk he shot, and another painted it.

Both brothers died of Hungtington’s disease, a genetic disorder that began to severely debilitate them during their 30s. Gilbert, who had the same likelihood of inheriting the disease but did not, said losing them turned her into an overachiever who always wanted to fight for the underdog.

“I think I kind of try to compensate for what they weren’t able to do,” she said.

Fights against energy and transmission projects have been her mainstay for more than a decade. She said she sometimes awakens in the middle of the night, struck by an idea about a rule or statute that might be of use.

“Most of the people in Stop B2H believe that we need more energy. And I agree, we need more energy. But we cannot provide the energy needs of this country or this state by taking all of the farmland,” Gilbert said. “There’s a point where we aren’t going to have the land needed to produce food.”

When Gilbert heard about Gamba’s bill to upend her main means of objecting, she did not panic. She did what she has always done. She spoke up.

On a recent May afternoon in Salem, Gilbert sat on a window bench outside a Capitol hearing room where she’d testified against Gamba’s bill.

“I remember you!” exclaimed Gilbert’s state representative, Republican Bobby Levy. “You’re one of the smartest people. You do your research.”

Levy said she was working to oppose the bill.

Gamba in the end was disappointed with what the Legislature was able to pass. After setting out to overhaul Oregon’s energy siting bureaucracy, he said the scaled-back legislation only “dabbled around the edges.” It might shave 10% off approval times for green energy, he said.

What did survive was Gamba’s effort to move lawsuits filed by people like Gilbert directly to the Oregon Supreme Court. Gilbert was dismayed to lose the chance to build a case over time. But it won’t stop her.

Now that the Boardman to Hemingway line is actually getting built, Gilbert said, it will bring a rash of new applications from people seeking to build wind and solar farms along the power line’s route. Gilbert will be standing by to file challenges.

“I figure I’m going to be really busy,” she said.