Wind power plan stirs controversy

VIRGINIA CITY -- The first wind energy project proposed for the Virginia City area is stirring up more than just wind.

Several residents are expressing concern about the visual impact that as many as 70 of three-bladed turbines would have on the 1860s-era tourist destination that has been designated a National Historic District.

Ron Reno told the Silver City Town Board he is not organizing opposition but he doesn't like Great Basin Wind's new Comstock project along Virginia Range ridgelines from Geiger Summit to McClellan Peak, just east of Washoe Valley and west of Virginia City.

"It's important that people have information about things of this magnitude with enough time to decide if it is a good thing or not," he told the Reno Gazette-Journal. "Wind power generation is a wonderful thing, but not in the Comstock Historic District."

If placed on the ridgelines as the company proposes, the wind turbines would be "highly visible" from Virginia City, Gold Hill and American Flat, Reno said.

Most of the wind turbine towers would be installed within the National Historic District and about half would in the Comstock Historic District.

Ken Nelson, real estate specialist with the Bureau of Land Management's Carson City field office, said the BLM must file a notice of intent and contract for an environmental impact study of noise, radar, telecommunications, watershed and other elements the project could impact that could take 18 to 24 months.

Nelson said BLM would schedule public meetings at the end of this year or early in 2009.

"We need to know what the public believes are issues before we can move to the next step of the process," Nelson said. "We have a process, and as far as any actual construction could even begin, it would be sometime in 2010 at the earliest."