This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Oregon Public Broadcasting. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.
Reporting Highlights
- “No” to Nukes: Oregon liberals, opposed to nuclear power in the 1970s, created a complex process for getting new energy projects approved.
- New Energy Woes: The onerous process is now being used to stall wind and solar projects, and one 76-year-old has filed more challenges to green energy proposals than anyone in the state.
- Failure to Act: Lawmakers have killed or weakened bills to modernize Oregon’s slow approval process, which is one factor critics blame for Oregon’s dismal green energy growth.
These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
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.
“