Feds approve scaled-down Idaho wind farm near historic Japanese American incarceration site

TWIN FALLS, Idaho (AP) — The federal government on Friday approved a scaled-down wind farm in Idaho over local opposition, including from groups concerned about its proximity to a historic site where Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II.

The Bureau of Land Management signed off on a final plan for the Lava Ridge Wind Project northeast of Twin Falls that decreases the number of wind turbines to 241 from 400 and imposes a maximum height of 660 feet (201 meters). The agency said the area “disturbed” by the project has been reduced by half from the initial proposal, with 992 acres (401 hectares) disturbed within a 38,535-acre (15,594-hectare) area.

The agency said the project could power up to 500,000 homes and that its approval “reflects a careful balance of clean energy development with the protection of natural, cultural, and socioeconomic resources on this historically significant landscape.”

Some groups have expressed concern over the high desert site’s potential impacts on the Minidoka National Historic Site, where thousands of Japanese Americans were imprisoned during World War II.

Friends of Minidoka, a group that works to preserve the site and educate about its history, said it was reviewing the decision but that it remained disappointed by a project it views as harming the area’s “sacredness.”

“Minidoka National Historic Site holds deep significance to both the nation as a whole and to the Japanese American community about the lessons of a gross violation of constitutional rights on a group of American citizens,” Robyn Achilles, the group’s executive director, said in an email.

Under the final version of the project, the closest turbine to the historic site would be 9 miles (14 kilometers) away.

Two months after the Japan’s Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. Roughly 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were taken from their homes and incarcerated in camps as a potential threat against the U.S. Many were elderly, disabled, children or infants.

Idaho Attorney General Raul Labrador has also opposed the wind project. In a Friday press release, he denounced the federal government for moving ahead with it “regardless of the damage to Idaho farms, ranches, rural communities, agricultural aviation, water supplies, wildlife, and historical sites.”

The Bureau of Land Management said it spent hundreds of hours speaking with Japanese American community members, as well as Native American leaders, ranchers and other local agencies. According to the agency, the final project reduced potential impacts to sage grouse, wildlife migration routes, a nearby airport, public land ranchers and other areas of cultural importance.

Under the Biden administration, the Interior Department has approved 43 renewable energy projects on public lands, the Bureau of Land Management said. The administration’s goal is to permit on public lands 25 gigawatts of renewable energy — enough to power roughly 12 million homes — by 2025, including from wind and solar projects.