By Samuel Strait, Reporter at Large – October 5, 2021 Seems like now the Harbor Commission has a solar installation limping along in the harbor, every crack pot energy idea is fair game to consider rather than a functioning harbor and its facilities. With hundreds of millions of dollars in past due deferred maintenance hanging over its head, dredging issues, and substantial debt, the harbor's latest "brain fart" is to plunge into off shore wind farms. How lovely. Most folks would assume that went by the way side with Don Quixote's epic failure, tilting at windmills. Apparently the local harbor commission is unaware of the colossal failure of a land based wind farm just a few miles up the coast. Like most liberal/progressive "good Ideas" very seldom is the likelihood of it being cost effective nor feasible before expending tax dollars to "investigate" the possibilities nor learn from past attempts at similar projects. It normally takes the route of willy nilly spending, without any consideration of whether it benefits anyone until all that is left is the broken remnants of a field of rusting, broken down wind generators. And that project was not twenty five miles off the coast in the primordial soup of the Pacific Ocean. True there are wind farms that produce some electricity. In the United States it represents a minuscule percentage of all power produced and occupies a great deal of arable land. They have been found to be harmful to some birds, and are considered a visual blight. In the Ocean they represent an obstruction to navigation. All that is well and good, but maintenance is the biggest issue, particularly in an ocean setting. Of course none of that seems to have hindered the Harbor Commission's Brian Stone and Wes White into deluding themselves that it was something to be considered. As was pointed out earlier in this piece, it is not as if the harbor commission does not have more pressing issues to solve, let alone have millions of dollars to spend on wind farms. Now that a large collection of government alphabet soup agencies and the natural drifting of non profits towards a collective of wasteful spending, what more can the liberal/progressive mind set orgasm over. Insufficient electrical distribution network costing billions to upgrade, requirements the harbor would need to upgrade to service the wind farm, and the wind farm itself, a Governor Newsom "wet dream". Billions of dollars in new spending, and a plethora of "new" jobs is the promise. "Someone" else will come along with the cash to fund the whole thing. It won't cost a single penny for the local population. What could possibly go wrong? As with most things that sound too good to be true, the Harbor Commission's Brian Stone is a wide eyed dreamer. Along with his compatriot, Wes White, rational minds are not in charge at the harbor. Perhaps balancing the budget, fixing a few of the many maintenance issues and a bit of dredging should come before any consideration of offshore Quixote style windmills.