Dairyland Power Cooperative’s search for a landfill site to dump ash from its Genoa plant just keeps coming back as a hot issue.
Now, it’s even made the movies. A 30-minute documentary about Vernon County residents’ fight against the proposed landfill was recently featured at the 10th annual Wisconsin Film Festival.
The film, “Keeping the Lights On,” is by Gretta Wing Miller and Aarick Beher of Madison and documents the resistance of Harmony Township residents to the Dairyland proposed coal ash landfill project.
Surrounding the personal stories of the farmer-landowners who are directly affected, the film explores the reasons this electric utility wants to construct a waste dump and why Wisconsin continues to be dependent on burning coal to produce electricity.
The landfill issue also came up in two meetings in late March. On March 26, more than 100 residents gathered to oppose a landfill near the current Vernon County landfill outside Viroqua.
Dairyland has been talking with county officials about that site as an alternative to the proposed site in the Town of Harmony. The Harmony site served as the catalyst for the film about the issue.
About 400 people attended the Vernon Electric Cooperative (VEC) annual meeting on March 29 and voiced their concerns about updates to Dairyland’s facilities and the proposed landfill.
Two advisory votes were taken at that meeting: one that urges Dairyland to look at recycling and gasification alternatives to a landfill and a second that stated if Dairyland does not look at alternatives VEC should “renegotiate our over 40-year exclusive contract with Dairyland (to buy power).” Both motions passed with little opposition.
It should be abundantly clear to Dairyland officials that opponents to the landfill are not going to go away, are well-organized with the abilities to get publicity and swing public opinion, have done their homework and eventually could actually hurt the cooperative’s business.
While Dairyland officials have said at almost every juncture that they will consider alternatives to a landfill, they at least on the surface seem to actually remain on the same path — moving toward a landfill but just in another place in the region.
It’s time the coop officials change directions and look at some real alternatives to just dumping the ash. They undoubtedly will argue that the alternatives will take time and money to develop, and they need a short term solution to the ash storage problem. But, dumping it is a short term solution with potential long term problems.
As this writer has stated in other columns, Dairyland has done a lot of good work in the alternative energy area — such as wind farms, methane produced electricity and others. On this coal ash issue, however, it has looked like the classic, anachronistic power company, resisting a move to truly innovative, alternative methods that could make the coop a model for power companies across the country.
Let’s hope somebody at Dairyland decides to think out of the box, devote the necessary resources to an alternative to a landfill and starts working on that alternative solution as soon as possible. Maybe the next documentary could then end up being on how a Wisconsin-based power coop set an example for the country and world.
