Approved in September 2008, the long-cooking but as yet unrealized Lompoc wind farm received a critical permit extension last week from the Santa Barbara County Planning Commission. The commission’s unanimous vote not only extended Acciona Energy’s soon-to-expire conditional use permit for the wind farm by two years but also effectively denied an appeal of the extension by the Bedford family, who live near the proposed wind farm site and have been unsuccessfully fighting the project since it was first proposed. The extension is actually the second the project has received in the past three years as Acciona continues to work through financial difficulties associated with the sluggish global economy.
