Energy

A rancher from birth, Stacy Davies came to Eastern Oregon for the wide-open spaces and solitude. Davies, who runs the 200,000-acre plus Roaring Springs Ranch near Burns, said he was essentially driven from his native Utah by oil and gas development on the east side of the state. The boom economy fractured the long-standing farming and ranching community, even as it created lucrative jobs.
Davies, now 43, had no interest in working in the industry, so he put the oil derricks in his rearview mirror and headed west to Harney County, home of Burns and Steens Mountain. Now Davies worries that another kind of energy development could threaten the unspoiled expanses of eastern Oregon, the way the gas and oil industry did Utah.

It's been a tough year for renewable energy.
In May, the Bonneville Power Administration curtailed wind power producers in Oregon and Washington to protect BPA's own power sales. Just a few months later, renewable giant Iberdrola announced that it was shelving plans for a $100 million biomass-to-electricity plant in rural Lakeview that had been held up as a model of sustainability. And just last week, a Washington wind-power developer announced that it was abandoning plans for two wind farms near Steens Mountain. Against this backdrop, the cash-strapped Oregon Legislature whittled away at its most generous incentives for renewable energy development.
One of the few bright spots, though, is a technology that is more Christmas Valley than Silicon Valley, so-called biomass thermal energy, which is a fancy way of saying the good ol' practice of burning wood for heat, which after several millennia remains one of the most effective ways of warming our hands and our homes.