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Windmills and unicorns in San Luis Obispo County

November 25, 2025

OPINION by MANDY DAVIS

We live in a place that is pristine, beautiful beyond compare and one might even say is magical. A place where rocky headlands meet the sea in turbulent majesty, where rolling golden hills become verdant and poppy-filled in spring and where the coastal redwoods create places so magical that one would expect to come across a unicorn or maybe a wood gnome or two peeking from behind the fairy rings and lush ferns. San Luis Obispo County is a place to be cherished and protected… a place unlike any other

We all love our home and it’s magic. It elicits a kind of creativity we all appreciate, except when it comes to the folks we expect to protect it and ensure its future is bright and filled with promise. Magical thinking and “creative communication’ about reality (most of us just call it lying) should not and cannot be tolerated. We all love the concept of unicorns, but to have a public servant embrace one instead of the reality of the real natural beauty we are stewards of is not only dangerous but destructive.

The unicorn I speak of is the offshore wind project, one that many of our state politicians and SLO County Supervisor Bruce Gibson locally embrace. It’s shiny and sparkly, with shimmering rainbow hues created by a greedy and manipulating industry and painted as such with promises of “green, reliable, affordable and world saving”. but after all, let’s face it folks, it is just a fantasy proffered to a public desperate for unicorns in a sometimes dark and unpleasant world story…a fairy tale,

It’s understandable that folks want to embrace the fairy tale…but let’s get real, The only magic we need to embrace is the one that already exists here, our pristine oceans, our beautiful coastal communities and our lovely quaint harbors. To do otherwise in favor of an illusion deftly created for public consumption would be its own form of delusional insanity.

To lie (remember creative communication?) to convince a trusting public that the unicorn is real;  that his own brand of magical thinking is beneficial to our lives, is not just delusional it is blindly self serving and destructive to everyone’s lives here on the Central Coast…and this is precisely what Bruce Gibson has done for years.

Case in point, recently in a NCAC meeting county supervisor Bruce Gibson told the participants that the offshore wind industrial port project(s) on the central coast were “a done deal’. In what reality is he living when he decides that an industrial port project is a “done deal” when the Port San Luis port commissioners haven’t even decided to accept a grant from the state meant to convince them to “mature” the project…an attempt by the state to push a project that is vastly opposed by a knowing local public?

It is time that Bruce awakens from his little fantasy and quits trying to manipulate the public in an untenable abuse of power. To lie to the public may be common in the world of politics and power brokering, but it is not acceptable to those of us whose lives he impacts.

It’s time to recognize that floating offshore wind is a boondoggle…a fairy tale of the most destructive and dark kind. It’s time we demand our public servants (after al, that’s what politicians are) listen to their constituents, act ethically and respect our right to not be lied to..It’s time that everyone realize the destructive potential of believing the offshore wind fairy tale and stop the industrialization of our oceans and coastline now.

It’s time we wake up and write a new, healthy chapter in the real fairy tale that is our beautiful Central Coast.

Mandy Davis is the president of REACT Alliance and a Morro Bay resident. REACT Alliance is a local organization established to educate and inform the public about the issues involved with offshore wind.

 


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Until we have fusion generators, nuclear remains the cleanest, safest, most environmentally sensitive, most energy dense power source we have. We are going to need dozens of nuclear plants in the immediate future to meet the needs of AI, electric vehicles, electric cooking devices, cybercurrency and all the rest of the stuff the millennials yearn for but don’t know or care where the power comes from to run them.


46

Thanks to the wholesale pursuit of the newest shiny object in the collective- AI and data centers, a lot of interest in the Dr .Seuss Memorial offshore wind farm has waned, probably permanently.

After the AI craze has come and gone- leaving economic disaster in its wake- we will be too broke to ever be able to pursue the luxury – fantasy of rows of floating windmills.

…. Just lookin’ on the bright side!


21

Low-IQ tree hugging hippies turned “green” scam advocates are beyond hypocrital:


Climate expendables? Whale deaths blamed on offshore wind farms

by WorldTribune Staff, January 30, 2023


Oceanic Administration’s Fisheries Expert Raised Red Flags About Offshore Turbines

The Epoch Times, March 3, 2023


EXCLUSIVE: Federal Regulator Acknowledges Danger To Wildlife Caused By Offshore Wind Farms

The Daily Caller, March 26, 2023


These few aforementioned published articles are but a few of the many I have retained off-line.


THE GREEN SCAM IS DEAD.


Thank you 47 for saving MY/OUR tax dollars.


Bruce Gibson is an evil, self-serving LOSER that must NEVER hold public office again.


Yes, I will say it to his face.


American/Californian Patriot #Hispanics4Trump, #Hispanics4TRUERepublicans and the Rule of Law. ⚖️


POTUS DJT #45-47


Winning!


40

There are much more effective and environmentally sound ways to produce energy that are actually green. This very costly BS project is also extremely environmentally destructive. What it would do to our coastline alone is beyond the pale. We are in serious need of evolving our power sources away from fossil fuels ASAP, but this ridiculous plan will only enrich an actual oil company whilst destroying what is our sacred duty to protect.


I keep harping on the Carrizo Plains solar installation, because that has proven itself both in power provided and as an actual environmentally friendly project. All species continue to thrive in its presence. No project of that kind would need to destroy our quaint little harbors and horizons in favor of an industrial nightmare.


There are much more effective wind configurations as well. Much more productive, much smaller, with much wider operational parameters, and onshore without being unsightly. The only thing that the “offshore wind” debacle had going in its favor was the amount of money that it would have put in the pockets of those who were promoting and then building and then cleaning up after it. All paid for by us. No thank you.


Anyone who is still insisting we need this particularly faux “green” BS needs to look into what the people on the east coast are dealing with regarding their much smaller installations that are a bona fide ongoing nightmare.


39

The Topaz plant owned by PG&E, is, at best, crap.


Advertised as a 550MW generator, it produced the most power in 2018….at just 1.3MW.


SP Global dropped the Berkshire-Hathaway holdings on Topaz, to junk status.


Failed “green energy” projects, are the main reason your energy bills are so high.


9

PG&E continues to be a dumpster fire that burns, maims and kills Californians via everything they touch turning to feces.


We better hope *Diablo Canyon (NUCLEAR POWER PLANT) is better maintained than nearly every other project they slap their name on.


*Diablo means DEVIL in Spanish. OH SHEET!


3

Where can you find anything on those two solar plants in Cal Valley, I’ve looked and haven’t found a thing on them, but I do know from people that farm and ranch around there about grass fires quite often at those plants.


5

I think China is building offshore wind farms and will soon corner the market on the leading technology to do so if we sideline our own efforts.


https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20251006-the-typhoon-proof-wind-farms-powering-chinas-coast


https://globalenergymonitor.org/report/chinas-solar-and-onshore-wind-capacity-reaches-new-heights-while-offshore-wind-shows-promise/


And I could provide many more stories of a similar vein.


-47

Yawn


Eff chy-nuh


13

China opens a new coal fired power generator, every few weeks. They likely have no interest in expensive equipment that uses more energy than it produces. China does not care about green energy, they care only for their version of communism to dominate the world. Their words, not mine.


12

China’s official statistics are all garbage. Their EVs are shiny and sleek, but they’re lousy quality. Even their putative allies in Russia are seriously disenchanted with Chinese cars and trucks, with the Russians going so far as to ban certain models of Chinese trucks. The quality of much of the Chinese-made stuff is so low, there’s a term for it: tofu-dreg. The Chinese are excellent at building big flashy projects which fall apart after a short time. Thus I wouldn’t put too much stock in their announcements. They have enough on their hands trying to placate the millions of PRC citizens who purchased apartments which are uninhabitable. They’ll throw up some windmills for the PR value and then keep raping Mother Earth like they always do. And we haven’t even touched upon their human rights record…

We shouldn’t emulate them in much of anything. Peace.


2

Those blades need replacement every three years and lay to rot in the desert afterward. Meantime, birds are annihilated in this configuration. They’re not environmentally friendly, to say the least. Nice concept but any attempt at longterm use is simply unviable. China would surely implement them if this were so.


58

On the other hand, it would be hilarious to watch the greenies try to figure out who to sue, when one or more of the turbines predictably and catastrophically fails, and dumps immeasurable amounts of oil, toxins, and assorted flaming trash into the ocean, or just plain sinks to the bottom of the whale migration route.


It would be a three ring circus of tie-dye and Patchouli incense!


8