by Tony Schick, Oregon Public Broadcasting

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Oregon Public Broadcasting. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

During the outcry against nuclear power in the 1970s, liberal Oregon lawmakers hatched a plan to slow an industry that was just getting started. They created a burdensome process that gave the public increased say over where power plants could be built, and the leading anti-nuclear activists of the day used appeal after appeal to delay proposed nuclear plants to death. It had a huge impact: Oregon’s first commercial nuclear plant, the one that spurred lawmakers into action, was also the state’s last.

What those lawmakers didn’t plan for was that 50 years later, an Oregon citizen activist would use that same bureaucracy to hinder some of the very energy projects that today’s liberals want: wind farms and the new high-voltage lines needed to support them.

They didn’t plan for Irene Gilbert.

The 76-year-old retired state employee, former gun store owner and avid elk hunter from La Grande, Oregon, is on a mission to keep turbines and transmission towers from blighting the rural landscape. She has filed more challenges to energy projects — 15 in all, including lawsuits — than anyone in the state, according to Oregon’s Department of Energy.

“I kind of have a reputation,” Gilbert said.

Renewable energy advocates treat activists like Gilbert as relentless gadflies who need to be stopped for the good of the planet.

They say Oregon’s slow process for approving energy projects, with its endless appeals, is one reason the state ranks near last in the country for green energy growth despite setting a deadline to eliminate fossil fuel use by 2040.

Democratic leaders up and down the West Coast are reckoning with liberal policies of the past that they say clash with today’s progressive agenda. In California, for example, Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed a rollback of environmental review laws to expedite the construction of affordable housing. Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek has been pushing to roll back her state’s vaunted land-use restrictions for the same reason.

But Oregon leaders have been far less aggressive in confronting the historical artifacts that critics say hold green energy back. One, the Depression-vintage federal agency that runs most of the Northwest power grid, which has set a sluggish pace for upgrades; the other, the energy siting system Oregon created long ago for nuclear power. (The federal agency says it makes financially prudent decisions about construction.)

In the past five years, the Oregon Legislature has repeatedly rejected or watered down bills to streamline permitting of energy projects. The efforts included legislation supported by renewables advocates as well as farming and land conservation groups, both of which share Gilbert’s concerns about development in rural spaces.

In response to questions from Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica, the governor’s office acknowledged “existing significant impediments” to renewable energy growth in Oregon.

Kotek is “carefully considering opportunities to streamline Oregon’s energy siting processes,” spokesperson Anca Matica said in an email, “while maintaining opportunities for community input and preventing detrimental impacts.”

In the meantime, Kotek and lawmakers let another effort to modernize the system fall through the cracks this year. A proposal to limit public appeals and speed up permitting decisions resulted in only minor changes to the process. The status quo means developers remain locked in battles with Gilbert and others for years on end.

“I figure I can lose a thousand cases,” Gilbert said. “Even if it doesn’t look like it, I have made a difference.”

Gilbert was retired from a career in state government and was running the Oregon Trail Trader gun shop with her partner in La Grande when she first heard about the Antelope Ridge wind farm. It was 2009, and only a handful of wind farms existed in the state. But an energy company suddenly wanted to erect 180 turbines across the scenic Grande Ronde River valley just outside town.

Energy infrastructure was a sore spot for Gilbert. Decades ago, she’d married into a ranching and timber family, and a chunk of the forest she owned was bulldozed for a transmission line. She blamed the line when she couldn’t get the timber to grow as she wanted.

She also had a stark memory of how quickly a business can erase a beloved part of rural Oregon. The company that owned Kinzua, the timber town where she grew up, razed it without a trace after shutting down operations in 1978.

Now that she was older, she said, she wanted to give back, and she was motivated by the idea of helping farmers and others protect their land from the government and electric companies.

“I feel like my reason for participating now is to do what I can to help these poor folks,” she said.

Gilbert became the legal research analyst for an opposition group known as Friends of the Grande Ronde Valley.

The tangle of rules governing energy siting was........

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