Inflicting heavy fines on developers of a project billed as supplying clean, renewable energy, a federal jury has awarded a couple in southwest Georgia $135.5 million after runoff from “Lumpkin Solar” severely polluted waters and soils on their rural property.

According to a lawsuit filed by Shaun and Amie Harris, Lumpkin Solar’s developers – after clearing about 1,000 acres of timberland, farmland, and land previously used for hunting and fishing – failed to install adequate measures for erosion and sediment control.

“The result is what one would expect – when it rained, pollution poured downhill and downstream onto the neighbors’ property, inundating wetlands with silt and sediment, and turning a 21-acre trophy fishing lake into a mud hole,” said James E. Butler, the couple’s attorney, in a statement.

The companies slapped with stiff fines are Nashville, Tenn.-based Silicon Ranch Corp. and its contractor IEA Inc…

You would think that with all the uproar over whale deaths, NOAA and the offshore wind industry would be more careful about harassing huge numbers of marine mammals. On the contrary, NOAA’s latest proposal sets a new record for needless cruelty.

NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) is taking comments on an outrageously destructive harassment proposal from Invenergy Wind off the coast of New Jersey, where whale deaths have been greatest. Here is the proposal: https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/action/incidental-take-authorization-invenergy-wind-offshore-llcs-site-characterization-surveys-new

It is called a “site characterization survey,” and it does include a new offshore wind development site that Invenergy picked up last year with a whopping bid of $645 million. That apparently buys a lot of Federal cooperation because this is nothing like a site survey.

You see, the site is a mere 131 square miles, while the proposed sonar blasting survey area is over 6,000 square miles. In…