June 30, 2005

FPL steals Enxco's wind

Researchers from Eltra (one of Denmark's two grid managers) recently found that turbines can decrease the productivity of downwind turbines as far as 5 km (3.1 km) away, thus limiting how much energy can be extracted in large facilities.

Now comes news from Dickey County in North Dakota that landowners who had signed up for exploitation by Enxco are complaining that FPL Energy has swooped in next door and may make the Enxco-committed land less windy. Hah.

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For the good of the Sultan

A comment added to Sam Smith's article, "Eminent domain means the eminent get the domain":

In "Beds in the East," the third novel of Anthony Burgess's Malayan trilogy, a bequest of $20,000 for the public good is used by the Sultan to buy a new Cadillac: "The highest good is the Sultan's good."

Just so, the Supreme Court has now clearly defined "public use" as private use: The highest good is the developer's good.

The whole Bill of Rights codifies protection of the few from the power of the many and the mighty. But the government now is openly a frontman for business, clearing the way of little people and constructing the legal charade for capitalist pillaging and clearance of the inconvenient. It is ironic that it was the most right-wing members of the Court who opposed this establishment of "lo stato corporativo," i.e., fascism.

As Sam points out about the many great urban development failures and follies, thinking of the "highest good" is easily abused and compensation is rarely "just." Without regard for dissent and opposition, a developer's dream becomes part of that mythical city on a hill, glittering in all its delusional glory (and promise of cash flow).

Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe bulldozes whole neighborhoods where the poor might support his opponents. George Bush in the U.S. dismisses his war's destruction of individuals and families as noble sacrifice for "a cause greater than themselves." Environmentalists, flattered by official attention and drunk with corporate partnerships, fight against the regulations and local opposition they themselves once championed but now find in the way of their dream of giant wind turbines (that can't even be shown to work) on every wild mountain ridge and rural open space. And liberals hail the right of the state to bulldoze homes that stand in the way of what they deem progress: waterfront condos for the wealthy few as a solution to the economic troubles of the many. Profits -- not homes -- as "public use."

Business wants it, so we must need it. As Billy Graham once said, there's nothing more inspiring to the poor heathen than driving through their neighborhoods in a big white Cadillac. The highest good is the Sultan's good.

June 27, 2005

"Hemp for Victory"

"On June 23, 2005, Congressman [Ron] Paul [R-TX] introduced HR 3037, the Industrial Hemp Farming Act. The bill requires the federal government to respect state laws (already five of them) allowing the growing of industrial hemp. Immediately, Congressmen Peter Stark (D-CA) and Jim McDermott (D-WA) co-sponsored the legislation. ...

"Please urge your members of Congress to support HR 3037. Free our farmers and you, the consumers, to move toward a more sustainable economy.

"Visit woodconsumption.org, votehemp.org and NAIHC.org for more information."

[Also see "Hemp."]

June 22, 2005

"Bush Administration Increasingly Isolated on Venezuela"

Economist Mark Weisbrot describes the absurd stand of the Bush administration against Venezuela's democracy:
For anyone who has been to Venezuela, it's easy to see why no one wants to take Washington's side in this grievance. A few weeks ago I passed by a 22-story government building in downtown Caracas, and saw about 200 students blocking the exits in a protest against the government. Trapped inside past quitting time were thousands of employees, including several cabinet-level ministers. A few police stood by calmly, not interfering. This went on for hours. There were no injuries or arrests. I thought of what would happen if people tried this in Washington D.C. There would be tear gas, pepper spray, heads cracked, and mass arrests. Some would get felony charges. The protest would be over in 10 minutes.
Of course, the real problem the Bush pirates have with the source of a third of our oil is:
The Venezuelan economy is booming, millions of poor people have access to health care and subsidized food for the first time, and President Chavez' approval ratings have soared to more than 70 percent -- according to opposition pollsters."
Remember, if you don't want your gas money to go to petty tyrants in the middle east or texas, if you would rather have it go to the greater good of our neighbors, buy from Citgo, which is -- for now -- a Venezuelan company.

June 21, 2005

The myths of wind power ...

An article in the June 10 Daily Hampshire Gazette (Northampton, Mass.) describes the controversy of industrial wind facilities, using a tour of the Searsburg, Vt., turbines led by Enxco representative Martha Staskus as the framework. Here are a couple of comments about some things Staskus said.
One of the myths about wind power, says Staskus, is that it's unreliable. On the contrary, she says, the turbines at Searsburg are on line over 90 percent of the time and need little maintenance or oversight. "It's a very efficient operation," she says.
Being "on line," or available, is a lot different than generating power. (And even during this tour, 2 of the 11 turbines were down for repairs, and 1 was turned off for the safety of the visitors.) Searsburg's turbines average about 89% availability but they generate electricity -- even the slightest trickle -- just over 60% of the time, according to a report by the Electric Power Research Institute.

In addition, Searsburg's output has decreased every year since beginning operation. It was down to 20.4% of its capacity in 2003, producing less than 11,000 MW-h, an average generation rate of 1.25 MW. The average residential customer of Green Mountain Power uses 7.5 MW-h annually (an average load of 0.85 KW), so Searsburg's output is equivalent to the use of less than 1,500 "homes." But two-thirds of the time, because the generation rate falls off sharply below the ideal wind speed, output is much less, and almost 40% -- two-fifths -- of the time it is zero. That is, they are very rarely providing power for any homes, much less the nonresidential needs of the grid. Further, when the wind picks up, for example, at night, is not necessarily when people need extra electricity.
But Staskus cites the most important benefit of wind: clean power. Searsburg produces enough electricity to light 2,000 homes annually, and in doing so displaces about 60 tons of sulfur dioxide and 12,000 tons of carbon dioxide that would otherwise be emitted by fossil-fuel plants, according to statistics provided by enXco.
In Vermont, the emissions argument is especially weak, because more than two-thirds of our electricity is emissions free (hydro and nuclear -- the latter, however, with its own serious problems) and none is from coal, the main cause of acid rain. According to the U.S. Energy Information Agency, Vermont's annual emissions from electricity production in 2002 were 17,000 tons of CO2, 141,000 tons of NOx, and no SO2 at all. Searsburg's output is equivalent to 0.2% of Vermont's electricity consumption. So, pretending that 1 MW of wind power displaces 1 MW of nonwind power, that means Searsburg "saves" 282 tons of NOx (and no SO2) and 34 tons of CO2. According to the EPA, that's equivalent to the CO2 emissions of 2 cars. The U.S. as a whole emitted over 6 billion tons of CO2 in 2002.

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June 20, 2005

Migrating birds forced to lengthen migration to avoid wind turbines

New Scientist has reported the results of a recently published study of a goose and a duck species flying in the area of the wind facility off shore from Nysted, Denmark. The results show that almost all of them avoid the turbines. The industry and their apologists have naturally leapt on it as vindication, but here are some qualifying remarks from the paper (Desholm & Kahlert, Avian collision risk at offshore wind farm, Biology Letters, early online publication, 2005).
"... data collection was conducted only in calm winds (less than 10 m/s) and no-precipitation situations."
Considering that the 2.3-MW Bonus turbines don't start turning until the wind is 6 m/s, how much of the time were they actually turning? It is much easier to avoid a large blade that is still than one whose tip is moving at 164 mph (82.4-m rotor diameter at 17 rpm).
"... data collected during twilight were excluded from the analysis."
Twilight is a particularly confusing time for assessing visual cues. The stated reason for excluding it is "to compare situations with good and poor visibility only," but at night the turbines are clearly lit and this comparison could be done without throwing out the twilight data, which might be crucial to an honest assessment of the facility's impact on the birds.
"During the initial operation, frequent visits of maintenance vessels may have influenced the avian avoidance response to the sweeping turbines in an uncertain way. Before solid conclusions can be reached, complementary studies at other sites are needed to confirm these findings, to include possible habituation behaviour over the years to come, and to cover other focal species such as divers (Gavia sp.) and common scoter (Melanitta nigra)."
This study was done in "autumn" of 2003 (the paper is not more specific and does not even specify how many days and nights of observation are included). But the facility was not completed until the end of November and began to generate electricity in December (except for 10 of the 72 turbines, which had begun operation in July and for all we know may have been among the 12 that were out of range of this study). It seems likely that the facility was not fully active during the study.

The researchers compare their results with an earlier study of the same area before construction began, but describing the lower percentage of birds flying through the turbine array as due to "operation" rather than construction seems quite inaccurate.

In addition, as countries desperate to salvage their misguided commitments to large-scale wind power look to build more of them off shore, the cumulative effect of facility after facility that must be dodged must be considered.

Also, I was unable to find any data on the actual output from the Nysted facility (let alone how often it corresponded to an actual need on the grid), which is central to the question of whether it is worth even the slightest risk to birds (and marine mammals -- see the recent story about dead baby seals at the Scroby Sands wind facility off the U.K. shore), not to mention the very high cost not only of manufacture and construction but also of maintenance and integration in the grid.

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June 16, 2005

Adopt a megacorporation

An opinion piece in today's Rutland (Vt.) Herald by Jeff Wolfe of Global Resource Options boasts that General Electric, Goldman-Sachs, and British Petroleum now characterize the players in renewable energy, particularly large-scale wind. He then makes a plea that they badly need our money to succeed. Shouldn't we be demanding money from them?

((((( )))))

On the opening of the 39 turbines at Cefn Croes (originally an Enron project), developer Falck Renewables of Italy says the visual impact is minimal. Scroll down to the June 10 post, The destruction of Cefn Croes, to see the decimation and intrusion that they won't acknowledge.

The developer also "estimates" that the facility will save 4 million tonnes of CO2 emissions over its 25-year lifetime. That's 160,000 tonnes each year, 0.1% of the U.K.'s total. You'd think you'd get a bit more for £50 million and the wreckage of a landscape. And that estimate is quite inflated, based on a very high capacity factor and an assumption that only coal burning would be displaced. Wind power is just as likely to displace easily dispatchable hydropower, and frequent ramping up and down of coal plants in response to the wind actually increases their emissions. Above all it ignores the likelihood that current production will itself be made cleaner in coming years.

In fact, £50 million could be much more effectively spent in that cleaning effort, which would bring a real decrease in emissions -- without violating another landscape.

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