The news editor of Renewable Energy Access returned my query about the removal of comments (that has continued since that query) that referred readers to www.aweo.org. Here is the exchange so far.
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From: Eric Rosenbloom
Sent: Wednesday, March 02, 2005 6:14 PM
It was brought to my attention yesterday that a comment on the article at renewableenergyaccess.com/rea/news/story?id=23068 was removed. Suspecting the reason to be a reference to www.aweo.org, that person put up a new similar comment and I added one as well. This morning both were gone.
I don't understand this, as other comments cite other web sites, both pro- and anti-wind. (And please remember that many opponents, including myself, to large-scale wind power are in fact very supportive of many other renewable energy sources.) Could you please explain what happened?
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From: Jesse Broehl
Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2005 15:54:47 -0500
Eric,
We welcome spirited, opposing, anti-RE comments in our news forum but we don't welcome comments that simply refer people off-site without actually contributing to a discussion or at least summarizing their arguments. That appeared to be the case with your comments regarding "aweo.org"
Just curious, if you're against commercial wind power, what are your suggestions to our increasing energy needs? More coal, oil, nuclear, etc? Now that would be a terrifc item to post in our comment forum!
Jesse Broehl, Editor,
RenewableEnergyAccess.com News
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From: Eric Rosenbloom
Date: Fri, 04 Mar 2005 16:57:19 -0500
Fair enough. Thanks for responding. My impression of the first instance, however, was that it was simply in response to the earlier referral to 4 pro-wind sites. I notice that references to aweo.org still stand in the comments at renewableenergyaccess.com/rea/news/story?id=22907, perhaps because the second one is just such a counter-referral as the instance I wrote to you about. Yet that second referral, recommending 2 pro-wind sites, contains no discussion or summary of their arguments.
To your curiosity, the thing that seems obvious to me about commercial wind power is that it can not contribute significantly to our existing energy needs, let alone any increase. That is, I reject the premise of your question. Your goading options ("coal, oil, nuclear, etc") also appear to equate rejection of big wind power with rejection of all alternative energy sources. My interest in alternative energy is precisely what led me to research wind and discover its many shortcomings, for which rural communities and wild habitats are being nonetheless sacrificed.
~~~
Eric
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From: Jesse Broehl
Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2005 17:51:27 -0500
Eric,
I always regret following up these conversations ........ but I don't follow your position that commercial wind power doesn't contribute significantly to existing energy needs. Every MW of wind power means that amount doesn't need to be generated somewhere else, through dirty means.
One quick anecdotal example: The 420 MW proposed Cape Wind farm would displace, at full capacity, more than the entire electrical output of the fuel oil plant near buzzard's bay. You may recall that over a year ago, roughly 40,000 gallons of oil were spilled in Buzzard's Bay on their way to that power plant. I'm sure you'll pick holes in this example (the wind is intermittent, they're an "eyesore", etc) but that's a real example of wind power contributing a large amount of commercial energy in a clean fashion.
As I said, we welcome any type of comment as long as it attempts to keep people on our site and contributes in some way as either a basic comment or part of a discussion.
Have a good weekend,
Jesse Broehl, Editor,
RenewableEnergyAccess.com News
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From: Eric Rosenbloom
Date: Fri, 04 Mar 2005 21:03:51 -0500
Well, you brought up the example of Cape Wind, and the salient phrase is "at full capacity." You know that its average output will be at best a third of that, and that it will generate at or above that average level only about a third of the time. You also know that oil-fired plants are precisely the quick-response generators necessary to balance the fluctuations of wind plant on the system. Oil will still have to be shipped to Buzzard's Bay.
And as the Cape Wind proposal is still being reviewed, it is certainly not a "real example of wind power contributing a large amount of commercial energy in a clean fashion." I often note that wind advocates always talk about the future rather than what has already been achieved in Denmark, Germany, or Spain -- which is not very much.
~~Eric
categories: wind power, wind energy, wind farms, wind turbines
March 6, 2005
March 3, 2005
References to anti-wind site removed
Renewable Energy Access removed a comment to one of their news articles, apparently because it referred readers to www.aweo.org for a good presentation of the arguments against industrial wind power. It followed a comment that similarly cited four pro-industry sites. An earlier comment cited on-line articles aginst wind turbines' destruction of birds. The correspondent who noticed the removal and brought it to my attention added a new comment recommending aweo.org, and I added one as well. Both were gone the next morning. I wrote to the webmaster on Tuesday and to the news editor on Wednesday for an explanation but haven't received an answer yet. No doubt the American Wind Energy Association (awea.org) is peeved and too big an account to reject their cowardice.
March 1, 2005
Mole Chaser windmill
"The Mole Chaser Windmill takes even a gentle breeze and creates underground vibrations so intolerable, moles quickly vacate your premises ..."
"Our Natural Mole Chaser Drives Them Crazy! Our durable windmill is fun to watch, but that's only part of the story. While the 18" rustproof steel blades spin silently above ground, they rattle and vibrate relentlessly underground. Moles can't stand it and quickly move out."
If this is the effect of a tiny $20 contraption, imagine what havoc a collection of 160-ton versions can wreak. Here is an account from the Mountaineer wind facility on Backbone Mountain in West Virginia (which ridge is targeted for hundreds more turbines in West Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania).
"Our Natural Mole Chaser Drives Them Crazy! Our durable windmill is fun to watch, but that's only part of the story. While the 18" rustproof steel blades spin silently above ground, they rattle and vibrate relentlessly underground. Moles can't stand it and quickly move out."
If this is the effect of a tiny $20 contraption, imagine what havoc a collection of 160-ton versions can wreak. Here is an account from the Mountaineer wind facility on Backbone Mountain in West Virginia (which ridge is targeted for hundreds more turbines in West Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania).
"I looked around me, to a place where months before had been prime country for deer, wild turkey, and yes, black bear, to see positively no sign of any of the animals about at all. This alarmed me, so I scouted in the woods that afternoon. I am accustomed to these woods, and know them and the signs of animals well. All afternoon, I found no sign, sight, or peek of any animal about.
"I did notice, in the next few months, that the animals were more abundant down here in the valley, in the farmers' fields and such. Places that they had steered away from before, they now were in, and causing trouble for man, and, in turn, getting shot. I saw more bear and bob cats in the populated areas than I had ever seen. I went up to the windmills several times to check, and it seemed that the animals had moved away from that area. There were no sight of them, no prints, no sign."
February 26, 2005
"The menaced landscape"
Here is an excerpt from Robert Macfarlane's essay in today's Guardian about the "wind rush," in which he asks, "Wind farms? You may as well take a knife to a Constable":
'Wild and open spaces, for obvious reasons, are proving most attractive to candy-grab developers, and some of the most extraordinary mountain, moor and coastal landscapes in the British Isles - unique as a Turner or a Spencer - are currently menaced with ill-thought-out development proposals.
'The debate over wind power in Britain suffers, as do so many "countryside" issues, from a crippling polarity. Both sides are guilty of this, but let me take as a relevant example Polly Toynbee, who has voiced in these pages the standard leftwing, pro-wind position.
'Those who resist the spread of wind farms, wrote Toynbee, are Tory-minded "rural nimbyists", worried about the depreciation of their properties, or peddling "sob stories" about the visual pollution of their precious views. As climate change accelerates, these people are fiddling while the world heats up. They are, she ringingly concluded, "small, selfish and short-sighted".
'Toynbee should take a trip to Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. There, the energy giant Amec is pushing to establish the world's biggest wind farm. The local community is resisting as best it can. The farm is to be built on the northern part of Mòinteach riabhach Leòdhais, the Brindled Moor of Lewis - a wind-swept, hyena-coloured expanse of bog, waterfall, cliff and scarp. The moor is one of the world's last great peat-bogs, whose ecological significance has been compared to that of the Serengeti. It is under protected status as a UN Ramsar Site, a Special Protection Area, and a Berne Convention Important Bird Area: designations that Amec would steamroll. Its biodiversity and appearance make it the centrepiece of the Hebrides' £60m-a-year tourism industry.
'The moor, in its strange, wild beauty, is also at the core of Lewis's embattled Gaelic self-identity. For centuries, the people of Lewis have worked the moor. As Finlay McLeod of the Lewis protest group has put it: "Language and even a people may go - but the land was immutable, a last and lasting bastion for human sanity and belonging. Now, this itself is seen to be under threat."
'Amec has not, of course, come to Lewis out of the greenness of its conscience. It is there for the money. It hopes, with the help of government subsidies, to make about £68m a year if the farm is built. "Farm", though, is far too homesteadish a word for what will happen if Amec gets the go-ahead. It will erect 234 turbines, each nearly 140 metres high with a blade-span of more than 80 metres. (Imagine 234 structures, each more than twice the height of Nelson's Column, and carrying a propeller with a diameter greater than the length of a Boeing 747.) The energy will be carried off the island by 210 pylons, each 26 metres high, and their adjoining overhead lines. To service the turbines, 104 miles of roads will be built, as well as nine electrical substations. Lewis, it is clear even from these bald statistics, is to be turned not into a wind farm but a wind factory.
'The Lewis development will be irreversible. Wind turbines, it is often forgotten in the organicist rhetoric of the pro-wind farmists, require anchorage. One does not simply plant them like outsize seedlings. Each turbine will be counter-sunk into 726 cubic metres of concrete. In total, 5m cubic metres of rock and 2.5m cubic metres of peat-bog will be excavated. Such statistics render ridiculous Toynbee's claim that if another renewable energy source is found "the wind-turbines can be dismantled and taken away, no harm done".
'The Lewis project is a salutary case study. It reveals that an American-Puritan error - that wild land is waste land, there to be put to industrial use - is rearing its head. Wild places, it has come to be understood, are the "uplands" of civilisation: landscapes that can renew, console, and lift us in unique ways.
'Lewis's situation also reminds us of the spiritual, aesthetic, historical and ecological values that are put at risk when extraordinary landscapes are industrially menaced. These values are harder to measure, and harder to articulate than the hard numerical wattage of the turbines. But they are, unlike the wattage, non-transferable.
'A new study by the German energy agency, the world's leading producer of wind energy, has concluded that wind farms are an inefficient tool in our desperate battle against climate change. But even if this were not the case, certain types of landscape are too valuable to be turned into outdoor power-stations. The Lewis development is only the biggest instance: one grimly thinks of the 150-turbine development in Eisken on Harris, the planned development on the Sleat peninsula on Skye, and the "interconnector" - the 50m-high pylon-line required to carry the power from the wind farms of the Scottish west coast to the southern demand centres: a knife-slash through some of Britain's wildest vistas.'
'Wild and open spaces, for obvious reasons, are proving most attractive to candy-grab developers, and some of the most extraordinary mountain, moor and coastal landscapes in the British Isles - unique as a Turner or a Spencer - are currently menaced with ill-thought-out development proposals.
'The debate over wind power in Britain suffers, as do so many "countryside" issues, from a crippling polarity. Both sides are guilty of this, but let me take as a relevant example Polly Toynbee, who has voiced in these pages the standard leftwing, pro-wind position.
'Those who resist the spread of wind farms, wrote Toynbee, are Tory-minded "rural nimbyists", worried about the depreciation of their properties, or peddling "sob stories" about the visual pollution of their precious views. As climate change accelerates, these people are fiddling while the world heats up. They are, she ringingly concluded, "small, selfish and short-sighted".
'Toynbee should take a trip to Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. There, the energy giant Amec is pushing to establish the world's biggest wind farm. The local community is resisting as best it can. The farm is to be built on the northern part of Mòinteach riabhach Leòdhais, the Brindled Moor of Lewis - a wind-swept, hyena-coloured expanse of bog, waterfall, cliff and scarp. The moor is one of the world's last great peat-bogs, whose ecological significance has been compared to that of the Serengeti. It is under protected status as a UN Ramsar Site, a Special Protection Area, and a Berne Convention Important Bird Area: designations that Amec would steamroll. Its biodiversity and appearance make it the centrepiece of the Hebrides' £60m-a-year tourism industry.
'The moor, in its strange, wild beauty, is also at the core of Lewis's embattled Gaelic self-identity. For centuries, the people of Lewis have worked the moor. As Finlay McLeod of the Lewis protest group has put it: "Language and even a people may go - but the land was immutable, a last and lasting bastion for human sanity and belonging. Now, this itself is seen to be under threat."
'Amec has not, of course, come to Lewis out of the greenness of its conscience. It is there for the money. It hopes, with the help of government subsidies, to make about £68m a year if the farm is built. "Farm", though, is far too homesteadish a word for what will happen if Amec gets the go-ahead. It will erect 234 turbines, each nearly 140 metres high with a blade-span of more than 80 metres. (Imagine 234 structures, each more than twice the height of Nelson's Column, and carrying a propeller with a diameter greater than the length of a Boeing 747.) The energy will be carried off the island by 210 pylons, each 26 metres high, and their adjoining overhead lines. To service the turbines, 104 miles of roads will be built, as well as nine electrical substations. Lewis, it is clear even from these bald statistics, is to be turned not into a wind farm but a wind factory.
'The Lewis development will be irreversible. Wind turbines, it is often forgotten in the organicist rhetoric of the pro-wind farmists, require anchorage. One does not simply plant them like outsize seedlings. Each turbine will be counter-sunk into 726 cubic metres of concrete. In total, 5m cubic metres of rock and 2.5m cubic metres of peat-bog will be excavated. Such statistics render ridiculous Toynbee's claim that if another renewable energy source is found "the wind-turbines can be dismantled and taken away, no harm done".
'The Lewis project is a salutary case study. It reveals that an American-Puritan error - that wild land is waste land, there to be put to industrial use - is rearing its head. Wild places, it has come to be understood, are the "uplands" of civilisation: landscapes that can renew, console, and lift us in unique ways.
'Lewis's situation also reminds us of the spiritual, aesthetic, historical and ecological values that are put at risk when extraordinary landscapes are industrially menaced. These values are harder to measure, and harder to articulate than the hard numerical wattage of the turbines. But they are, unlike the wattage, non-transferable.
'A new study by the German energy agency, the world's leading producer of wind energy, has concluded that wind farms are an inefficient tool in our desperate battle against climate change. But even if this were not the case, certain types of landscape are too valuable to be turned into outdoor power-stations. The Lewis development is only the biggest instance: one grimly thinks of the 150-turbine development in Eisken on Harris, the planned development on the Sleat peninsula on Skye, and the "interconnector" - the 50m-high pylon-line required to carry the power from the wind farms of the Scottish west coast to the southern demand centres: a knife-slash through some of Britain's wildest vistas.'
February 25, 2005
"Report doubts future of wind power"
The Guardian today (Saturday) reports the release yesterday of the "re-edited" German Energy Agency (DENA) study of integrating wind energy on the grid.
Despite having been utterly biased in favor of industrial wind power, the Guardian straighforwardly describes the implications of the study. They even quote Angela Kelly of Country Guardian without deprecation. And they print a commentary against the industrial depredation of the landscape that wind power represents. They also cite the U.K.'s own National Audit Office finding that wind power is the most expensive way of pursuing carbon emissions reduction.
A shift in opinion, perhaps? The "useful links" after the on-line article, however, are to the two most avid "green" supporters (Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth) and the industry trade group British Wind Energy Association. Fair and balanced, that isn't.
Despite having been utterly biased in favor of industrial wind power, the Guardian straighforwardly describes the implications of the study. They even quote Angela Kelly of Country Guardian without deprecation. And they print a commentary against the industrial depredation of the landscape that wind power represents. They also cite the U.K.'s own National Audit Office finding that wind power is the most expensive way of pursuing carbon emissions reduction.
A shift in opinion, perhaps? The "useful links" after the on-line article, however, are to the two most avid "green" supporters (Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth) and the industry trade group British Wind Energy Association. Fair and balanced, that isn't.
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