"a train that never arrives"

From a story in the Manawatu (New Zealand) Standard, May 22:

The hearing for the Te Apiti wind farm in September 2003 received 20 submissions -- 11 in support, 8 against and 1 which didn't specify.

A year later the number of submissions to the Te Rere Hau hearing, in December 2004, had jumped to 71 -- 27 for, 38 against and 6 not indicating either.

Five months later, the hearing into the proposed Tararua 3 extensions received 340 submissions -- 106 in support, 230 against, and 4 not indicating either way.

And from the Dominion Post (Wellington), May 25:

Turbines were beginning to lose their appeal, especially in the Ashhurst area, where residents complained of noise from the Te Apiti turbines, a rumble that sounded "like a train that never arrived", as one submission to the recent resource consent hearing described it. ...

"A lot of people think that we've done our bit for sustainable energy around here. When the second stage of the Tararua wind farm went up it looked like a fence along the top of the ranges, and the Te Apiti development changed many people's minds. They didn't know the turbines were going to be so big or that there would be so many of them." ...

One turbine was a feature; a wind farm was an eyesore.

Yet the industry insists that people only love them more after they're built!

categories:  wind power, wind energy, wind farms, wind turbines

Wendy Williams in support of the coal industry

To the editor, Providence (R.I.) Journal:

Most legislators are oblivious to the world beyond their offices until someone in their own family is affected. That indeed makes for pathetic representation, but if Lamar Alexander and John Warner got interested in the wind energy debate only because their children have property on Nantucket Sound, so be it (Wendy Williams, "TR IV tilts for windmills," May 25).

And yes, Alexander's energy votes are usually determined by the energy lobby. In the case of developing Appalachian ridge lines for wind power, however, the energy lobby is all for it. For example, the firm of Gracewell and Giuliani, which fights emission limits among other burdens to their clients, is working on behalf of a giant wind facility proposed for Highland County, Virginia. There are two obvious reasons: Wind is turning out to be an attractive tax shelter, and while people think that wind turbines are cleaning the air the coal plants can go on polluting as much as ever.

Williams makes much of Knoxville and Memphis being the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America's top two "asthma capitals." Besides looking at the rate and severity of asthma, the ranking also considers pollen levels, public smoking laws, inhaler laws in schools, and the rates of poverty and lack of health insurance. General air quality is but one factor. As the American Lung Association's annual "State of the Air" report shows, Memphis and Knoxville do have pollution problems -- like most big cities -- but they are nowhere near the worst.

Williams also mocks Alexander's proposed funding of "clean coal" as a corporate give-away. She defends the corporate give-aways for wind power as relatively small, ignoring how much the 1.9-cents per kilowatt adds up over the planned 20-year life of a wind turbine as well as other benefits, such as accelerated depreciation and RPS schemes to force the purchase of wind-generated power and create a secondary market in green "credits."

Meanwhile, the main source of our electricity, coal, will continue to burn just as before (and Williams ignores the fact that most of our emissions come from other uses of energy, such as transport). Despite Williams' mockery, cleaning it up can make a real difference.

Scrubbers installed (against the owner's will) at the 1600-MW coal-fired power plant in Mt. Storm, West Virginia, remove the sulfur and nitrogen oxides and most of the mercury from its smokestacks. Once one of the dirtiest plants in the nation, Mt. Storm is now one of the cleanest.

An article in the New York Times business section May 22 described the single integrated coal gasification combined cycle plant in the U.S., owned by Tampa Electric in Florida. In gasifying the coal before burning it, 95% of the sulfur and mercury, and most of the nitrogen, is removed -- at a tenth of the cost of smokestack scrubbing -- and carbon can be captured as well. In addition, the plant generates 15% more energy from the coal and uses 40% less water than traditional plants.

Mining the coal to fire such plants of course remains a serious issue. Unfortunately, building giant wind turbines -- whose output is unpredictably variable -- is not going to reduce, much less end, the use of coal. If Williams is concerned about air quality, if Teddy Roosevelt IV is worried about the arctic ice cap melting, they should put their efforts into cleaning up the energy sources we use now and will be using well into the future.

Resigning oneself to, even to the point of advocating, "feel-good" wind turbines that won't actually change anything -- yet create many problems of their own -- is an environmental cop-out.

categories:  wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism

Polly Toynbee on the despair behind embracing the wind

To the editor, the Guardian:

It's amusing to note that Toynbee calls it heroic to stand against the apparent popularity of nuclear power, but excoriates opponents of industrial wind power (not the 17th-century models!) by citing their apparent popularity.

She ably sees through the nuclear industry's propaganda, but sadly not that of the wind industry.

categories:  wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism

Unaccountable

The New York Times today writes about the continued bullying of Latin America by the U.S., this time in trying to get the Organization of American States (OAS) to set up a committee for monitoring the "quality" of democracy in the different member countries. As the price of supporting the new secretary general José Miguel Insulza, the U.S. forced him to stand with Condoleezza ("revenge of the sith") Rice last month and state, "The elected governments that do not govern democratically should be held accountable by the O.A.S."

Now Rice is going around calling it Insulza's plan to attack Venezuela's government. Why does the U.S. hate Venezuela's president Hugo Chavez so much? Because he is popular. He rejects the banana republic assumptions of U.S. dominance in the region and has turned Venezuela's oil wealth to making life better for all Venezuelans rather than only a few.

As far as "elected governments that do not govern democratically," the glaring example is the U.S. itself. What is fight about the filibuster, i.e., the right of the minority to demand a larger majority than 51% for controversial votes, than a desire to remove perhaps the last barrier to absolute one-party rule?

Embrace the Revolution

"Embrace the Revolution" is the name of the British Wind Energy Association's government-sponsored campaign to convice people that they really do like giant wind turbines as much as investors do. Calling these ineffective but hugely intrusive industrial machines "revolutionary" is like saying that war is peace, submission is freedom.

One of their tactics has been a continuous stream of surveys showing that two-thirds to three-fifths of the public want lots of giant wind turbines all over the U.K. They say this even as every single proposed facility faces strong and broad-based opposition. The embracers are obviously asking the wrong people (or by design the right people, for their purpose).

As BWEA's head of communications Alison Hill told an international meeting in London last November, "Most people don't understand climate change and they don't understand wind turbines."

And that is clearly all that their surveys show. Rather than address that shortcoming, the BWEA and its dupes are only trying to exploit it.

categories:  wind power, wind energy

Incredible

"People are dead because of what this son of a bitch said. How could he be credible now?" --Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita.

I couldn't have said it better myself. Except there's many more than one such "son of a bitch" in the gang of pirates we're stuck with instead of a government. Too bad there's no other group to rally behind. Maybe we should ask George Galloway, late of the U.K.'s Labour Party, to come over and start a real opposition.

Wind advocacy rather weak

The Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE) issued an amusingly inept response to Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander's Environmentally Responsible Wind Power Act of 2005.

I agree with them about the "siren song" of nuclear power, and I am glad to read that Alexander has worked with them to protect the Smoky Mountains and pursue cleaner use of coal.

While they criticize him for listening to energy lobbyists more often than good sense in supporting the current energy bill, however, they also criticize him for trying to insert this bit of good sense against the wishes of energy lobbyists.

What are their answers to Alexander's charges against the wind energy industry?

1. A blindfolded person can tell the difference between the noise of a freight train and that of a wind turbine facility.
2. Thousands of giant wind turbines will not scar the landscape as much as mountaintop-removal coal mining.

That is not to say, of course, that wind turbines are not very noisy or do not scar the landscape. And just as we will still have freight trains, we will also still have coal mining to the same extent whether we build a hundred thousand wind turbines or none.

SACE correctly recognizes the seriousness of our energy issues, including reducing pollution and preserving wild places. But they forget to show how industrial wind power helps in tackling these issues. In fact, they can't. Giant industrial wind facilities are scarring our landscapes and ruining the lives of their neighbors. They are destroying wild places and the lives of animals on the ground and in the air. And they are not giving us anything in return.

categories:  wind power, wind energy, wind farms, wind turbines, environment, environmentalism