Low-frequency noise and vibrations from windfarms

Eleanor Tillinghast of Green Berkshires recently brought to my attention the paper from which the following excerpts are taken.

P. Styles, I. Stimpson, S. Toon, R. England, and M. Wright. Microseismic and infrasound monitoring of low frequency noise and vibrations from windfarms. Applied and Environmental Geophysics Research Group, School of Physical and Geographical Sciences, Keele University, 18 July 2005:

• Wind turbines are large vibrating cylindrical towers, strongly coupled to the ground with massive concrete foundation, through which vibrations are transmitted to the surroundings and with rotating turbine blades generating low-frequency acoustic signals which may couple acoustically into the ground. (p. 8)


• Additionally, the blade-tower interaction is a source of pulses at a low repetition rate, which contain components in the infrasound region. The local and surrounding geology, especially layering, may play an important part in determining vibration transmission. (p. 8)


• [W]ind farms do produce discernible harmonic signals which can be detected over considerable distances. (p. 44)


• When the windfarm starts to generate at low wind speeds, considerable infrasound signals can be detected at all stations out to c. 10 km. (p. 66)


• [T]he vibrations experienced on seismometers situated at considerable distances from farms propagate through the ground as high frequency Rayleigh waves and not through the air, and as such must obey the propagation modes and attenuation and absorption laws for geological materials and not air. (p. 67)


• We have clearly shown that both fixed-speed and variable-speed wind turbines generate low-frequency vibrations which are multiples of blade-passing frequencies and which can be detected ... at considerable distances (many kilometres) from wind farms on infrasound detectors and on low-frequency microphones. (p. 76)


• At present there are no current, routinely implemented vibration mitigation technological solutions which can reduce the vibration from wind turbines. (p. 90)

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

A NIMBY wind is a-blowin' my mind

David Bauman writes in yesterday's Berkshire Eagle:

The appropriate term for opposition to big ugly projects, which could benefit many but harms few, is NIMBY (not in my backyard). Our reluctance to invoke NIMBY has caused us to make laws that give legal power to frogs and roots but none to ourselves. Human's wants and needs always take a back seat to those fussy plants and animals. In generations past the plants and animals were clear-cut, slaughtered, eaten and worn. Now they have it better than ever and all they do is complain.

So it's NIMBY to act as a steward of the land against unquestioned industrial development. And it's fear of challenging said NIMBY that has made weighing the natural environment, the ecosystem that sustains us, against unquestioned industrial development a normal procedure. And, like free speech, it's apparently enough to have the right -- but to actually use it is obstructionist whining.

[He is correct to call many of the opponents of the Cape Wind project NIMBY when they support wind power elsewhere. But most opponents of industrial wind have looked seriously into it and determined that it is not worth sacrificing their or anyone else's backyard, rural landscape, or wild mountaintop for its dubious claims. These people can not therefore be called NIMBY.]

Bauman's answer is pretty much, "might [or more usually mere bluster] makes right" -- hardly a compelling alternative:

As everyone knows West Virginia is the perfect place for windmill farms because the plants and animals there are friendly, poor, a little slow and don't give a hoot 'bout much.

He thinks he's mocking those who have driven out the wind pirates, but he reveals his own contempt for not only plants and animals but also his fellow humans. And typical of the misinformed or disingenuous, he invokes oil, which has almost nothing to do with electricity. If anything, more wind power would mean more oil, because that's what often powers the quick-response plants that would be be needed to cover for wind's erratic production.

categories:  wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism

Spitting into the wind

From "Company revives Equinox wind plan," Rutland Herald, August 27, 2005:

Endless Energy has a contract in place with the Burlington Electric Department, which will purchase the entire output of the turbines when they are up and running, [Endless Energy president Harley] Lee said.

That's enough electricity to satisfy 7 percent of the entire demand in Burlington, said Patti Richards, the director of resource planning for the department.

With the cost of oil now above $65 per barrel, the economics have swung in favor of wind energy, [said Patti Richards, the director of resource planning for the Burlington Electric Department (BED)].

"Whatever amount of kilowatts we can buy (for wind power) is a savings," she said. "If this project doesn't move forward, we'll likely have to go for a rate increase."

What makes wind energy even more attractive from an economic standpoint is that renewable energy can be traded on a secondary market, Richards said, giving the electric department a buffer if oil prices were to drop.

Burlington's main power plant, although it is able to burn oil and natural gas, is primarily fuelled by wood. According to the U.S. Energy Information Agency, a grand total of 0.2% of the electricity generated in Vermont in 2002 was from oil. Even if all of it was from Burlington -- which it isn't -- oil would represent only 3.3% of BED's output.

The threat of a rate increase if people don't support the wind power facility is simply dishonest bullying. In fact, BED is more likely to be more dependent on oil if they brought in wind power, because oil-fired plants are precisely the quick-response generators necessary to deal with the wildly fluctuating input from wind turbines.

As Richards lets slip, however, the obvious economic benefit is in that market for "green credits" -- the environmental indulgences that people can buy to allow them to continue polluting. The electricity generated by wind turbines doesn't even have to be used, only generated. Since output is so erratic, it is likely to be dumped or at best exported into a larger grid where the fluctuations won't be as much of a problem. So for the prospect of raking in profits from selling not energy but meaningless credits for wind turbine production, Burlington Electric supports industrializing a southern Vermont mountaintop with virtually useless 400-foot-high wind towers. Some vision!

categories:  wind power, wind energy, wind farms

Missing the point about industrial wind

To the Editor, Manchester (Vt.) Journal:

Jane Newton, whom I have proudly supported in several elections, aptly puts the matter of industrial wind power threatening our ridgelines in context ("'Save our Ridgeline' misses the point," letter, August 26). Indeed, compared to the ravaging that Iraqis have endured for decades, a wind "park" looks almost benign.

It isn't, of course, as the campaign against it has made clear. The drive to develop our ridgelines is part of the same industrial arrogance, the same corporate piracy, that drives the war and poverty machine Newton calls attention to. In fact, many of the same investors and companies, notably Halliburton (active in building off-shore turbine facilities) and GE (the major U.S. manufacturer of wind turbines, having bought the business from Enron), are pocketing huge amounts of public money from both.

Spinning, strobing, grinding, and mostly useless 400-foot-high turbines are not as bad as napalm and depleted uranium, but that doesn’t make them good. If we don’t stop the industrial juggernaut here -- and even repeat the developer’s sales pitch as gospel -- how can we expect it to be stopped in Iraq and elsewhere?

Fighting to protect the ridgeline is every bit as important as fighting other injustices. It is the same fight.

categories:  wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, anarchism, ecoanarchism, anarchosyndicalism

Another picture of turbines in Hawaii

Here's another photograph of the South Point, Hawaii, turbines, only 24 of 37 of which are still working after 19 years. They are a long way from being the elegant kinetic sculptures that the industry wants us to see them as.

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

Book wish

"From mescaline to mesclun: The decline and fall of late-20th-century counterculture"

Turbines now junk after 19 years

A Kansas correspondent sent this dramatic photograph that a friend of his took on a recent trip to Hawaii. It's some of the turbines installed in 1986 at South Point, Hawaii. Note the dripping oil and missing blades, and that many of them are turned in the opposite direction of the rest. This is the future!

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