Salesmen

To the editor, Seven Days:

Peter Freyne (Inside Track, Nov. 30) has apparently fallen for the sleight of hand that points to gas-guzzling SUVs and peak oil and then switches to advocating giant wind turbines -- which don't power our cars and airplanes or heat our homes and workplaces. And very little oil is used to generate electricity.

The choice is not between staying in Iraq and building wind turbines. In fact, the motivations and justifications for invading Iraq are similar to those behind wind development: We must destroy these sites to save them; It would be much worse without us; Outrageous profits for a few and the suffering of many are a necessary cost; You'll thank us some day.

Also similar is the casual acceptance of "cherry-picked intelligence" by otherwise reasonable people, perhaps out of fear. Shouldn't one be a little dubious when it is the developer himself dismissing environmental concerns about his project?

Dave Rapaport of East Haven Wind told Freyne that "anywhere around the world, you've got an average mortality rate of about two birds per turbine per year." The National Wind Coordinating Committee, however, finds that mortality rates in the U.S. range widely ("about two birds" being the lowest) and are highest in the mountains of the east. Besides birds, the amount of bats killed is so disturbing even to the industry that they kicked out the researchers -- for the same reason U.N. weapons inspectors were taken out of Iraq, because they were no longer "helpful."

Like the most ignorant of right-wing media brutes, Freyne would rather beat up on the Free Press than explore independently whether or not wind power is a viable energy option in the first place, let alone whether or not its its benefits actually outweigh its negative impacts.

Denmark -- the poster child for large-scale wind -- hasn't changed their energy consumption one whit because of wind. Nor has any other country. German grid manager Eon Netz warns that expansion of wind will cause more building of conventional power plants not less.

The wind developers are salesmen and as transparently dishonest as George W. Bush. They'll talk about the coming hydrogen economy, cats, peak oil, battery technology, and how just like you they care about the environment and our shared future -- anything other than the fact that wind turbines built today don't actually do anything about our energy use. They play the guilts, fears, and prejudices of their marks like a fiddle.

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

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Desperate times for Danish wind

According to a Nov. 10 news item from the Danish Wind Industry Association, Denmark is tackling the biggest problem they have had in integrating wind power. Currently, only a fraction of the wind plant production can be used, because Denmark has built and converted many conventional plants to provide both heat and power ("combined heat and power," CHP), thus doubling the amount of energy extracted from fossil fuels. Because they are providing heat, the plants can not be ramped up and down to accommodate the fluctuations of the wind. But the fact that Denmark exports most of its wind production must be getting embarrassing. The solution is to subsidize converting homes to electric heat! Of course, this means that the CHP plants won't be providing heat any more, so their fuel burning will be back to the old inefficient level, thus raising CO₂ and other emissions. New inefficiencies also will be introduced by their being called upon to modulate their output.

But wind turbine manufacturer Vestas, Denmarks' second-largest company (after Lego), is experiencing hard times, and the most important thing is to make it appear that wind energy works. Vestas investors don't care if more fossil fuel has to be burned to make it so.

categories:  wind power, wind energy

Wind power does not work

To the Editor, Manchester (Vt.) Journal:

Rob Roy Macgregor (letter, Nov. 18) would have us believe that more than 50 gigawatts of wind power capacity installed worldwide, or its endorsement by some utilities, is proof that it works. He asks, as if he does not know the answer, where is the profit if wind is so unreliable?

To the first point, one need only ask for evidence that 50 gigawatts (or 10-15, representing the actual output from wind, or even any at all) of energy from other sources has been displaced to discover that wind power does not work as an energy source on the grid, that such claims are as puffs of smoke.

To the second point, endorsement by utilities comes from the same source as the profits: the requirement or expectation to buy a certain amount of renewable energy and the option of buying "green credits" instead. Whether the energy produced by a wind turbine is used or not, equivalent green credits are generated as well. There is great demand for them, and their trade is very profitable. Enron began this model of energy progress, and it remains a scam that benefits only a few investors. Some utilities set up as credit producers themselves, and others are typically bought off, as exemplified by Lyndonville Electric's East Haven deal, with a share in the racket.

Utilities, however, are clear about the futility of wind power. Eon Netz, one of Germany's grid managers, with over 7,000 MW of wind capacity connected, has described in their annual wind reports that they need additional conventional capacity to cover 100% of the possible infeed from wind, because even as it peaks it often drops off very quickly. Many utilities in Japan cap the amount of energy they will accept from wind facilities. A recent report boasting of the U.K.'s superb wind resource also points out that new "spinning reserve" must be built and kept burning to compensate for wind power's fluctuations, thus severely limiting any positive effect on the use of other energy sources. A February 2004 study by the Irish grid found that wind power caused minimal displacement of other sources, that it was essentially superfluous additional capacity. Eon Netz projects that at best wind turbines might displace barely 4% of their capacity in other sources.

Macgregor is right that storing the intermittent output of wind turbines is an essential solution. It only underscores the absurdity of building them now, when large-scale storage, if feasible at all, is still very far off.

If wind power worked, proponents would be able to point to real evidence of energy savings and cleaner air, not just a sales chart.

categories:  wind power, wind energy, Vermont

"Neighbours Warn of Din From Wind Turbines"

From the Nov. 16 Wellington, New Zealand, Dominion Post:

Manawatu residents say they are being "driven stupid" by noise from wind turbines, despite living twice as far away as those planned for Makara.

Two residents who live up to three kilometres from Te Apiti and Tararua wind farms spoke at the resource consent hearing for Meridian Energy's proposed Makara wind farm yesterday.

On the Makara Guardians group's last day of evidence, Wendy Brock described three consecutive days of relentless noise and throbbing from 18 turbines 2.5km from her Ashhurst home.

"You have this drone, you can't escape it. After three days the residents were just worn down, fed up."

Meridian's Project West Wind proposes 70 turbines, some within 1km of homes. The Makara turbines would also be 35 metres taller than Te Apiti's.

Mrs Brock said Meridian's consultation for Te Apiti did not prepare residents for the noise levels.

"The turbines make noise, lots of it."

... Meridian has already paid an undisclosed sum to move one Manawatu family who could not live in their house because of noise and vibrations.

Daniel Sproull's farm lies within sight of both wind farms. He said he feared for Makara residents if Meridian's 70 turbines were allowed.

"If these go ahead and your place is downwind, you're stuffed."

The turbines' sound at Te Apiti, 3km away, was like a truck rumbling past his house, though "it doesn't pass in seconds, it can rumble for hours".

The turbines were enough to "drive you stupid".

Several nights he was woken by turbine noise, thinking the clothes dryer had been left on overnight or road works were directly outside his property, he said.

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

Save the world, save the ridgelines

To the Editor, Vermont Guardian:

I am puzzled by Jane Newton's stand against opposition to industrial wind turbines (letter, Nov. 16). Are not the ridgelines part of the world that needs protecting? If we allow our own back yard to be destroyed merely for corporate profit, how can we go on to save the rest of the world from the same process?

I am surprised by her apparently unquestioning acceptance of claims from the developers that wind power is a step in the right direction. Despite decades of experience, and at least ten years of substantial installation, proponents can not point to any savings of other fuels. It won't move us away from fossil or nuclear fuels, let alone war, exploitation, and pollution. Besides a lack of positive impact, the negative effects are not negligible.

Just as military invasion is sold as "spreading democracy" and corporate piracy as "bringing opportunity," the needless industrialization of our last rural and wild landscapes with wind turbines just as falsely sold as "clean energy."

Newton suggests countering corporate crime in small ways, yet dismisses the crimes of big wind as minor. A scam is a scam, destruction destruction. The fight against it at every level can -- and ought to -- begin in our own back yards. My experience in working with many individuals against big wind is that their concern does not stop at their own ridgelines. The network of individuals and groups helping each other extends around the world. Their activism should be praised not denigrated.

In August 2004, the Point Pierce Aboriginal community of Australia watched 40,000 years of Dreaming destroyed by the construction of 50 wind turbines at Wattle Point. This past autumn, Zapotecos of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico asked Mark Duchamp, a bird conservationist who fights giant wind turbine facilities in Spain and Scotland, to help them against "the imposition of neoliberal megacorporations destroying nature and our cultures" (the whole letter in Spanish is reproduced on the web at www.iberica2000.org/Es/Articulo.asp?Id=2565).

Giant wind turbines on our ridgelines won't reduce the use of other sources of energy in Vermont or anywhere else on the grid. According to a Nov. 18 article in the Times Argus, the U.S. president of the Italy-based company targeting Sheffield and Sutton shamelessly boasted of construction on "state-owned virgin mountain tops" on Maui, Hawaii. It's corporate invasion and conquest, nothing else.

The fight against big wind is not to deny the necessary struggles Newton is active in. It is to join them.

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