"Wind power not such a good idea"

Richie Davis of the Greenfield (Mass.) Recorder wrote a fair article (click the title of this post) about opposition to industrial wind energy, featuring a couple of the founders of National Wind Watch.

I want to call attention to the final quote from William Labich, resource planner for Franklin County: "The technology isn’t the issue; it’s the siting of the technology, and how you apply it."

Notice how that attempts to evade the fundamental problem industrial wind energy on the grid has had, namely, showing that the technology actually reduces other sources, especially carbon-emitting fossil fuels.

Saying, as Sally Wright -- of the University of Massachusetts in Amherst -- does elsewhere in the article, that "for every kilowatt hour that you make with a wind turbine, that’s a kilowatt hour not made with a fossil plant" ignores the real-world effect of adding large amounts of a highly variable, intermittent, and significantly unpredictable source such as wind to the grid. The extra work to balance the wind-generated power and the lower efficiency of extra ramping appear to cancel out much, if not all, of the benefits hoped for from wind.

In other words, every kWh from wind may indeed replace a kWh from other sources (and not necessarily fossil-fuel plants), but that is very different from actually reducing the fuel use of other sources, what with standby, spinning reserve, or extra fuel burned in ramping up and down.

wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism

"Bush Must Go"

Paul Craig Roberts writes at Counterpunch (click the title of this post):

When are the American people and their representatives in Congress and the military going to wake up and realize that the US has an insane war criminal in the White House who is destroying all chances for peace in the world and establishing a police state in the US?

Americans don’t have much time to realize this and to act before it is too late. Bush’s “surge” speech last Wednesday night makes it completely clear that his real purpose is to start wars with Iran and Syria before failure in Iraq brings an end to the neoconservative/Israeli plan to establish hegemony over the Middle East.

The “surge” gives Congress, the media, and the foreign policy establishment something to debate and oppose, while Bush sets his plans in motion to orchestrate a war with Iran. ...

Bush’s entire “war on terror” is based on lies. The Bush Regime, desperate to keep its lies covered up, is now trying to prevent American law firms from defending the Guantanamo detainees. The Bush Regime is fearful that Americans will learn that the detainees are not terrorists but props in the regime’s orchestrated “terror war.” ...

The only reason for the Bush Regime’s policy of indefinite detention without charges is that it has no charges to bring. ...

Nothing can stop the criminal Bush from instituting wider war in the Middle East that could become a catastrophic world war except an unequivocal statement from Congress that he will be impeached.

[This essay also describes the treasonous cover-up of Israel's attack on the U.S.S. Liberty in 1967.]

the spineless ledger

It might have been comforting to think of himself as one of Yashmeen's holy wanderers, but he knew the closest he'd ever got to a religion was Vectors, and that too was already receding down a widening interval of space-time, and he didn't know how to get back to it any more than Colorado. Vectorism, in which Kit once thought he had glimpsed transcendence, a coexisting world of imaginaries, the "spirit realm" that Yale legend Lee De Forest once imagined he was journeying through, had not shown Kit, after all, a way to escape the world governed by real numbers. His father had been murdered by men whose allegiance, loudly and often as they might invoke Jesus Christ and his kingdom, was to that real axis and nothing beyond it. Kit had sold himself a bill of goods, come to believe that Göttingen would be another step onward in some journey into a purer condition, conveniently forgetting that it was still all on the Vibe ticket, paid for out of the very account whose ledger he most wished to close and void, the spineless ledger of a life once unmarked but over such a short time broken, so broken up into debits and credits and too many details left unwritten. And Göttingen, open to trespass by all manner of enemies, was no longer a refuge, nor would Vectors ever have been Kit's salvation.

Someplace out ahead in the fog of futurity, between here and Venice, was Scarsdale Vibe. The convergence Kit had avoided even defining still waited its hour. The man had been allowed to go on with his dishonorable work too long without a payback. All Kit had anymore. All there was to hold on to. All he had.

--Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

anarchism, anarchosyndicalism

More about extreme wind turbine noise

Farmers Weekly, 12 January 2007, p. 10, has an article about the Davies, a farming couple in Lincolnshire who have had to sleep away from their home 60 nights since September, because of the Deeping St Nicholas wind energy facility 3,000 feet from their home (see the excerpts from forum posts by "wiggyjane" posted yesterday). The article is accompanied by a sidebar:

The Wind Turbine Noise Working Group has been asked by the DTI [U.K. Department of Trade and Industry] to provide expert advice and guidance on issues surrounding what has become known as Amplitude Modulation of Aerodynamic Noise.

This is a low-frequency whooshing sound caused by the passage of air over turbine blades under certain atmospheric conditions. So far, little is known about the phenomenon or how it might be controlled.

Because amplitude modulation is difficult to predict, it is often not until a turbine is erected and fully working that the noise becomes evident. An acoustics expert, who asked not to be named, said that, although rare, it was becoming more common.

"The concern is that bigger, more modern turbines may be more prone to this problem," he told Farmers Weekly. ...

Because of the nature of sites required for wind farms, turbines are often in areas of low background noise which makes the noise of the blades all the more noticeable -- especially for rural residents used to peace and quiet.

Last month, noise worries contributed to the withdrawal of an application to build three turbines at Weston, Herfordshire. Noise has also been an issue for residents living near wind farms at Bears Down, North Cornwall and Askham, Cumbria.

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

Unintended consequences

Industrialists are seizing the opportunity created by the successful effort of many environmentalists to scare everyone shitless about global warming, as seen in these recent stories, courtesy of the Climate Crisis Coalition (click the title of this post).

Schwarzenegger Argues that Global Warming Justifies Two Big Dam Projects. By Bettina Boxall, The Los Angeles Times, January 12, 2007. In proposing two big, expensive dam projects this week, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger made a novel argument to justify the old-fashioned public works projects. Advocating $4 billion in bonds to build reservoirs in Northern and Central California, the administration emphasized not population growth or the specter of future drought, but global warming. 

Construction Begins on Giant Quebec Hydro Plant. CBC News, January 11, 2007. "Construction has begun on a controversial $5-billion hydroelectric project, the Quebec government announced Thursday, calling it the biggest and most important of its kind in a decade. ... To construct the two power stations, Hydro Quebec will build four dams and 72 dikes, and will flood 188 square kilometres of forest land along the river. Quebec Premier Jean Charest announced the start of the project at a press conference at Hydro Quebec's headquarters on Thursday, a last-minute venue chosen after the government cancelled a northern ceremony in Waskaganish, where it was rumoured that Cree opponents to the project were going to protest… Charest lauded hydroelectricity as a cornerstone of Quebec's heritage that has 'become a tool of economic development for Quebecers,' including the Cree. ... Quebec Environment Minister Claude Béchard said the project will create cleaner, more environmentally friendly energy than other power sources. The power stations are 'long-term solutions to fight greenhouse gas emissions' that will put Quebec at the forefront of the fight against climate change, he said ...

Tighter CO₂ Caps Push Finland to Nuclear. By Sami Torma, Reuters, January 11, 2007. Finland can meet EU limits on carbon dioxide emissions by 2010 through more use of renewable energy and biofuels but further tightening of the limits would push it to build more nuclear plants, its energy minister said. ...

Give Conservation Another Chance

By John H. Herbert, Baltimore Sun, Jan. 1, 2007:

Since 1997, utility demand-side investments such as efficient lighting programs, heat recovery systems and advanced electric motor drives have yielded returns for consumers that far exceed the cost. Since 1997, every 3 cents worth of conservation investment by utilities has reduced demand by 1 kilowatt-hour. Electricity costs about 9 cents per kilowatt-hour. Thus, for every 3 cents worth of conservation investments, consumers avoid paying 9 cents and thus obtain a 6-cent gain. ...

Why is there no federal support? Because Washington understands the impact of programs that involve tax credits, subsidies and government expenditures that increase energy supplies rather than reducing demand. Support for these programs provides paybacks for specific industries. ...

In the 1970s, prices were high and energy security was a pressing issue as Middle East oil supplies were at times curtailed. The national government responded by promoting energy conservation on several fronts such as tax credits for domestic conservation investments, energy-use labeling of appliances and automobiles, and frank talk about the value of saving energy for economic and security reasons. ...

By 1985, U.S. imports from OPEC fell to 1.8 million barrels per day from a peak level of 6.2 million in 1977, a decline of 70 percent. ...

According to the Department of Energy's Annual Energy Review, from 1978 to 1982, energy consumption per household declined by 26 percent, and in the major consuming region in the nation, the Midwest, it declined by 32 percent.

From 1973 to 1982, industrial consumption of natural gas declined by 32 percent. The industrial sector is the major user of this most environmentally benign hydrocarbon. During the same period, fuel consumption per vehicle declined by 19 percent. ...

[W]ill we stay entrenched in the known comforts of energy dependency and legislation written by lobbyists supportive of particular groups? The smart money may be on the latter, but there will be more money and security for everybody if we give conservation another whirl.

wind power, wind energy, wind farms, environment, environmentalism

Rosenbloom's law of wind turbine output

Eric Rosenbloom, currently the president of National Wind Watch, has observed from cumulative output vs. time graphs (see the samples from Germany, Ireland, and Denmark) the following:

Whatever the capacity factor, or average output over a period of time, any turbine or aggregate of turbines generates at or above its average rate only 40% of the time.

A recent illustration of this law is the output from the 240-MW Maple Ridge wind energy facility in Lewis County, N.Y., as compiled by Richard Bolton:


For this period from July through September 2006, the output represented 25% of capacity, or an average rate of 80 MW. As the graph shows, the facility produced at a rate of 90 MW or more only about 520 out of the total 1,883 hours of data collection, i.e., about 28% of the time. Adding the number of hours that it generated at 80-90 MW brings the time figure close to a third.

wind power, wind energy, wind farms, wind turbines