Are Wind Turbines Hazardous to Your Health?

To the Editor, Seven Days:

In "Are Wind Turbines Hazardous to Your Health? Docs Disagree" (May 12), Andy Bromage reported that Dr. Robert McCunney wonders how wind turbines can be any worse than other industrial noises.

The mechanisms may be in dispute, but the very papers McCunney cited in his work for the American and Canadian Wind Energy trade groups emphasize that disturbance from wind turbines occurs at much lower noise levels than from other sources. The significance of the published European studies is not that adverse health impacts are low but, since the turbines are much smaller and farther from homes than those going up today, that the impacts are so high.

It should also be noted that wind turbine noise is especially intrusive at night, when other artificial noises usually take a break, particularly in the rural places targeted by industrial wind developers.

The article closed with a classic change of subject, describing an audience member asking about wind power impacts compared with those of coal, oil, and nuclear. Bromage editorialized McCunney's utterly meaningless response as "good": "None of us needs to be reminded of the health implications and environmental consequences of oil in light of the tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico right now."

Oil is used for only 1% of our electricity. Nuclear provides base load with which wind's intermittent and variable infeed is not a competitor. And the use of coal has not been reduced anywhere in the world because of wind on the grid, again because wind is intermittent, highly variable, and nondispatchable. Other sources have to stay on line, burning fuel on standby or ramping and switching and thus burning fuel less efficiently than they would without wind. Hydro, in fact, provides the best pairing for wind, thus not affecting fossil fuel use at all, one renewable simply displacing another.

None of us indeed needs to be reminded of the impacts of oil, coal, or nuclear. But many of us apparently need to be reminded that industrial wind has no effect on them and only adds negative effects of its own.

As an illustration of wind's limitations - both a poor source of energy and a disproportionate source of adverse impacts - Denmark has not installed any new on-shore capacity on shore since 2002. As wind production in Denmark (including one off-shore facility opened in 2003) more than doubled from 1998 to 2004, carbon dioxide emissions remained flat and remain so, unaffected by adding even a huge proportion of wind to the grid.

Eric Rosenbloom
President, National Wind Watch (wind-watch.org)

wind power, wind energy, wind turbines, wind farms

Correction

(Ironic Times)

An article about money spent on investigations said that $30 million had been spent to investigate the financial crisis and $8 million had been spent investigating the Monica Lewinsky scandal. In fact, $8 million was spent investigating the financial crisis and $30 million on investigating the Monica Lewinsky scandal. We apologize for any confusion caused by the error.

Civility

Sam Smith writes:

You know things are going poorly for the establishment when it starts appealing for civility, as Obama did the other day, asking for a "a basic level of civility in our public debate."

That means they've pretty much run out of arguments to defend the way they're screwing things up and are now attempting to pass on the blame for anger to the victims. It is interesting that Obama barely mentioned the employment situation when talking at the University of Michigan graduates, something that even quite civil students would have been interested in.

I also like civility, however, and in the interest of improving my relations with the Obama administration I’d like to offer a few suggestions on how to increase the amount of civility in our land:

- Get out of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq now.

- Stop bailing out Wall Street and start helping endangered homeowners and the unemployed.

- Stop letting oil companies determine when their rigs are safe.

- Stop unconstitutional spying on people through wiretaps and other means.

- Stop trying to find ways to cut Social Security and Medicare for seniors.

- Stop calling for civility and start practicing it.

Paul Krugman and the straw man

In his New York Times column today (click the title of this post), Paul Krugman explains that disasters like the BP oil well explosion in the Gulf of Mexico are necessary to keep environmentalism alive. Which is exactly what Rush Limbaugh said in his paranoid speculation that environmentalists themselves blew up the drilling platform.

Krugman further allies himself with Limbaugh:

But there was also an attempt to construct a narrative in which advocates of strong environmental protection were either extremists — “eco-Nazis,” according to Rush Limbaugh — or effete liberal snobs trying to impose their aesthetic preferences on ordinary Americans. (I’m sorry to say that the long effort to block construction of a wind farm off Cape Cod — which may finally be over thanks to the Obama administration — played right into that [latter] caricature.)

Krugman is the one playing right into that caricature. He has joined Limbaugh in deflecting any debate about Cape Wind by mocking its opponents. This is a sure sign of weakness in any case, but the fact is that a very broad coalition of Cape Codders and others are fighting Cape Wind, and their arguments are about preserving a treasured natural resource and noting the minuscule potential benefit of even such a huge facility. If rich beachfront property owners spearheaded the fight against offshore oil drilling, would Krugman join Limbaugh in supporting it?

Or would he look at the facts and agree with their findings that the environmental harm, immediate and potential, could not be justified by the insignificant benefits? That offshore drilling is merely a symbolic bone thrown to the so-called right? Then he would also have to agree with the clear evidence that large-scale wind power is merely a symbolic bone thrown to to the so-called left and false environmentalists ("invertomentalists"?).

wind power, wind energy, wind turbines, wind farms, environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, ecoanarchism

Advocates Say Vermont Lags In Wind Power

On Vermont Public Radio this morning, Lawrence Mott, chairman of Renewable Energy Vermont, complains "that the state needs to develop guidelines on where wind projects can be built".

The problem, of course, is actually that Vermont already has such guidelines. Large-scale development above 2,000 feet is not allowed.

In a plea for "guidelines", Mott is really demanding that wind development be exempted from them.

This is such an obvious situation of predatory industry versus the environment that he should be laughed out of the room.

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

More comments on Cape Wind

The reader comments attached to the New York Times story (click title) about Washington "approving" the 24-square-mile Cape Wind facility reveal quite a bit about the supporters of wind.

Their smug gloating, name calling, fearful jingoism, and sheer misinformation are in contrast to the reasoned voices that raise clear points of issue in the arguments supporting wind.

When they aren't being attacked for being shills of Exxon (even though only 1% of the electricity in the U.S. comes from burning oil), opponents of erecting this massive complex in the middle of a treasured natural resource are accused of being radical environmentalists.

What has been so interesting to me through the 7 years that I have been involved in the debates about industrial wind is that it brings together people from the right and the left. For those that would see it, the clarity of the issue — an industry assault on heretofore protected rural and wild lands, fueled by an unholy cabal of desperate politicians, greedy landowners, corporatized pseudenvironmentalists, and financiers seeking tax avoidance — breaks through the current expectations of right and left. It is the people against a bought-off government, against developers fomenting community division for personal gain, against heedless destruction of our natural heritage and quality of life.

Meanwhile, the comments at the N.Y. Times show that the same process is mirrored in the proponents of wind. But whereas opposition has tended to bring out the best in our citizenry, support tends to bring out the worst. From both right and left, supporters cling to myths and irrelevancies in an attempt to shore up their shaky foundations and diminish those who question the big wind juggernaut. Click on the title of this post to read what they say. Not one of the comments supportive of the Cape Wind approval can be backed up by fact. And almost all of them betray an ignorance, a nastiness, hatred that is quite disturbing. The Cape Wind company has indeed done its job.

Comments on Cape Wind

First, the claim that Cape Wind's 130 giant turbines will produce 468 MW of electricity: That will be the facility’s maximum output. It will actually produce at an average rate far below that, likely one-third, or only 156 MW.

Considering that there is already over 35,000 MW of wind capacity installed in the U.S. (for an average rate of production of 10-12,000 MW), this project hardly represents a game-changing contribution.

And considering that the average electrical load in the U.S. is about 500,000 MW, it will take a hell of lot of such industrial installations to make any meaningful contribution.

And considering that the wind is a fickle resource, those installations will always be in addition to more reliable generators.

Conservation could easily obviate the paltry contribution from wind — and save so many otherwise off-limit areas (coastlines, ridgelines) from development.