Coey 2012

Learning about the power of genetic engineering are St Anne’s pupils T— and K— with Monsanto Education Officer Laura Coey.


Learning about the power of hydraulic fracturing are St Anne’s pupils T— and K— with Halliburton Education Officer Laura Coey.


Learning about the power of unmanned drone warfare are St Anne’s pupils T— and K— with General Atomics Education Officer Laura Coey.


Learning about the power of submission to Jesus are St Anne’s pupils T— and K— with Billy Graham Crusades Education Officer Laura Coey.


Learning about the power of wind energy are St Anne’s pupils T— and K— with Action Renewables Education Officer Laura Coey.

Time waves

Just as, in listening to Cottard, Brichot and many others, I had come to realise that, through common culture and fashionable fads, a simple undulation sends the same mannerisms of speech and thought over the surface of the globe, in the same way over the whole expanse of time great tidal waves bring up from the depths of the ages the same hatreds, the same sorrows, the same types of bravery, the same strange fancies running through superposed generations, each section made at various levels in the same series giving a repetition (like shadows cast on a row of screens) of a phenomenon as identically reproduced although often not as trivial, as the family trait which set M. Bloch junior at odds with his father-in-law, M. Bloch senior with M. Nissim Bernard, and others before them whom I had never known.

[De même qu’en écoutant parler Cottard, Brichot, tant d’autres, j’avais senti que par la culture et la mode, une seule ondulation propage dans toute l’étendue de l’espace, les mêmes colères, les mêmes tristesses, les mêmes bravoures, les mêmes manies, à travers les générations superposées, chaque section prise à plusieurs niveaux d’une même série, offrant la répétition, comme des ombres sur des écrans successifs, d’un tableau aussi identique quoique souvent moins insignifiant que celui qui mettait aux prises de la même façon M. Bloch et so beau-père, M. Bloch père et M. Nissim Bernard et d’autres que je n’avais pas connus.]

—Marcel Proust, The Past Recaptured
(1932 translation of Le Temps Retrouvé (1928) by Frederick Blossom):

Vermont Wind Proposals

Also see: "Large wind projects in Vermont"

And listen (and chat or call in) to Wind Wise Radio, May 27, 7:00 p.m.: Stand Against the Wind — Chris Braithwaite and other guests talk about the destruction of Lowell Mountain in northern Vermont, co-hosted by Annette Smith, executive director of Vermonters for a Clean Environment.

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

wind = natural gas

On May 1, 2012, Windpower Monthly published an interview by Ros Davidson with Denise Bode, CEO of industry lobby American Wind Energy Association. Besides her incoherence about the Production Tax Credit (the industry will die without it! the industry no longer needs it!), here is an interesting excerpt about natural gas. Before moving to the AWEA in 2009, Bode was CEO of natural gas lobby American Clean Skies Foundation.

RD: You and Texan oil billionaire T Boone Pickens have promoted the idea of a wind–natural gas partnership, using both sources for generation and natural gas for vehicles. You co-authored an article on the issue with Pickens on Politico (the political journalism website) just before the 2011 AWEA conference. Yet, many people are increasingly uncomfortable with natural gas because of questions about the environmental safety of fracking - a procedure that releases gas from underground shale rocks - and because of methane emissions. Where does that leave AWEA and the prospect of natural gas as a "bridge fuel" to a low-carbon future?

DB: You're talking to somebody who was a state regulator of oil and gas. You can safely frack. You can regulate and manage it. The natural gas industry really got ahead of itself because they were drilling in places that did not have a mature regulatory structure. They also didn't have the infrastructure to properly address the fracking. Over time that will change, whether it is through federal or state regulation. It can be managed.

RD: So the controversy over fracking and methane emissions doesn't change your view of wind and gas collaborating?

DB: It's a matter of fact that wind and gas will be the two largest new sources of electricity generation.

RD: But doesn't the public perception of natural gas fracking make the partnership more difficult to sell?

DB: You know, we're focused on the PTC and don't spend a lot of time promoting our partnership. We try not to tear somebody else down and build ourselves up. We talk about the benefits of wind. Natural gas has to pretty much make its own case, although we do need to work together. We need each other to balance utilities' portfolios. Natural gas provides peak power in a way that wind can't. We need each other and should work together as much as possible.

It is obvious that wind needs natural gas, not just to ensure power on demand, but also to effectively balance wind's high degree of variation. However, natural gas does not need wind. In fact, without wind, natural gas turbines can operate about twice as efficiently - ie, with about half the emissions. In other words, to support wind on the grid is not only to support more fracking for natural gas, but also to support less efficient use of that natural gas.

Bode's comment that "You can safely frack" reminds us of this statement from the AWEA strategy memo leaked from its November 2011 board meeting:

We need to create a space for the wind energy industry without defining it as an alternative to fossil fuels and coal and that goes beyond being one of many "renewables." "Renewables" in general are saddled with weaknesses that we don’t want to have to carry.

That is to say, wind has moved from serving as atonement for consumerism to now being little more than the greenwashing arm of the natural gas industry.

Cf  "Breaking Up with the Sierra Club", in response to the discovery that the wind industry cheerleader had accepted more than $25 million dollars from fracker Chesapeake Energy.

wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism

Denmark's ecological footprint worse than U.S.

This just in from Common Dreams: The World Wildlife Fund's Living Planet Report 2012 finds that:

“The U.S. has the fifth largest ecological footprint in terms of the amount of resources each person annually consumes. We rank only behind Qatar, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, and Denmark in the global rankings of the Ecological Footprint.”

Denmark: 4th largest per-capita ecological footprint in the world.
U.S.: 5th.

wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism

Nimby: you lose.

Another friend sent us a couple of articles by industrial wind development consultant Tiff Thompson about the pesky problem of people resisting the insertion of giant industrial machines near their homes after finding that any benefit is far outweighed by many adverse effects. Below are some quotes from her articles, with comments in italics. Since she has named her consultancy "Nimby Consulting", she clearly assumes that there is no basis for their fears, only selfishness, and that she can therefore bully them into submission ...

"For those waging arguments out of genuine fear, the prospect of an industrial-scale wind turbine within visible distance from their homes appears more important than seemingly distant implications of climate change."

False choice. She thus removes one side of the equation. Opponents are not only concerned that industrial wind's impacts are greater than claimed; they are also motivated to fight more strongly for those concerns because industrial wind's benefits are much less than claimed.

"[S]etbacks over 1 mile will effectively kill any wind project, even in the most rural settings."

Can not even consider accommodating concerns. This statement about "setbacks over 1 mile" is actually disingenuous, since the industry fights every setback, no matter how modest, e.g., the effort in Wisconsin to increase a 1,250-ft minimum setback (less than one-fourth of a mile) to 1,800 ft (just over one-third of a mile).

"The wind farms typically referenced in oppositional arguments are, indeed, poorly sited and often the first the industry erected."

"The first" meaning: last month's. The industry has been saying this as long as it has existed, even as problems are documented with practically every facility built.

"Strategies such as ..., while successful at reducing noise, unfortunately also cause significant power loss."

Again, can not be seriously considered. Or as Ditlev Engel, CEO of Vestas, the world's biggest turbine manufacturer, wrote to Denmark's Environment Minister in complaint about regulations of low-frequency noise: "At this point you may have asked yourself why it is that Vestas does not just make changes to the wind turbines so that they produce less noise? The simple answer is that at the moment it is not technically possible to do so."

"In 1999, international noise standards were created by the World Health Organization’s Community Health Guidelines – set at roughly 40dB(A) averaged over night in one year. And in 1972, the US Environmental Protection Agency established its Office of Noise Abatement and Control, only to be later phased out in 1982, when individual states and local governments were given authority to create noise regulations. Today, in the USA, umbrella legislation – the EPA’s Noise Control Act of 1972 and Quiet Communities Act of 1978 – remains enforced, holding guidelines of permissible indoor and outdoor noise levels at 55dB(A) and 45dB(A) respectively."

Why is the EPA indoor limit (45 dB(A) — the writer apparently got the respective order backwards) 5 dB greater than the WHO outdoor limit? (And inside bedrooms at night, WHO guidelines specify a limit of 30 dB(A).) Note that a change of 5 dB is one that triggers widespread community complaints. Imagine the difference between a rural indoor nighttime level of 25 dB and the intrusion of 45 dB from neighboring wind turbines! And that's A-weighted (see below) averaged levels — add a significant low-frequency component (which is more prominent indoors) and a pulsing character, it's no wonder people get sick.

"In a recent Leicester, UK, article: ‘We were wrong on turbine noise, admit protesters’, a four-turbine project that was greeted by foreboding turned out to be not so threatening after it was erected and operational."

The one and only such report! The typical story is the opposite: Neighbors are reassured, even supportive, and then discover how wrong they were (e.g., Mars Hill and Vinalhaven, Maine; Falmouth and now Fairhaven, Massachusetts; Deeping St Nicholas, England; Waubra, Australia). Furthermore, not everyone is sensitive to noise to a health-threatening degree. This single light report can be weighed against the innumerable reports of problems around the world and increasing attention from the medical community (e.g., editorial in
the March 8, 2012, British Medical Journal [BMJ], special issue [August 2011] of Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society).

"[I]f people do not like wind energy, do not receive payments, have a turbine within their view, or dislike the developer, they are more likely to be annoyed. Hence, accurate noise assessment – from the beginning – is essential not only for a successfully sited project but also for community goodwill."

But remember, it's a (false) choice of turbine or climate change. And remember the impossibility of adequate distances from homes. And the economic cost of quieter and safer operation. And the laughability of noise standards (and the mystery of logarithmic decibels and frequency weighting). In other words, get the bullshit machine cranking early, and keep spreading it thick until the project is on. Be prepared to pay off a few neighbors. Then ... who cares? Once it's up, it will be nearly impossible to halt the multimillion-dollar investment. On to the next marks!

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

North American Windpower

A friend has sent us these excerpts from the May 2012 issue of the trade journal North American Windpower.

Pressure Applied in States to Widen RPS Allowances

"It's disconcerting to even have the conversation," [George Cannon, a partner at Dallas-based law firm Patton Boggs,] continues. "Any attempt to water down or cancel an RPS has a chilling effect on investment."

Cannon says that any potential elimination or alteration of federal incentives and state mandates places into question the future viability of wind energy.

"The RPS mandates are effectively what creates the market, assuming there are no other structures in place, such as feed-in tariffs," he says. "If you roll back the RPS, then you are eliminating much of the market for the renewable off-take."

Global Wind Market Demands Industry Evolution

To make matters worse [emphasis added], load growth in the U.S. in non-existent, with 2012 electricity consumption projected to remain 1% below 2007 peaks. ...

As a consequence of the aforementioned issues, turbine prices in the U.S. are approaching unsustainable levels. ...

Clipper Windpower's Liberty turbine design was very innovative. However, ongoing doubts remain regarding the durability of its quantum-drive powertrain, which, in turn, lead to concerns regarding long-term warranty exposure and put future sales at risk. Reinventing the group was an option for United Technologies Corp. [who divested its recently acquired Clipper assets], but to do so would require a great deal of time and investment, especially given the unique architecture of the Liberty concept. ...

Nordex recently announced that its joint venture deal [with Vestas] fell through and that it is exiting the offshore wind business completely.

California Wind Market Is 'Not for the Faint of Heart'

... rabid environmentalists ...

Navigating California's Regulatory Maze

Because California's four primary areas for wind farm development are now largely saturated, developers are moving into many new regions of the state that host a combination of renowned natural landscapes, community activism, cultural resources and diligent government oversight.

wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism