The President Pro Tem of the Vermont Senate, Peter Shumlin, was in St. Johnsbury last night talking about climate change: "Ski areas and even snowmobilers have been hit by the changes in climates," he said, to illustrate how dire the situation is.
What this really illustrates is the twisted thinking around this issue, because ski areas and snowmobilers are major contributors to climate change. The crisis is not that recreational energy use is threatened. And the solution is certainly not in protecting such wasteful and environmentally damaging recreational energy use.
In fact, it is in encouraging their further demise. Alas, politicians would rather pretend to tackle an issue with grand symbolic gestures -- no matter who or what it might harm -- than face it honestly. And so President Bush invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, and Shumlin would invade our forested ridgeline and rural communities to erect giant wind turbines of very doubtful benefit.
And the crises remain. Which may, of course, be the whole point.
wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, Vermont, anarchism, ecoanarchism
January 31, 2007
January 27, 2007
Noise, birds, permit madness
The wind energy facility on Mars Hill in Maine is still under construction, but the 16 operating turbines are already causing noise problems:
Residents have also noticed a disappearance of wildlife and are dismayed by the how much the mountain has been destroyed. The story from the Bangor Daily News is archived at National Wind Watch. See a photograph of one of the turbine sites under construction at Vermonters With Vision (another UPC project for the Vermont town of Sheffield is currently in the permitting process).
Another story that makes the developers' lines harder to believe is that of another buzzard killed by turbine blades in Forss, Scotland. According to the Aberdeen Press and Journal, "The buzzard was one of a pair, with its local nest also including a nine-month fledgling." The report went on to state, "Work is under way to build a further four turbines at the site."
Finally, are wind energy developments held to unfairly prejudiced standards in the permitting process? Perhaps it's the other way around. (See a relevant piece in The Examiner by Tim Carney about big energy -- particularly wind turbine manufacturer GE (who bought the business from Enron) -- making sure the way is cleared for and taxpayers fund their predations.)
This comes from The Journal of Newcastle (again, via National Wind Watch):
the best way to describe it is you step outside and look up thinking there's an airplane. It's like a high-range jet, high-low roar, but with the windmills, there's a sort of on and off "phfoop ... phfoop ... phfoop" noise.One of the turbines has even been shut down. Residents are understandably worried about what it will be like when all 28 turbines start running next month. This is a project of UPC Wind under the name Evergreen Wind Power. They (surprise!) said noise from the towers would not be an issue. But (surprise!) it is. People are already being kept from a good night's sleep and can no longer hear the gentle sounds of the natural environment.
Residents have also noticed a disappearance of wildlife and are dismayed by the how much the mountain has been destroyed. The story from the Bangor Daily News is archived at National Wind Watch. See a photograph of one of the turbine sites under construction at Vermonters With Vision (another UPC project for the Vermont town of Sheffield is currently in the permitting process).
Another story that makes the developers' lines harder to believe is that of another buzzard killed by turbine blades in Forss, Scotland. According to the Aberdeen Press and Journal, "The buzzard was one of a pair, with its local nest also including a nine-month fledgling." The report went on to state, "Work is under way to build a further four turbines at the site."
Finally, are wind energy developments held to unfairly prejudiced standards in the permitting process? Perhaps it's the other way around. (See a relevant piece in The Examiner by Tim Carney about big energy -- particularly wind turbine manufacturer GE (who bought the business from Enron) -- making sure the way is cleared for and taxpayers fund their predations.)
This comes from The Journal of Newcastle (again, via National Wind Watch):
Last July Tynedale Council refused permission for Ali Johnson's [paralysed from the neck down in a rugby accident in September 2004] father, Ken, to build a three-bed [specially-equipped] bungalow on the grounds of his own home at Wolf Hills Farm, Coanwood, near Haltwhistle in Northumberland, saying that regulations didn't allow for any new developments in open countryside because they wouldn't fit in with the surroundings. ...wind power, wind energy, wind turbines, environment, environmentalism, Vermont, anarchism, animal rights
But the same council has now decided those rules and regulations don't apply to a 165ft wind speed recording mast despite admitting in its own documents that it "would represent an intrusive feature" and be "alien and incongruous" -- because it would only be in place for three years.
Yet that same mast, according to Doncaster-based Harworth Power which applied for planning permission, could eventually be used to try to get the go ahead for up to 24 permanent giant wind turbines above rural Northumberland.
January 26, 2007
Illusions of progress and victory
As the landscape turned increasingly chaotic and murderous, the streams of refugees swelled. Another headlong, fearful escape of the kind that in collective dreams, in legends, would be misremembered and reimagined into pilgrimage or crusade . . . the dark terror behind transmuted to a bright hope ahead, the bright hope becoming a popular, perhaps someday a national, delusion. Embedded invisibly in it would remain the ancient darkness, too awful to face, thriving, emerging in disguise, vigorous, evil, destructive, inextricable.
--Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day
anarchism, anarchosyndicalism
January 23, 2007
Vermont legislators want to dump renewable energy
Newly introduced Vermont House bill 104 revises last year's renewable energy bill (which requires new in-state electricity generation to be renewable). H.104 essentially scratches out "renewable" to require specifically "wind."
Dick Cheney couldn't have written a more blatant example of crony favoritism. When it was brought to your editor's attention, he first thought it was a spoof. But there it is on the state legislative web site: AN ACT RELATING TO INCREASING THE USE OF WIND POWER TO MEET PART OF THE STATE’S ELECTRICITY DEMAND.
With a major push currently underway for real alternatives like methane from landfills and cow manure and run-of-river hydro, along with growing awareness of the low benefit yet substantial negative impacts of industrial wind, the industry must be feeling unloved. (And they'd be right.)
That so many legislators -- including 2 Progressives -- have jumped on to sponsor this wind industry protection bill is pathetic indeed. Not one of them, needless to say, represents a town targeted by wind developers. Not one of them lives in the northeast counties which are particularly targeted.
This bill is unlikely to go anywhere, and perhaps we can hope that such a desperate act is a sign that big wind is at last finished in Vermont.
wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, Vermont, anarchism
Dick Cheney couldn't have written a more blatant example of crony favoritism. When it was brought to your editor's attention, he first thought it was a spoof. But there it is on the state legislative web site: AN ACT RELATING TO INCREASING THE USE OF WIND POWER TO MEET PART OF THE STATE’S ELECTRICITY DEMAND.
With a major push currently underway for real alternatives like methane from landfills and cow manure and run-of-river hydro, along with growing awareness of the low benefit yet substantial negative impacts of industrial wind, the industry must be feeling unloved. (And they'd be right.)
That so many legislators -- including 2 Progressives -- have jumped on to sponsor this wind industry protection bill is pathetic indeed. Not one of them, needless to say, represents a town targeted by wind developers. Not one of them lives in the northeast counties which are particularly targeted.
This bill is unlikely to go anywhere, and perhaps we can hope that such a desperate act is a sign that big wind is at last finished in Vermont.
wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, Vermont, anarchism
January 20, 2007
UPC's continuing misinformation
Your editor contributed to a report on Wednesday by Pat Bradley of New York Public Radio station WAMC. She was covering the third version of UPC's plan to erect 16 420-ft 2.5-MW wind turbines on mountain ridges overlooking historic and peaceful rural communities in remote northeast Vermont. Their moving of 2 turbines across a town line seemed to have been timed to overshadow a more dramatic development in one of those affected communities. The town of Barton voted 120-0 (yes: zero) Tuesday night to oppose the project.
In the demand for sacrifice from these communities, for utterly changing their character for very much the worse, one asks "what are we weighing here? It's very clear that wind energy is just not going to make any significant contribution to replacing fossil fuels or reducing greenhouse gas emissions."
Matt Kearns, hired flack for UPC (backed by private equity firms Madison Dearborn Partners of Chicago and D.E. Shaw of New York), calls that statement "one of the disingenuous arguments regarding wind power. One of the issues that we hear is that wind power will not provide an offset to other forms of energy generation or that somehow this won't produce a benefit in terms of the use of some other fuels. Y'know, any green electrons that you add to the grid it means that there's less need to bring on other units that are fossil fuel based."
Then where are the numbers showing a reduction of fossil fuel use due to wind power on the grid? The disingenuous argument is Kearns's, because it claims a result for which it has no data. The evidence (see, e.g., the graph from the International Energy Association of Denmark's fuel use for electricity generation from 1971 to 2003 at National Wind Watch) is clear that large-scale wind has negligible, if any, effect on other sources. This is probably because, although their electricity generation may be displaced, they either must continue burning fuel (less efficiently, i.e., less cleanly) on standby or burn more fuel (again, less efficiently) in more frequent ramping up and down or switching on and off.
Besides, in Vermont almost no electricity comes from fossil fuels.
tags: wind power, wind energy, wind farms, environment, environmentalism, Vermont
In the demand for sacrifice from these communities, for utterly changing their character for very much the worse, one asks "what are we weighing here? It's very clear that wind energy is just not going to make any significant contribution to replacing fossil fuels or reducing greenhouse gas emissions."
Matt Kearns, hired flack for UPC (backed by private equity firms Madison Dearborn Partners of Chicago and D.E. Shaw of New York), calls that statement "one of the disingenuous arguments regarding wind power. One of the issues that we hear is that wind power will not provide an offset to other forms of energy generation or that somehow this won't produce a benefit in terms of the use of some other fuels. Y'know, any green electrons that you add to the grid it means that there's less need to bring on other units that are fossil fuel based."
Then where are the numbers showing a reduction of fossil fuel use due to wind power on the grid? The disingenuous argument is Kearns's, because it claims a result for which it has no data. The evidence (see, e.g., the graph from the International Energy Association of Denmark's fuel use for electricity generation from 1971 to 2003 at National Wind Watch) is clear that large-scale wind has negligible, if any, effect on other sources. This is probably because, although their electricity generation may be displaced, they either must continue burning fuel (less efficiently, i.e., less cleanly) on standby or burn more fuel (again, less efficiently) in more frequent ramping up and down or switching on and off.
Besides, in Vermont almost no electricity comes from fossil fuels.
tags: wind power, wind energy, wind farms, environment, environmentalism, Vermont
January 18, 2007
Against the day
It went on for a month. Those who had taken it for a cosmic sign cringed beneath the sky each nightfall, imagining ever more extravagant disasters. Others, for whom orange did not seem an appropriately apocalyptic shade, sat outdoors on public benches, reading calmly, growing used to the curious pallor. As nights went on and nothing happened and the phenomenon slowly faded to the accustomed deeper violets again, most had difficulty remembering the earlier rise of heart, the sense of overture and possibility, and went back once again to seeking only orgasm, hallucination, stupor, sleep, to fetch them through the night and prepare them against the day.
--Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day
tags: anarchism, anarchosyndicalism, Finnegans Wake
January 17, 2007
"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
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
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)