October 12, 2004

Cherish the Squirrels

New York Times, October 10, 2004:

To the Editor,

If the residents of Ville Platte, La. ("If Town Clears Out, It Must Be Squirrel Season," front page, Oct. 3), stopped shooting squirrels long enough to observe them, they would see that squirrels are creatures with complex lives of their own.

We have squirrels at our house and have witnessed a mother squirrel raising her young. She teaches them to climb slippery trees and steep rooftops. If she senses danger, she will carry her young to safety.

She spends lots of time hunting and gathering food and soft things with which to feather their winter nest.

It is sad to read of cruel behavior toward these small and beautiful creatures, which are merely struggling to survive, as we all are.

Burlington Electric Supports Wind

To the editor, Burlington Free Press:

Patty Richards [director of resource planning for the Burlington Electric Department] (My Turn, October 12) claims that wind produces electricity 80% of the time. This is contradicted by the record at Searsburg, which produces electricity barely 60% of the time, according to audits by the Electric Power Research Institute. In Germany, grid manager Eon Netz reports that two thirds of the time, wind facilities are generating less than their annual average annual output.

Average output in Vermont is likely to be no more than 25%. Only one third of the time will a wind facility be producing at that level or above. To suggest, as Richards does, that Searsburg's fitful generation of less than 0.2% of Vermont's electricity "has increased reliability" is simply ludicrous.

Richards describes how the grid responds to a customer's turning on a light switch. Unfortunately, the wind does not cooperate in this scheme. Output from wind facilities is dramatically erratic and rarely corresponds to actual demand for electricity. Denmark's wind installations generate electricity equivalent to 20% of their consumption, but most of it has to be exported because the extra power isn't generated when it's actually needed.

It is true that in balance wind doesn't produce pollution when making electricity. Much of the time, however, wind turbines are not making electricity, yet they continue to draw power from the more polluting sources that are still working. And because of the unstable output, more reliable and more polluting backup generation has to be dedicated to cover for it.

Because of wind's low output and almost useless contribution, it is misleading to say that wind towers on the mountain ridges will stop the acid rain and global warming that threatens them. Wind towers -- with their acres of clearance, huge foundations, transformers, roads, and power lines -- represent only another form of destruction. They do nothing to mitigate acid rain or global warming.

Only a tiny fraction of Vermont's electricity comes from burning fossil fuels, none from coal. Even if wind could make a significant contribution, Richards' insistence that it would stay in Vermont therefore contradicts her threat that without wind the mountains will die.

About 200 MW of capacity would be required to match the output of Burlington's McNeil plant, which provides less than 8% of Vermont's electricity from a visually discreet location. That is three times more than the wind resource recognized as available for development. Richards' description of "wind turbines spinning gracefully in a few spots along our hill tops" either underscores their negligible contribution or is a lie.

So it comes, as Richards admits, down to a question of aesthetics. Hurling empty threats about global warming and acid rain and fossil and nuclear fuel dependence, knowing that wind power does nothing to alleviate those problems, she accuses opponents of using fear tactics! She asserts that wind turbines are visually appealing and only someone ignorant of the poisons in our air would oppose them.

Considering that the installation of wind turbines on our "hill" tops brings its own environmental and quality-of-life problems and that they will do nothing about pollutants from other sources, the aesthetics of the 330-foot-high erections are obvious: They are expensive, intrusive, destructive of rare habitat, and useless.

October 10, 2004

A Poem

Deliver Me, O Wind

by Annie Dullard

I'm glad that I have lived to see
Wind towers more lovely than a tree
Arrayed by dozens in the sea --
The tears of joy run free.

What better use of tired land,
The postcard pictures getting bland,
Than turning weary trees to sand
And making money to beat the band?

October 7, 2004

The wind in Texas

To the editor, The New Republic:

Martin Peretz ("Evil Lesser," October 11) cites George W. Bush's promotion of "one of the largest and most productive programs of wind farms in the country," which "actually diminishes our dependency on Middle Eastern oil."

The wind power projects in Texas are indeed large and heavily subsidized (Bush just renewed their major tax break), second in capacity to California. Yet the expanses of giant windmills generated only 0.85% of the state's total electricity in 2002, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. The amount actually used is much less, because wind speed (their fuel) rarely corresponds with consumer demand.

Almost all of Texas's electricity is generated from natural gas and coal. Oil generates only 0.4%. Wind power has therefore diminished their dependency on oil for electricity by about 3 one-thousandths of a percent. Electricity, of course, represents only a fraction of total energy use (for transport, heat, etc.), which wind power doesn't affect at all.

October 5, 2004

Wind power creates a job!

Here are some excerpts from the story linked to in the title, which is about "windsmiths" -- the people who maintain wind turbines.
Roughly 100 windsmiths, mostly men, work at the various wind energy companies in Tehachapi.

CalWind Resources has 10 windsmiths on staff to service its 350 turbines. Oak Creek Energy has six to maintain its 100 turbines.
There are more than 4,600 turbines in the Tehachapi area. That's an average of 1 maintenance job per 46 turbines. CalWind's ratio is 1 per 35, and Oak Creek's 1 per 17. Typical wind "farms" are within this range, so they are unlikely to "create" more than 1 or 2 jobs each, despite the promises of the developers.

More items of note from the article:
"Turbines break every day," ... [operations manager at CalWind Resources Ed] Bullard said. ...

Bullard agreed with [windsmith Clayton] Swan that the most challenging part of working in the field is dealing with the elements, especially in the winter, when huge ice formations build up on turbine blades.

If those chunks fall, Bullard said, some of them could kill you.

October 4, 2004

FPL Energy to leave Kansas Flint Hills alone

Florida Power & Light has wanted to turn the continent's last unspoiled expanse of tallgrass prairie into a power plant of 1,000 400-foot-high wind turbines. Faced with broad opposition, they have been forced to look elsewhere.

October 2, 2004

Global warming and wind power

The primary argument of most advocates of wind power is that it will reduce the emission of "greenhouse" gases (particularly carbon dioxide (CO2)) that cause global warming. A few opponents of the proposed giant wind-power facilities therefore deny or diminish the possibility of a human contribution to climate change. There still remain the undeniable pollution from burning fossil fuels and the environmental and social costs of drilling and mining and transport, but it is global warming that is the crisis driving most support for industrial wind power. Every ill effect of wind-turbine installations is countered that it would be much worse if we let global warming continue. It is assumed to be unarguably obvious that wind power reduces CO2 and other emissions. They mock the argument that conservation and efficiency are much more effective. And anyone who denies global warming or our role in it is referred to the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Does the IPCC support wind power?

In the paper, "Summary for Policymakers. Climate Change 2001: Mitigation. A Report of Working Group III of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change," they state, "Hundreds of technologies and practices for end-use energy efficiency in buildings, transport and manufacturing industries account for more than half of this potential [greenhouse gas emission reductions in the 2010 to 2020 timeframe]" (p. 5).

In Table SPM.1 (p. 7), energy supply and conversion represent only 7%-19% of potential emission reductions by 2020. That category includes fuel switching to natural gas and nuclear, CO2 capture and storage, and improved power station efficiencies as well as renewables. Efficiency improvements in building, transport, and industry account for 51%-92%.

Tables from the full report show wind's small contribution: potentially mitigating 2.0%-4.3% of projected carbon emissions from electricity generation by 2020, or about 0.7%-1.4% of carbon from all energy use. Its actual contribution is projected to be much less, i.e., theoretically reducing atmospheric CO2 by less than 5 1,000ths of a percent.

That projected amount of wind power represents up to more than a million megawatts of installed capacity, more than 20 times the amount already connected (and causing trouble) worldwide. It also requires the construction of an equal amount of dedicated backup generators to cover the fluctuations of wind-generated power and hundreds of miles of new high-voltage transmission lines, particularly as the preferred sites for wind facilities are far from areas of high demand.

That's a lot of environmental destruction for almost nothing. The push for wind power is a distraction from seriously addressing the problems of our energy use.