Derelict wind derricks

From a lawsuit in Abilene, Texas:

Dale Rankin et al. vs. FPL Energy et al.
Filed Feb 24, 2006, District Court of Taylor County, Texas

IV. Background Facts

61. The huge wind turbines in this project will produce very little electricity, and that electricity is of less value than electricity produced by reliable coal and gas fired generating plants. This means that when the government subsidies ... run out, Plaintiffs and others similarly situated in Taylor County are likely to be confronted by a poorly maintained and deteriorating wind energy facility that may one day become derelict because ... the provision in the lease agreements for the dismantling of non-operational turbines is not absolute.

South Point, Hawaii
The primary plaintiff in the Texas case has noted in correspondence that there is a gaping loophole in the lease that FPL Energy had landowners sign. It is normal to include a "decommissioning" fund to remove the turbines, towers, and the top part of their foundations and restore the land (except for the bulk of the foundations). This is to comfort the landowner that the company is serious about meeting the obligation to remove everything. Anything three feet or so below the surface, however, including the miles of transmission cable, is usually to be left. Nor are the roads that fragment the land required to be removed. If the Tug Hill lease from PPM (Scottish Power) is typical, the amount deposited in the fund is determined by an "independent" expert chosen by the company, and potential scrap value is deducted. In other words, when the company is long gone, the money in that fund will be meager indeed.

Back to FPL's loophole, Dale Rankin noted that if the turbines are mortgaged and later foreclosed on, then the mortgagee is not bound to remove them. Considering that a third of the federal tax benefits are used up in six years and the other two-thirds last ten years, but the leases are for 25-30 years and wind turbines are very expensive to maintain, this situation is very likely.

That leaves the landowner with exactly what paragraph 61 in the suit asserts is likely and the derelict turbines at South Point on Hawaii stand testament to.

wind power, wind energy, wind farms, wind turbines

Hasta la libertad siempre!

Free the greyhounds!
animal rights

East Haven survey suspect

George Willy, proprietor of East Burke's Village Inn, wrote in Friday's Caledonian Record about the unreliable survey showing that a majority of the people (or at least property owners, if not residents) of East Haven support four giant turbines on East Mountain (if not 46 more planned for ridges closer to the village). The survey was made quite some time ago, but people still cite it as valid.

Willy described his efforts to get information about the survey. The town select board presented it as theirs, but he learned that it was created, conducted, and tallied by the developer. The town clerk had no record of the select board's involvement and no information about the survey's creation and methodology. Willy also discovered that not all property owners and residents received the survey, known opponents having been apparently left out.

This is certainly no surprise. The wind developers are adept deniers of reality. Just as they insist there are no negative impacts from industrial wind, they insist there is no opposition by both ignoring and insulting it. That's their business, however cognitively dissonant their approach, but it most definitely should not be the method for politicians and environmentalists who promote wind. The job of these individuals is to protect the people and the environment from those with power (i.e., money), not the other way around.

The other way around is fascism, or corporatism, as Mussolini proudly characterized it.

wind power, wind energy, Vermont, environment, environmentalism, anarchism, anarchosyndicalism, ecoanarchism, animal rights

It's not easy being green and supporting industrial wind, too

To the editor, Rutland (Vt.) Herald:

It is good to read that the Rutland Herald recognizes that, like any energy producer, industrial-scale wind power has serious environmental and social costs (editorial, May 20). The task, then, is to weigh those costs along with the financial expense against the actual contribution such a source can practically make.

As the Rutland Herald also recognizes, "even the industrial wind farms [Gov. James Douglas] opposes barely cut into the state's demand for electricity."

Yet, ignoring this information that they themselves have placed before their own and our eyes, the Herald criticizes Douglas's opposition to industrial wind in Vermont as "a short-term argument."

Look again: high costs, low benefit. If you're serious about our long-term energy plans, it's time to stop talking about industrial wind as anything more than a predatory boondoggle.

wind power, wind energy, Vermont, environment, environmentalism

Tilting at turbine foes in Vermont

To the Editor, Vermont Guardian:

So the Free Press thinks clean coal and nuclear power are better options than wind for providing Vermont's electricity in the future. Yet they are accused of burying their head in the sand about energy issues. True, they have not published editorials about clean coal and nuclear power. That is because those are not currently being debated throughout the state, with ten large projects newly threatening dozens of towns. It is clear that the wind power industry considers the Free Press to be ignoring energy issues only for writing off wind power as an obvious boondoggle.

As David Blittersdorf himself is quoted as saying, there is no silver bullet. It is not an either/or question, yet Vermont Guardian implies exactly that in connecting the Free Press's rejection of wind power with their reported interest in clean coal and support for nuclear.

Industrial-scale wind power can be debated on its own costs and benefits. It is irrelevant and dishonest to change the subject to nuclear power (one can oppose both) or, for another common example, to the number of birds killed by cars. Even in the larger debate about electricity (let alone the four-fifths of Vermont's energy use that is not electric), there are, as Blittersdorf mentions, peaking and base load plants. Nuclear and coal plants make up the latter, and wind power would have nothing to do with their level of use, even if hundreds of redundant wind facilities are built in the hope that somewhere the wind is blowing.

Proponents of industrial-scale wind power want to bury everyone's head in the sand.

If you reject the idea of 400-ft-high machines flashing on prominent ridges, producing no power at all a third of the time, a trickle another third of the time, and at or above their 25% average output only the remaining third of the time, you are accused of ignoring energy issues.

If you reject badly worded surveys in the conviction as well that the people who actually have to live with the noise and vibration and ecological degradation from the machines are the only ones whose opinion might be informed and relevant, then you are denying reality.

If you note that the intermittency (see above) is defended as unproblematic because the fluctuating contribution from wind would be inconsequential to the larger grid, and therefore you wonder how anyone could justify building on vigorously protected sites for such an inconsequential power source, then you are ignorant of the facts.

A debate based on facts is exactly what promoters of the wind industry do not want. Blinded in their lust to develop what remains of our wild places, to take for profit what belongs to all of us, they lash out at all who question them. That is to be expected. That the Vermont Guardian joins them in that endeavor is sad, even disgusting.

wind power, wind energy, Vermont, environment, environmentalism, anarchism, ecoanarchism

"All the eco-news that's fit to sell ads"

Andrew Leonard wrote yesterday in his "How the World Works" column for Salon about a special "green business" section in the New York Times, filled with smarmy ads from the likes of Wal-Mart, GM, Shell, and ADM. He remarks on the greenwashing it promotes and the obvious fact that it is an advertising supplement pretending to be objective editorial content (there's even an article about "eco-ads"!), and he is remarkably perceptive about the fact that this business is part of, not an alternative to, the whole model of economic growth that threatens the environment so egregiously.

There's also a more fundamental snake-eating-its-own-tail problem. The general tone of the section is hopeful, packed with tales of environmentalists and business executives working together, full of heartwarming news about advances in energy efficiency, renewable technologies and corporate commitments to social responsibility. But it would have been nice to have just one essay exploring the question of whether environmental destruction is built into the deep structure of the current global economy. Nowhere is the possibility raised that even as some slivers of society in the developed world are beginning to understand the importance of sustainable development, rampaging economic growth in countries such as China and India threatens to utterly overwhelm what little, incremental progress is being made in, say, Northern California or Sweden. ... [A]ny discussion of "the business of green" ought to tackle directly the fundamental problem: Economic growth, historically speaking, is an eco-killer.

environment, environmentalism, anarchism, anarchosyndicalism, ecoanarchism

Hull wind facts

The following is from the Hull wind website:

Hull Wind 2, a Vestas V80 - 1.8 Megawatt turbine has been installed in Hull!
The new turbine will produce 5 million kWhs every year.

And right below it are data from Hull Wind 1 that call into question that claim:

May 8, 2006
6,853,738 kWhs
Capacity Factor: 27.1%
Days Commissioned: 1594
Total Hours Generating: 25403

After more than 4 years (1,594 ÷ 365), Hull 1 has generated electricity only 66% of the time (25,403 hours ÷ [1,594 days × 24 hours]) and its capacity factor is 27% (6,853,738 kWh ÷ [1,594 days × 24 hours × 660 kW]), yet in complete denial of that fact, a capacity factor of 31.5% is projected for Hull 2 (5 million kWh ÷ [1,800 kW × 365 days × 24 hours]).

The 15% exaggeration may not seem like much, but with such a marginal power source it is indeed significant. In fact, 27% is the average capacity factor voluntarily reported by wind facilities in the U.S. to the Energy Information Agency, and since those reports apparently allow discounting turbines that are temporarily broken down the actual capacity factors are lower. Yet promoters continue to claim that new facilities will have capacity factors of 30-40%. Then when the turbines are up and running, it's on to the next project and if the actual output actually becomes known, why, new technology will have a much higher capacity factor, yes, don't dwell on the past, let's move on.

And let us return to the other aspect of that output that is problematic on the grid (where large-scale storage is impractical): the fact that one third of the time wind turbines are idle (from either too little or too much wind). Related to this is the fact that from the "cut-in" wind speed up to the "rated" wind speed -- at which the generator's output reaches its full capacity, typically around 30 mph -- the output is cubically related to the wind speed. That is, if the wind speed doubles the power output increases by 8. The result is that in addition to being idle a third of the time, another third of the time wind turbines produce power below their already low average rate.

In other words, whatever the capacity factor is (from historical experience it would be expected to be 20-30%), that level of output is seen only one third of the time.

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