Ralph Nader -- the last American

Last night's Independent Lens on PBS showed An Unreasonable Man, a film about Ralph Nader. We were probably not the only ones who found it inspiring, for the same reasons we voted for him all three times he ran for President. But it may have reawakened in others the misplaced anger they felt toward Nader for daring to make Al Gore's tepid candidacy appear even worse by expecting more from the allegedly "liberal" party.

For those people who blame Nader instead of Gore or Bush for the outcome of the 2000 election, here is an analysis of the voting. It should help return them to reality. The most notable finding is that where Nader did well, so did Gore.

"Best Renewable Energy Project": Clipper wind turbines failed after couple months

PennWell announces 2007 Projects of the Year winners

11 December 2007 -- PennWell Corp's Power Engineering magazine announced the 2007 Projects of the Year Award winners at an awards gala held December 10, 2007 at the New Orleans Sheraton Hotel. Each year, the magazine recognizes some of the world's best power projects from four major categories: gas-fired projects, coal-fired projects, nuclear projects and renewables projects. Winners and honorable mention recipients in each category are selected by the Power Engineering editorial committee. ...

The 2007 Best Renewables Project of the Year Award Winner was the Steel Winds Wind Farm, co-owned by BQ energy and UPC Wind. The wind farm, a 20 MW facility consisting of eight Clipper WindPower 2.5 MW liberty series wind turbines, is located on the site of the old Bethlehem Steel Mill, located along the shores of Lake Erie in Lackawanna, N.Y. It is the first commercial deployment of Clipper WindPower's Liberty turbines.

[thanks to Cohocton Wind Watch]

Why are the Lackawanna windmills being taken apart?

(Lackawanna, NY, December 11, 2007) -- ... They all started turning for the first time in June, this Steelwinds Project was the first to use the newest clipper wind turbines touted as the new standard for reliable performance, but by late summer, engineers discovered damage inside one of the gear boxes, and then shut down 5 others, because the timing was off in those gear boxes too.

A Clipper Vice President tells [News 4's George Richert] the plan now is for a crane to arrive next week to take all of the gear boxes down send them back to the factory in Iowa, and then replace them one by one throughout the winter. The towers will still stand but the blades will have to come off of all eight wind mills. It could be March or April before the job is finished.

[thanks to National Wind Watch]

wind power, wind energy, wind turbines

Immoral Rearmament

That's the title of a review of The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy by Adam Tooze. The review was written by historian Richard Evans in the Dec. 20 New York Review of Books. Here's an interesting quote:

So extensive was Hitler's drive to rearm that it was absorbing over a fifth of German state expenditure by the eve of the war.

That skewed priority ensured the destruction of Germany, leaving few resources to, for example feed, clothe, and shelter its people, let alone maintain a modern economy.

According to official U.S. government accounting, the U.S. similarly allocates over a fifth (21% in 2007) of its budget to "national defense". According to the War Resisters League, however, adding the military portions from departments other than Defense and the debt and obligations of past military actions and readiness brings the figure to over half: 51% in 2008. Even subtracting past obligations, the figure is 31%, almost one-third of the budget.

The only outcome of that kind of misspending is disaster. Its logic requires ever more build-up which only comes at the expense of a functioning society.

Reduce emissions by reducing energy use (duh!)

The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) has released its study of the economic impact of a federal Renewable Electricity Standard (RES), which is being debated in the U.S. Congress as part of new energy legislation. The ACEEE found that the RES would lower electricity prices, primarily by reducing demand rather than by adding renewable energy plants.

The RES, which is allegedly meant to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but instead simply calls for 15% of electricity sales by 2020 to be from renewable sources, allows 27% (why not all, as in Canada?) of the requirement to be met by efficiency improvement, i.e., actually reducing use. The ACEEE assumes the 4% efficiency will be used, and that's where the savings are -- in both prices and emissions.

The ACEEE underscores this by analyzing another scenario that would combine a 15% RES with a 15% efficiency requirement, finding very much greater savings.

That is not surprising. Requiring purchases of renewable energy does nothing towards the goal of reducing greenhouse gas and other emissions or of reducing the use of dwindling or sociopolitically problematic energy sources. It is like a diet regimen that says every time you eat a dish of ice cream you have to eat a carrot (or pay someone else to eat a carrot).

In Canada, Alberta requires a 12% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2014. A similar federal rule is expected to take effect in 2010.

The U.S., in contrast, only adds tax giveaways to the carrot industry to those for the ice cream companies. Cutting down is bad for business.

Colorado: 20% of electricity from wind and solar means 18% new nonrenewables, too

An analysis by the Colorado Energy Forum (CEF) notes that Colorado's Renewable Energy Standard (RES), requiring that 20% of the electricity from investor-owned utilities (and 10% from large municipal and rural cooperative utilities) be obtained from renewable sources, primarily wind, by 2020, will not represent a correspondingly expanded capacity to to reliably supply growing demand.

The CEF analysis estimated that more than 3,300 MW of wind generation and nearly 200 MW of solar generation must be deployed to meet Colorado's RES.

However, after taking into account the intermittent nature of many renewable energy resources, especially wind and solar, a gap in needed power supplies of between 3,700 and 4,500 megawatts will still exists.

"When taking into account the intermittent nature of wind and solar resources, we estimate that the reliable capacity credit for these renewable resources ranges between 330 MW and 1,122 MW," according to the study's authors. "This means that even after the requirements of Colorado's RES are met, significant amounts of new electric generating capacity still will be required to meet the state's needs. Based on the assumptions and data in this study, Colorado will need to address additional resource needs in the range of 3,700 MW to 4,500 MW by 2025." (press release, Nov. 9, 2007)

In other words, all those wind turbines won't keep the lights on. You have to use other sources to guarantee capacity, because the wind doesn't always blow when you need it.

In addition, there is a need of new capacity because of adding a significant amount of wind to the system. The grid requires excess capacity to be able to cope not only with times of exceptional demand but also with outages (inadvertent as well as for maintenance) of some of its plants. The wind is largely unpredictable, especially for the precise needs of the electrical supply, so more excess capacity is required to deal with that extra burden.

Giant wind turbines are not symbols of "green energy"; they are window dressing for a huge expansion of the conventional grid.

wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism

Why Robertson endorsed Giuliani

Most likely to hasten Armageddon.

Green technology just a new name for old pattern of exploitation

Wendell Berry, letter to the editor, New York Review of Books, Sept. 27, 2007:

... As for rural poverty, Mr. Dyson's thinking ["Our Biotech Future", July 19] is all too familiar to any rural American: "What the world needs is a technology that directly attacks the problem of rural poverty by creating wealth and jobs in the villages." This is called "bringing in industry," a practice dear to state politicians. To bring in industry, the state offers "economic incentives" (or "corporate welfare") and cheap labor to presumed benefactors, who often leave very soon for greater incentives and cheaper labor elsewhere.

Industrial technology, as brought-in industry and as applied by agribusiness, has been the cleverest means so far of siphoning the wealth of the countryside -- not to the cities, as Mr. Dyson appears to think, for urban poverty is inextricably related to rural poverty -- but to the corporations. Industries that are "brought in" convey the local wealth out; otherwise they would not come. And what makes it likely that "green technology" would be an exception? How can Mr. Dyson suppose that the rural poor will control the power of biotechnology so as to use it for their own advantage? Has he not heard of the patenting of varieties and genes? Has he not heard of the infamous lawsuit of Monsanto against the Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser? I suppose that if, as Mr. Dyson predicts, biotechnology becomes available -- cheaply, I guess -- even to children, then it would be available to poor country people. But what would be the economic advantage of this? How, in short, would this work to relieve poverty? Mr. Dyson does not say.

His only example of a beneficent rural biotechnology is the cloning of Dolly the sheep. But he does not say how this feat has benefited sheep production, let alone the rural poor.

[These statements apply similarly to wind energy development. See also the comments by Garret Keizer (click here) specifically about wind energy and the rural poor.

wind power, wind energy, wind farms, human rights, animal rights, , anarchism, anarchosyndicalism, ecoanarchism