George Monbiot trashes animal rights movement

A few weeks ago, George Monbiot, the bold defender of all that is middle-class left, wrote a very good article about the monstrously vague Protection from Harassment Act in the U.K., which can be invoked to outlaw pretty much any protest as "alarming" or "distressing". He writes how the security forces, as well as industry and developers, use it for just that purpose. As he notes,

With the exception of animal rights protests, these campaigns in the UK have been overwhelmingly peaceful.

And so The Guardian continues its own campaign against the animals rights movement, tarring an overwhelmingly peaceful group with the "distressing" tactics of a very few. Monbiot and the rest have cheered on the very harassment of animal rights protesters that he now decries against causes he agrees with. Whoops!

environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights, anarchism, anarchosyndicalism, ecoanarchism

New York Times portraying big wind more truthfully?

Today's New York Times included to pictures with a wind turbine. The illustration by Guido Scarabottolo accompanying "The End of the Financial World as We Know It" by Michael Lewis and David Einhorn in the Week in Review section includes an industrial wind turbine as part of the system of financial shenanigans of the past decades:



And in the front news section, the continuation of the front-page article on Obama's intended aid to workers includes a photo by Larry W. Smith for the European Pressphoto Agency of a wind turbine in Kansas, clearly establishing it as an industrial construction and suggesting its futility in the shadow of established truck and car transport:



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

A problem with truth: Wind Works Long Island

Promoters of an industrial wind energy plant off the shore of Jones Beach, Long Island, New York, attempted some time ago to debunk a few of the findings of Eric Rosenbloom's paper "A Problem With Wind Power". It is a weak effort, but since it is occasionally cited as definitive, it requires refutation. Below is the entire piece, with answers inserted below each "distortion" and "truth" pair.

The Distortion
"No power plants have been shutdown in other countries with wind turbines because wind is an intermittent resource.

The Truth
Both Germany and Sweden have shut down nuclear reactors with the intent of supplying the loss of capacity with wind power (http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8058171/)&(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4536203.stm)

Intent is very different from what actually happens. In fact, Germany has essentially halted their planned shutdowns of nuclear plants and will now extend their operations. Germany is planning 26 new coal plants, 8 of them on a fast track for 2010. Sweden has not in fact shut down any nuclear plant and is now planning to build new ones.

The Distortion
If you build wind turbines you need backup generation

The Truth
Electric grid systems can handle a certain percent of wind power without needing additional generation. The 140MW able to be produced by the wind park is within these parameters. The grid is already designed to compensate for loss-of-load contingencies when large power plant units suddenly become unavailable.

Because a system can handle contingencies doesn't mean that's the way it should be operated normally. Furthermore, as the system is already designed to handle dropouts of major suppliers, then it would have to be expanded to also be able to handle sudden drops in production from a wind energy plant. In other words, most of the time the system can indeed already deal with large fluctuations of wind production, but it then also has to still be able to handle the loss of a major supplier or two -- so more excess capacity is needed to ensure reliability.

The Distortion
Because other electric generators need to be running at lower efficiencies in ‘spinning reserve’ they will actually pollute more than the avoided emissions from the wind turbines

The Truth
The fact is: electrical generating units are constantly varying their outputs, starting and stopping, as the demand for electricity rises and falls throughout the day. When not running or burning less fuel, they pollute less!

This "distortion" isn't even in Rosenbloom's paper. Nevertheless, the fact is that running thermal plants at a lower output than their ideal, running them in spinning reserve, ramping them up and down, and starting and stopping them -- all of this increases carbon emissions per unit of electricity supplied. It is like stop-and-go city versus smooth highway driving. Wind -- intermittent, highly variable, nondispatchable -- on the system would increase all of these inefficient uses. Whether or not that inefficiency would cancel the theoretical savings of taking wind energy into the system is easily determined by records of fuel use. And so far, there is no such evidence of less fuel use per kilowatt-hour provided on any grid. In fact, coal use in the U.K. and the U.S. has increased in recent years relative to electricity use.

The Distortion
Other countries are reducing their subsidies for wind power

The Truth
This is what is supposed to happen with any industry as it reaches a sustainable point in any market. E.g. Spain began to reduce subsidies in 2002 and their wind generating capacity still grew 33% in the last two years. (in the USA fossil fuels still receive very large subsides despite overwhelming market penetration)

Development in Germany has slowed dramatically with a decline in subsidies, and development in the U.S. has gone up and down with the existence of the Production Tax Credit. Spain continues to fund its wind industry with future carbon credits sold to others. The fact is, the wind industry lobbies hard for subsidies and could not thrive without them. In the U.S., compared with 44 cents for coal, $1.59 for nuclear, and 25 cents for natural gas (the three main sources of electricity in the U.S.), wind received $23.37 per megawatt-hour of its electricity production in 2007, according to the Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration (click here). And that's only federal (not state or local) financial (not legislative) intervention and ignores the 5-year double-declining-balance accelerated depreciation that is available to wind.

The Distortion
The German Energy Agency report issued in February 2005 said increasing wind generation would raise costs by 3.7 times

The Truth
Completely false. We encourage you to visit the agency's website and read their report to see for yourself that Mr. Rosenbloom’s claim was uniformed [sic] (http://www.deutsche-energie-agentur.de). The true additional cost per household is 12 euro a year.

Obviously, this means that projected increases of electricity costs would be 3.7 times more with a large wind program than without. Dena's page for the publication states that "[t]he expansion of wind energy will cost private households between 0.39 and 0.49 euro cents per kWh in 2015". That's up to 25 euros for 5,000 MWh. Table 8 in the English-language summary shows the different costs between expanding wind and not from 2007 to 2015 under three pricing scenarios: While the cost increase from 2007 to 2015 for private households ("nonprivileged consumers") is 1.9-2.8 times more with wind, for industry ("privileged consumers") it is 3.8 to 5 times more.

Rosenbloom's paper also puts this economics issue in the context of several studies having concluded that the goal of CO₂ mitigation can be achieved much more cheaply by other means. The Long Island [N.Y.] Power Authority rejected the project in Long Island Sound for simple economic reasons.

The Distortion
The US Fish and Wildlife Service rejected the use of monopole towers as a means to mitigate bird deaths

The Truth
Completely False, the document Mr.Rosenbloom cites, actually promotes the use of monopoles to mitigate bird deaths. It appears he didn’t read his own citation. (http://www.fws.gov/habitatconservation/wind.pdf, pg.6 statement #1)

The FWS recommendation to use monopole towers (on page 3 of the document) is simply an acknowledgement that lattice towers provide roosts. It does not suggest that using a monopole tower makes it safe to operate a wind turbine in flyways and feeding and gathering areas. While the industry points to the tower design to absolve itself, the problem remains the giant blades, both directly and by the turbulence behind then, not to mention habitat fragmentation, degradation, and destruction.

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

La nueva Conquista: Parques eólicos en Oaxaca

En el mes de noviembre de 2008 se llevo a cabo el Encuentro Voces y resistencias para comentar las diversas problemáticas que atraviesan los pueblos de Oaxaca por los proyectos neoliberales y capitalistas que se imponen sin consentimiento en la zona. El encuentro tuvo cita en Juchitan Oaxaca cabecera municipal de esta región donde el aire atrajo no un proyecto ambiental como podría pensarse de la energía eolica, sino de la ambición mezquina de interés capitalistas (como la familia del fallecido Secretario de Gobernación Camilo Murino.

Estas empresas en su mayoría europeas están aprovechándose de la pésima situación en que viven los campesinos debido a las malas políticas de los gobernantes, para vender o rentar su tierra por poco dinero y rompiendo así el tejido social comunitario, debido a la migración y la desigualdad económica.

La forma en que se han llevado a cabo esta nueva conquista ocupa la mentira y el engaño hacia los ejidatarios y campesinos. Los beneficios de la tecnología ocupada no es para el goce colectivo sino de unos cuantos.

Cuando pasó el recorrido de la Otra Campaña, eran menos de 10 transformadores eolicos introducidos por la Comisión Federal de Electricidad, dos anos mas tarde son cientos de transformadores cerca de centros poblacionales, así como zonas agrícolas y de pastizal.

Pero los problemas no paran ahí, por todo Oaxaca, así como en todo el país, la política del gobierno es un diseño de la política global neoliberal, que quiere despojar a los campesinos de su tierra y convertirlos en los miserables de las ciudades. No comprende ni admite las formas y tradiciones democráticas de las comunidades indígenas, no busca el beneficio.

Lunes 29 de diciembre de 2008

Wind energy multimillionaires: "immoral, unjust, scandalous"

This is a translation, as near as I can make it out, from an interview with Roberto García, Secretary general of Unións Agrarias, in the Dec. 26 El Pais (click the title of this post for the Spanish original).

"It is immoral, unjust, scandalous, that in making multimillionaires from wind energy development, the Xunta [Galicia, Spain] takes its percentage of business, the contractors talk of how much they are going to reinvest in replacing Ence in the area and creating who knows how many companies, and the only ones left with nothing are the landowners of Chousas and Leiras, where the wind blows at a certain speed, where they will install the windmills."

"Isn't that standard for industry?"

"They have expropriated our land by emergency and we have no other choice than to go to trial on a question that should have been part of that standard. Our farms are not valued for the toxos, only for the value of the air passing through at a certain speed."

wind power, wind energy, human rights

Against Utilitarianism

There is nothing truly beautiful but that which can never beof anyuse whatsoever; everything useful is ugly, for it is the epxression of some need, and man's needs are ignoble and disgusting like hos own poor and infirm nature. The most useful place in a house is the water-closet.

--Theophilé Gautier, May 1834

Efficiency 3 times cheaper than wind, payback in 1 year

Gary Parke, chief executive of energy services firm Evolve Energy, writes in Evolve Energy (Dec. 10, 2008):

Energy efficiency has often been seen as the ugly sister to renewable energy, but there is nothing ugly or unglamorous about saving money, reducing energy costs and lowering emissions. While the clean tech sector tends to focus on investment in renewables as a means of cutting carbon, there is growing evidence that investing in "negawatts", a term coined to describe a megawatt of power avoided or saved from use on the energy grid, will provide a better return.

According to Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, energy efficiency is “the largest, least expensive, most benign, most quickly deployable, least visible, least understood, and most neglected way to provide energy services”. While that may seem a strong statement, there is widespread agreement that increasing energy efficiency can bring both financial and environmental benefits.

The opportunity for energy efficiency investment is immense – the International Energy Agency calls it the "fifth fuel" after oil, coal, gas and nuclear. According to a recent report from the McKinsey Global Institute, Curbing Global Energy Demand Growth: The Energy Productivity Opportunity, increased energy efficiency is the biggest and most cost-effective lever to attack greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. It could deliver up to half of the reductions of global GHG required to cap the long-term concentration of GHG in the atmosphere to 450 to 550 parts per million – a level many experts believe will be necessary to prevent the mean temperature increasing by more than two degrees centigrade, leading to "dangerous" levels of climate change. ...

Perhaps even more importantly, there is the opportunity to boost energy productivity using existing technologies, in a way that pays for itself and frees up resources for investment or consumption elsewhere. McKinsey’s analysis suggests that annual investment of $170bn (£115bn) would result in a cut in energy demand of between 20 and 24 per cent by 2020 and a CO2 saving of 7.9 billion tonnes. McKinsey calculated that, at an oil price of $50 a barrel, $170bn annual investment would generate more than $900 billion in annual energy savings, a 17 per cent annual rate of return. This would reduce global oil consumption by 21m barrels a day, from today’s level of 86 million barrels a day.

While many energy efficiency market drivers are similar to those in the renewable energy market, Evolve Energy has found first hand that investing in energy efficiency delivers greater carbon reductions and financial return than investing in renewables.

We recently conducted some research on the return on investment for a typical 4GW wind turbine in comparison to energy efficiency measures implemented for a large supermarket brand. We found that to generate one megawatt of wind energy costs about £1m, while to save one megawatt through energy efficiency measures costs £350,000. For companies investing in wind technologies it could take 20 years to achieve payback, whereas it would only take just over one year through energy efficiency. On a wider environmental point, businesses can reduce up to three times the amount of CO2 for every £1 invested. This comparison shows that energy efficiency can provide a greater economic and environmental reward.

Note that per capita energy use in the U.S. is about twice that in the U.K.; there is obviously a huge potential for conservation as well as efficiency.