Wind farms in danger
Posted by Yankee on February 23, 2006 - 7:58pm
Topic: Alternative energy
Tags: cape wind, coast guard reauthorization act, don young, robert f. kennedy, jr., wind farms [list all tags]
From the letter that Greenpeace is asking people to forward to Congress:
The development of wind energy projects adjacent to shipping channels in other countries suggests that a 1.5 mile mandatory buffer is unnecessary. Denmark and the United Kingdom are currently the world leaders in offshore wind energy, and both countries require a site specific review of impacts on navigation for projects 1/3 of a mile or greater from a shipping channel...In fact, the Middlegrunden wind farm in Denmark is within 1/3 nautical miles of a shipping channel, and there have been no negative impacts on navigation as a result of the wind farm since it was installed in 2001. In addition, this provision is more restrictive than laws dealing with other offshore structures, including oil and gas platforms that can be located within 500 feet of shipping channels.
Considering that Don Young of Alaska doesn't seem to have an immediate stake in this issue, and it's not often that lawmakers think about potential future impact when formulating policy, it seems plausible that lobbyists have gotten to him. Projects like Cape Wind are important, and I think that anyone who is serious about developing alternative energy must weigh need over aesthetics (which does seem to be the predominant concern in the case of Cape Wind). Here's what the Cape Wind people have to say:
After four years of favorable regulatory review showing the project would lower energy costs, reduce air pollution and help wean the New England region off its dependence on imported oil and natural gas, Cape Wind's future is now threatened because of Alaska Congressman Don Young's backdoor attempt to kill America's first offshore wind farm.Rep. Young's effort would also delay progress on the development of any other offshore wind proposals, causing the American renewable energy industry to fall further behind its foreign competitors.
If the Young Amendment were to pass it would deny New England the many benefits of the Cape Wind project including cleaner air, lower energy costs, increased energy independence, and more.
If you're not too jaded about the political process in the US, it's worth sending off the Greenpeace letter to Congress.
Well, I grew up on Cape Cod. I have family there; and I travel there quite a few times each year. Now, I am a permanent resident of Canada, although I am still an American citizen.
Where is the option for an American citizen living abroad? Who, precisely, is my Congressional representative? My last voting place in the states?
Perhaps you could pass these concerns onto Greenpeace?
If you don't vote absentee, U.S. congress critters won't give a rat's rear what you think.
Few in this state question the merit of wind power, however much of the debate seems to be falling into two camps:
- "I'd rather look at windmills than power lines, and anyway we would be better off using wind power than relying on oil [sic] from the Middle East.", and
- "Windmills should be scaled appropriately to the environment and our towns, so that we can benefit from the power without sacrificing the bucolic nature of our surroundings."
Both of these arguments may be emotionally satisfying, however they seem to be naive in the sense that they ignore the harsh reality of human nature.By this I mean: These windfarms are being built by entrepreneurs who wish to profit by building windmills in advantageous locations and selling power through the grid to the highest bidder.
There seems to be a universal assumption that if windmills are put up in one's community, one will be the immediate beneficiary.
Clearly this is not necessarily true. I wonder if those who are so in favor of windfarms realize that they may never see a single electron? Until now, the wind developers have been currying local favor by offering cash to the community. Why not power directly?
Because eventually the local people won't be able to afford it.
The best way to insure the power remains local is for your municipality to build the power generating system. If you live in a city that generates its own power, you can get in touch with the windmill guys and they will help you sell windpower to your municipal generating company. If you get your power from a co-op, the same thing applies. If you do not have local municipal generating, you can approach your city leaders with it as a method for preventing blackouts, insuring local power, some local jobs and an additional revenue stream for your city. The windmill guys handle the financing, and a bond issue can take care of it for the city. Believe me, municipal and co-op generating companies are looking for any way out of the petroleum trap too, and if you put public support behind it, things can happen.
What they are afraid of is NIMBYism and any recoil from local people. But if it's locals asking for it, things usually go your way with enough people behind it.
My personal feeling is that there is nothing more bucolic than a bunch of windmills turning on top of a hill, especially if I know the power is heating my home!!
I'm not sure if people are aware of the price they will have to pay, especially if wind starts growing beyond 10-15%. As I discussed here the costs would be mind-boggling.
As electricity moves to more of a real-time market pricing, the government woven glove over the invisible hand of the market will take care of the NEED for storage.
People can run their delayable loads when power is cheaper, things like charging the electric car, washer, dryer, et la.
If the shipping by electric rail infrastructure is constructed properly (along with tax law changes to make JIT shipping not advantatagous tax wise) when there is excess electrical power, the freight trains move.
The present POV WRT electrical power - flip a switch and its there, will just have to change. Variable pricing based on resource aviablity will force the change is all.
Can you imagine the losses that a loss of power would cause for a aluminium factory for example? Sorry, but this is a total nonsense.
Besides, the variations in wind power go down the bigger the area covered by the wind farm is.
If USA can finance new technologies, develop and build 2,593 F-35 fighter jets, they can afford a few new wind turbines. All depends on which one they want the most sky power consumers or sky power producers.
http://www.lockheedmartin.com/wms/findPage.do?dsp=fec&ci=15152&rsbci=11173&fti=0&ti=0&sc=400
Wonder how long that fill up is going to last.
http://www.lockheedmartin.com/wms/findPage.do?dsp=fec&ci=
15152&rsbci=11173&fti=0&ti=0&sc=400
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/FTPROOT/features/beamon1.pdf
My reading has convinced me that wind power isn't as "relatively" expensive as the conventional wisdom would have it. For one thing, once it is built, the "fuel" is almost "free" and therefore, with very low price volatility (risk). And, if you believe in peak oil, then high fuel prices and volatility will be (are?) the norm. (How about 30-year fuel contracts? Under huge price increases, most of the suppliers will simply go bankrupt, and the power company will then have to pay market rates.) Capital and maintenance costs are high for wind, but no other generation method is exactly free. The following link gives another comparison:
http://www.earthscan.co.uk/news/article/mps/UAN/71/v/3/sp/
I think that one of the reasons that the USA has been on a wind power building binge is the subsidy, but I also think that the power companies have discovered a type of a gold mine in wind, and they are taking advantage of it. Maybe the wind power companies are pleading poor economics partly because they are attempting to milk us for more dollars. Heck, the oil industry does this all the time, and they get billions and massive tax breaks every year! Maybe the wind power industry is just drinking at the same trough.
It will be clearly the opposite IMO, and with the implied necessity of subsidies you will have to add a heightened tax burden as a nice little extra.
Regarding the cost - above 10-15% wind penetration we will have to find a way to store that wind energy and start building expensive storages in a geometric progression. Nobody included these costs in this article and noone included the costs of maintaining a fossil powered backup capacity even with penetration well below 10%. But of course who cares, what is important is to show the public that we do something to reduce fossil fuels usage. Blah.
Let us not fool ourselves, wind is not THE answer. It could be one of the answers but relying on it to replace all nuclear, gas and coal is simply not serious. I'd also say irresponsible, IMO.
According to my Southern California Edison stub, I got 3% of my 2004 power from wind (1% solar, 1% small hydro, 2% biomass, 9% large hydro, 11% geothermal, 18% coal, 22% nuke, 33% natural gas).
(In terms of weaning us off corporations ... the "off grid" stuff does continue to evolve with some technology overlap.)
15% wind and 19% gas would look much better IMO. The obsolate NG power plants could be left as a backup for wind. All you will need is some NG storage facilities. Hope your grid is not too decentralized.
(the "off grid" stuff is doomed. we are all in the Matrix and nobody is researching red pills)
Note that in our state there is a law against billboards, and there are a lot more pristine scenic views than one can find elsewhere, upstate New York for example. (I live in an absolutely gorgeous valley, that has "scenic view corridor" building restrictions.) So here, wind farms would not be just another blight on the landscape, but the only "blight".
That's also a part of the resistance.
I had just finished listening to a local radio broadcast about the past-present-future of the Vermont landscape. A very educated woman spoke authoritatively for about 30 minutes in front of a live audience about why Vermont is like it is today. Great program, very stimulating, and then right at the end she was asked what she thought about wind farms. She responded, "I'd rather look at windmills than depend on oil from the Middle East." And she got a huge round of applause!
OK, with more windmills, we'd use less coal, hydro, nuclear and natural gas to power the grid, but not oil in any appreciable way. At least not until the vehicle fleet gets converted to plug-in hybrids. Which is obviously some time off. People still don't seem to get the fact that we don't use oil for electricity generation, but for transportation.
Running out of cheap fossil energy is not going to be the problem, people's reaction to the situation will be. I think we could compare it to someone thinking they have a lot of money in the bank, and then one day their debit card gets rejected, and they find out the account is empty and the money is gone. Very upsetting! Who spent all the money! What are we going to do now! Hey you, give me some of your money!
</off topic observations>
I attended an Audubon meeting a couple months ago, talking about the issues around windpower in Maine, and those battle-lines were trenched in deep.
I should dig up a picture of Lovely Santa Barbara, CA, with her cute little Row of Oil Platforms out along the shore, there.
I would think that a township that OK's a windfarm would, by all rights, be looking at the tax revenue from the Power Sales. If you've got the sites, I shouldn't think you'd need to sweeten the deal much to bring them in. Does that fit with Windpower economics? Not my field..
Bob
Sure, I am not sea side in Nantucket, but we have some nice fresh water lakes up here...
I have come to the opinion that there is no way to generate the amounts of power we need without some adverse impacts, and that goes for any method you may devise. But some are worse than others. And it seems to me that wind turbines are lower impact than most, especially when off shore or in existing industrial areas. Far better off shore than stuck where people actually live.
http://www.engr.mun.ca/~fkhan/EN-6601/Accidents.doc
One has to wonder what "carrot" was offered to Rep Young ?
There's no good way to store large amounts of electrical energy. Is that true? The wind energy is sporadic I assume. So it adds when it can? This then allows gas/coal/nuclear to be conserved? I think I read someplace that that's the hierarchy -- gas can be adjusted up and down most easily, nuclear least. So it saves gas mostly? But this then puts limits on how much wind can contribute. Does anyone know roughly what percentage that is? One still has to have the capacity to generate at almost full load without wind? And aside from all that, how big a wind farm would it take to light NYC? How much does wind change between day and night? How much can it be smoothed out by hooking up wind farms from different areas? Bottom line, how much can wind farms contribute to our energy needs?
Most of these things will only be known after major projects are built. Especially in offshore projects there will be a lower limit output that's granted for the all year - that's the granted conservation. Beyond that limit you'll have switch on and off gas generation.
For NYC try to get the yearly comsuption. Then you know that on average a wind turbine produces in a year it's plate MW times .3 times the nº of hours of the year. For a GE 3.2 (like the ones in Cape Wind), and for a REPower 5M (the world biggest):
GE 3.2 Yearly output = 3.2 * 0.3 * 8760 = 8410 MW
5M Yearly output = 5 * 0.3 * 8760 = 13140 MW
This 0.3 factor varies from place to place, in the North Sea it'll be higher. To get a better feeling 8410 MW are roughly equal to 4950 boe, 13140 MW to 7730 boe.
Know you have the get the NYC yearly electric comsumption and divide it by those figures - that will give the therotical number of turbines needed.
All the other questions are really hard to answer generically.
On average a US household consumes 10 MW per year.
So a 3.2 MW turbine in theory supports 840 households, a 5 MW 130 households.