Whither Wind?
(Page 3 of 7)
February/March 2007
By Charles Komanoff
Some of the bad press is warranted. The first giant wind farm, comprising 6,000 small, fast-spinning turbines placed directly in Northern California’s principal raptor flyway, Altamont Pass, in the early 1980s rightly inspired the epithet “Cuisinarts for birds.” The longer blades on newer turbines rotate more slowly and thus kill far fewer birds, but bat kills are being reported at wind farms in the Appalachian Mountains; as many as 2,000 bats were hacked to death at one 44-turbine installation in West Virginia. And as with any machine, some of the nearly 10,000 industrial-grade windmills now operating in the United States may groan or shriek when something goes wrong.
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At the same time, however, there is an apocalyptic quality to much anti-wind advocacy that seems wildly disproportionate to the actual harm, particularly in the overall context of not just other sources of energy but modern industry in general. New York state opponents of wind farms call their Web site “Save Upstate New York.” In Massachusetts, a group called Green Berkshires argues that wind turbines “are enormously destructive to the environment,” but does not perform the obvious comparison to the destructiveness of fossil fuel-based power. Although the intensely controversial Cape Wind project “poses an imminent threat to navigation and raises many serious maritime safety issues,” according to the anti-wind Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, the alliance was strangely silent when an oil barge bound for the region’s electric power plant spilled 98,000 gallons of its deadly, gluey cargo into Buzzards Bay in 2003.
Of course rhetoric is standard fare in advocacy, particularly the environmental variety with its salvationist mentality — environmentalists always like to feel they are “saving” this valley or that species. You can spend hours sifting through the anti-wind Web sites and find no mention at all of the climate crisis, let alone wind power’s potential to help avert it.
In fact, many wind power opponents deny that wind power displaces much, if any, fossil fuel burning. This notion is mistaken. It is true that since wind is variable, individual wind turbines can’t be counted on to produce on demand, so the power grid can’t necessarily retire fossil fuel generators at the same rate as it takes on windmills. The coal- and oil-fired generators will still need to be there, waiting for a windless day. But when the wind blows, those generators can spin down. That’s how the grid works; it allocates electrons.
What about the need to keep a few power stations burning fuel so they can instantaneously ramp up and counterbalance fluctuations in wind energy output? The grid requires this ballast, known as spinning reserve, in any event both because demand is always changing and because power plants of any type are subject to unforeseen breakdowns. The additional variability due to wind generation is slight — wind speeds don’t suddenly drop from strong to calm, at least not for every turbine in a wind farm and certainly not for every wind farm on the grid.
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