Whither Wind?
(Page 4 of 7)
February/March 2007
By Charles Komanoff
With very few exceptions, then, wind output can be counted on to displace fossil fuel burning one for one. No less than other nonpolluting technologies such as bicycles or photovoltaics, wind power is truly an anti-fossil fuel.
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What Windmills Signify
I made my first wind farm visits in the fall of 2005, to the 20-windmill Fenner Windpower Project and the seven-windmill Madison Windpower Project, both located in Madison County, N.Y. It was windy, though not unusually so, according to the locals. All 27 turbines were spinning, presumably at their full 1.5-megawatt ratings. For every hour in full use, each windmill was keeping a couple of barrels of oil, or an entire half-ton of coal, in the ground. Of course wind turbines don’t generate full power all the time because the wind doesn’t blow at a constant speed. The Madison County turbines have an average annual output rate of 28 percent, meaning that over the course of a year, they generate between one-fourth and one-third of the electricity they would produce if they always ran at full capacity. But that still means an average 2,500 hours per year of full output for each turbine. Multiply those hours by the 27 turbines at Fenner and Madison, and a good 160,000 barrels of oil or 40,000 tons of coal were being kept underground by the two wind farms each year.
The windmills, spinning at 15 revolutions per minute — that’s one revolution every four seconds — were clean and elegant in a way that no oil derrick or coal dragline could ever be. The nonlinear arrangement of the Fenner turbines situated them comfortably among the traditional farmhouses, paths and roads, while at Madison, a grassy hillside site, the windmills were more prominent but still unaggressive. The windmills didn’t seem like a violation of the landscape. The turning vanes called to mind a natural force — the wind — in a way that a cell phone or microwave tower, for example, most certainly does not.
They were also relatively quiet. My sound readings, taken at distances ranging from 100 to 2,000 feet from the tower base, topped out at 64 decibels and went as low as 45 — the approximate noise range for a small-town residential cul-de-sac.
Thinking back on that November day, I’ve come to realize that a windmill, like any large structure, is a signifier. Cell phone towers signify the intrusion of quotidian life — the reminder to stop at the 7-Eleven, the unfinished business at the office. The windmills I saw in upstate New York signified, for me, not just displacement of destructive fossil fuels, but acceptance of the conditions of inhabiting the Earth.
What about the argument that the potential energy produced by wind turbines could be saved instead through energy-efficiency measures? Examples include swapping out incandescent light bulbs in favor of compact fluorescents, replacing inefficient kitchen appliances and extinguishing “vampire” loads by plugging watt-sucking electronic devices into on-off power strips. If this notion sounds familiar, it’s because it has been raised in virtually every power plant dispute since the 1970s. But the ground has shifted, now that we have such overwhelming proof that we’re standing on the threshold of catastrophic climate change.
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