Whither Wind?
(Page 5 of 7)
February/March 2007
By Charles Komanoff
Those power plant debates of yore weren’t about fuels and certainly not about global warming, but about whether to top off the grid with new supply or energy saved through conservation. The energy arena of old was local and incremental. The new one is global and all-out. With Earth’s climate, and the world as we know and love it, now imperiled, topping off the regional grid pales in comparison to the task at hand. In the new, ineluctable struggle to rescue the climate from fossil fuels, efficiency and “renewables” (solar, biomass and wind) must all be pushed to the max.
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A New Ethic for WIND POWER Siting
Part of the problem with wind power, I suspect, is that it’s hard to weigh the effects of any one wind farm against the greater problem of climate change. It’s much easier to comprehend the immediate impact of wind farm development than the less tangible losses from a warming Earth.
Intruding the unmistakable human hand on any landscape for wind power is, of course, a loss in local terms, and no small one. The inevitable access roads for erecting and serving the turbines can be damaging ecologically as well as symbolically. In contrast, you will feel few benefits of the wind farm in a tangible way. If the thousands of tons of coal a year that your wind farm will replace were being mined a mile from your house, it might be a little easier to take.
If Congress enacted an energy policy that harnessed the spectrum of cost-effective energy efficiency together with renewable energy, thereby ensuring that fossil fuel use shrank starting today, a windmill’s contribution to climate protection might actually register, providing psychic reparation for an altered viewshed. If carbon fuels were taxed for their damage to the climate, wind power’s profit margins would widen. And surrounding communities could extract bigger tax revenues from wind farms, which could go to a new high school, or land acquired for a nature preserve.
It’s very human to ask, “Why me? Why my ridgelinee, my seascape, my viewshed?” These questions have been difficult to answer; there has been no framework — local or national — to guide wind farm siting by ranking potential wind power locales for their ecological and community suitability. That’s a gap that the Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC) is trying to bridge, using its home state of Massachusetts as a model.
According to AMC research director Kenneth Kimball, who heads the project, Massachusetts has 96 linear miles of “Class 4” ridgelines, where wind speeds average 14 mph or more, the threshold for profitability with current technology. Assuming each mile can support seven to nine large turbines of roughly 2 megawatts each, the state’s uplands could theoretically host 1,500 megawatts of wind power. (Coastal areas such as Nantucket Sound weren’t included in the survey.)
Kimball’s team sorted all 96 miles into four classes of governance — Appalachian Trail corridor or similar lands where development is prohibited; other federal or state conservation lands; Massachusetts open space lands; and private holdings. Then they overlaid these with ratings denoting conflicts with recreational, scenic and ecological values. The resulting matrix suggests the following rankings of wind power suitability:
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