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Tilting At Windmills
GreedyCapitalist writes "Anne Applebaum writes in the Washington Post about environmentalists who are opposing renewable energy sources." From the article: "Already, activists and real estate developers have stalled projects across Pennsylvania, West Virginia and New York. In Western Maryland, a proposal to build wind turbines alongside a coal mine, on a heavily logged mountaintop next to a transmission line, has just been nixed by state officials who called it too environmentally damaging. Along the coast of Nantucket, Mass. -- the only sufficiently shallow spot on the New England coast -- a coalition of anti-wind groups and summer homeowners, among them the Kennedy family, also seems set to block Cape Wind, a planned offshore wind farm. Their well-funded lobbying last month won them the attentions of Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska), who, though normally an advocate of a state's right to its own resources, has made an exception for Massachusetts and helped pass an amendment designed to kill the project altogether."
a proposal to build wind turbines alongside a coal mine, on a heavily logged mountaintop next to a transmission line, has just been nixed by state officials who called it too environmentally damaging.
Yeah, because in 2 or 3 decades, when the sea rises and countless disaster stories that will make the LA flooding look like a joke will occur every year, the weather will turn hot and sterile, or brutally cold where it was mild before,... I'm sure we'll all be happy that the mountaintop's view has been preserved...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Whatever happened with the idea of building a giant pipeline to generate power? It would be 100 miles or so long, and 10 feet wide. The last half-mile at each end it would taper out to about 20 feet. As weather fronts passed over it, the pressure difference would push air through the pipe, where it would achieve supersonic speed (due to the tapering).
In the middle was a turbine that would work in both directions (as the pressure difference could go either way).
Bigtime Consulting - "We're the best because we cost the most"
In western WI, a private company is looking at building a wind farm in my county.
I thought people would be happy about it, usually anything renewable is looked well upon, hell 5 miles away there is a manure digester that was praised for being "forward-looking".
But this project is facing major opposition from the local residents because of supposedly lower property value.
Funny thing about it, they don't want a windfarm ruining thier view, but they have no problem building a $500,000 house on a previously wooded hillside, and running the nice road up the side of the hill to drive there.
They can kiss my ass, as least i am getting something from the windmill.
More than that, the hard core "environmentalists" want the downfall of industrial society. Extreme environmentalism is just the best way to accomplish this. Look at groups like ELF, what are they really fighting for, the environment? By setting things on fire? I think not.
Actually, no. Most of Cape Cod's residents are pretty poor, relatively speaking. Living costs are insane. Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard both have huge problems with drug and alcohol abuse because there's nothing to do on the islands, and life is pretty rough. Outside of the tourist seaason, practically nobody is around.
The Cape isn't dominated by million dollar homes; to a large extent it's "middle class" people who have a small summer place.
These issues are largely being driven (read: funded) by a very small minority that doesn't even live there.
Please help metamoderate.
No. You're confusing the loony, back-to-nature, anti-civilization crowd with the moneyed, "as long as it doesn't involve actual sacrifice", feel-good faux-enviromentalist crowd.
Completely opposite ends of the green spectrum: Extremists vs. dabblers. Wannabe terrorists vs. people who put a bumper sticker on their SUV.
It's like equating Falwell's crazies with fair-weather Christians. It offends people in the middle who care about the message but haven't gone so far as to be unable to understand it anymore.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Nowadays, there's no way to legally replicate such marvellous accomplishments as our fathers bequeathed to us. No more Hoover Dams, no more offshore drilling, no more drilling in the wilderness. Mind you, I hold nature worthy of preservation but I also hold technology worthy of furtherance. There must be a balancing point somewhere; we seem to have missed it.
You ever think that our grandparents are only dieing of old age because their progeny is embarassing them? Just sayin', is all.
Wikipedia has a lot more balanced discussion of the pros and cons of wind power:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power
To sum up: Intermittancy is a non-issue where associated with pumped storage. Europe's hydroelectric dams, for example, have enough water behind them to power the entire continent for a month, and only take minutes to change their output. There are plenty of other efficient ways to deal with the intermittancy issue; it just requires preplanning instead of using wind as a patch. For most systems, no extra storage is needed and no waste occurs unless you start getting to a large percentage of your power coming from wind. This is due to the fact that normal powerplants can fall off the grid without notice as well. This doesn't occur as often as wind cycles up and down, but because it can occur, and the results of a loss of power are unacceptable to Americans, we have to have the surplus capacity anyways. Wind power output can generally be predicted well for hours in advance, which is more than enough for most existing plants to ramp up their generation (some plants take as little as 30 seconds). This ignores demand-side management as well. For example, if you have wind power running an electricity-intensive industrial process (such as aluminum refining or desalinization), you just ramp up and down plant capacity as the power situation dictates. The wider the turbines are spread out, the more constant the wind is. Also, wind tends to be inversely correlated with solar energy (cloudy days and nights tend to be windier)
There are lots of refs at the bottom of the page.
Also, your linked article may want to recheck how "little" global warming hydroelectric power (which wind often displaces) causes. Dams displace CO2, but they increase methane production; methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas. In some cases, hydroelectric plants are worse global warming contributors, per MW, than coal. Pairing wind with hydroelectric allows you to reduce the scale of the hydroelectric plant use (or, conversely, to get a lot more power out of a give amount of hydroelectric potential)
"This may be presumptuous..." "That's my favorite kind of 'This'."
Back in the 1980ies here in Denmark, a left-lunatic-fringe school built the first windmill and published a report titled "Let a thousand windmills bloom"
They were ridiculed and everybody were adamant that windmills would spoil the landscape and do things to the cows milk etc.
Then the government introduced a subsidy on electricity from windmills and suddenly all the farmers could see a good business case and today we have most of the country plastered with windmills.
As a result Denmark gets around 20% of its electricity from wind nowadays.
Once energy prices get high enough, windmills will stop ruining USA and become "a sensible economic investment".
BTW: The trend here is to put new windmills off the coast because water disturbs the wind less than land.
Poul-Henning
Poul-Henning Kamp -- FreeBSD since before it was called that...
In my backyard we have some wind mills. Well, figuratively speaking (they are in the backyards of friends of mine, actually and within maybe 15 miles). In my state, Wind power is taking off. There has been some controversy exactly as you describe from the "I built my house here and don't want to see your windmills" crowd, but all and all this has not been a huge concern.
What is driving the projects here in Washington State has been a set of deals with local farmers to rent space on farmland for the windmills. The farmer then gets a percentage of the proceeds (and is thus farming wind), and the power company (usually a county PUD) gets the space for the windmills. Works out well for everyone.
Now, it is true that there are some environmental hazards of windmills, regarding migrating birds, and the like. However, these are small in comparison to the problems of coal, nuclear, and even hydroelectic on the scale that it has been implemented in our state. Wind is a good option if approached well and built up in moderation.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I'm related to an anti-wind activist and I'll tell you what they think. First off, they complain that there is far too much population on the planet. They think people should stop having children, etc. Think euthanasia is a good thing, etc. They are the basically lower the population at any and all costs and don't go creating any more energy or else it will encourage people to have more babies. They think that since they have lots of money they'll be the last ones kicked out of the lifeboat when the difficult times come. Really, they are living so damned well that a huge drop in their standard of living wouldn't really mean that much to them if it meant that all the less desirable inhabitants of the planet were eliminated. This position has actually become quite popular in recent years and I hear it more often and more vehemently. I just wish people would come right out and say it. Instead they take positions on various issues that they think will promote their aims and just pay lip service to whatever window dressing makes the rest of the coalition they're with happy.
The micro-utopian organic gardening crowd aren't a problem; they're the ones getting high and practicing what they preach without bothering the rest of us. The ELF types are the dangerous ones, and they exist in EVERY political movement. The real problem is that all they really want is an excuse to use force; they'd feel equaly at home in the communist movement, or as anarchists, or even as militant conservatives. For people like that, the actual goal or ideology is secondary - it's the hate and violence that's important.
Noise is a concern to people who have seen the California wind turbines from the 70's in operation. The lower RPM's, improved blade design, and increased tower clearance make the new, larger designs much quieter. I think it's almost eery how quiet they are.
Birds are a pretty minor concern as well. Some people like to point to a valley in California where the hawk population decreased by 90% after the turbines were installed. That was one exceptional region, and the newer designs are also better in that regards. The newer 1.5 MW turbines are huge! The blades typically clear the ground by about 50 meters and the birds generally below the swept area. The lower RPM's also give them more time to dodge the blades if they do get the crazy notion to fly through the swept area.
By the way, I have a bone to pick with you about your turbines over there in eastern Washington. One of your boys got dropped in the middle of our freeways here in Portland last fall. Really messed up traffic to have a 100 ton generator sitting in the road. If that ain't proof that wind power is evil, I don't know what is.
Your first link claimed he hadn't changed anything in Mims' letter, but in fact cut an unspecified amount, likely the more cogent part. At any rate it all has no bearing on the case at hand. Attacking the messenger is not a valid tactic.
Your second link is an attempt at the old guilt-by-association argument - or perhaps even more tenuous. Something along the lines of "Al-jazeera reports on Bush and on al-Quaeda, therefore Bush is linked to Al-Quaeda"
Your third link is to a TV station whose idea of invesigative reporting goes no further than asking Pianka if he wanted to kill everybody and then taking everything he says as unvarnished truth.
Your fourth link is where you cribbed most of your post, and it is pure primate territorial display - "The wingnut echo chamber has recently gone insane
Here's a better link to someone proposing that Pinka didn't mean it:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/04/pianka
And here are a couple of first hand refutations in reply to that:
So no, Pianka isn't likely to spread a virus but he is looking forward to the deaths of billions of people.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
I have really strong feelings about this, so excuse me if I rant a bit.
The so-called Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, i.e. those people trying to stop wind turbines in the water off of cape cod, is headed by William I. Koch, who is a billionaire by way of his family's Oil & Gas fortune. The Alaska congressmen are just trying to protect the value of the what Alaska is worth - which is a lot of money when the US can get oil from nowhere else -- of course they don't want competition from states who would rather generate the power at home without expensive Alaskan oil. Ted Kennedy is opposed for an unknown reason - but the other Massachusetts senator, the famous John Kerry, is a supporter of Wind Power.
There was a document leaked a while back showing the fund raising strategy of the professional fund raising company from new york who was hired by this Alliance - and the strategy biols down to "Don't bother with the poor or middle class - raise money from the ultra-rich" -- the rich who don't have to suffer from energy crisis that we are going through, or some who even get richer because of it.
I am going to stop now, before I burst an artery...
It all depends on the group, and their agenda.
Are you against the pollution that the coal fired plants put off, and the potential radiation from a nuclear plant? Then you'd like wind, solar, hydroelectric, and wave power.
Are you worried about the woodland critters and plants? Then solar is probably out, because you'd be covering the ground to some degree with panels.
Are you worried about the birds? Then wind power is out.
Are you worried about fish? Then hydroelectric is out.
Are you worried about whales? Then wave power is out.
There are non-environmental people against various things too. I believe it was in Connecticut, the local government was pushing for wind power. It wasn't the environmentalists there complaining, it was the locals complaining about the potential for noise and, god forbid, windmills being seen if you were to drive 20 miles and climb up on a hill to get a look.
I think nuclear plants look pretty cool. They have a particular asthetic look to the domed reactor and huge cooling towers. Then again, it's not quite as pleasing to take a boat anywhere near the warm water outlet and not find anything living in the water.
I'm all for solar, wind, and wave power. Not only can it be deployed fairly easily, but it can eventually be moved for whatever reason. Maybe another location is found to be more productive. Hydroelectric is nice, but it does require a huge building project to accomplish it, and usually flooding large areas to get the required water pressure.
I live by a really great place to put a wind and solar farm. There's a ridge with almost constant wind. The south facing side of the hills could be home to huge solar panel arrays. The residents in the valley below would never have it. There are a few million of them, living in smog year round. Clean power would destroy their pretty view. Of course, they can't usually see the view through the smog.
Environmentalists would complain that it would hurt the natural ecosystem. Sure, some coyotes may get killed. If the neighbors wouldn't have complained about gunshots, I would have killed some on my own. What about the small woodland critters? Well, my cats killed off quite a few, probably numbering near the same as any power generation systems would have. In nature, things die. It's not a perfect world, even though people have their perfect picture of it in their minds. I guess most environmentalists have never seen a house cat come home with parts of a small bird, snake, lizard, or anything else that may move enough for a cat to play with. It's nothing compared to what the larger animals do to each other.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.