Bloggin in the Wind

Should we or shouldn't we? In the September|October issue of Orion, Charles Komanoff raises serious questions and issues for both sides of the wind power debate. We'd like to hear your opinion. Click on "Comments" below to add your voice.

Peter Stiglin
Online Editor
http://www.orionmagazine.org/

NEW POST SEPTEMBER 25, 2006: CHARLES KOMANOFF RESPONDS TO READERS

The extensive commentary on "Whither Wind?" is heartening. I'd like to thank readers who voiced support. Here I reply to some of the criticisms. - C.K.

Re Comment #7

Jon Boone is a gifted writer. His Sept. 2005 Contemporary Aesthetics article, The Aesthetic Dissonance of Industrial Wind Machines, is fascinating and heartfelt. Unfortunately, Boone presumes that wind power averts little, if any, fossil-fuel burning, and that fallacy pervades and invalidates his arguments.

If large windmills didn't displace carbon-emitting fuels, they would of course be blots on the landscape, like any 300-foot structure that does no good. But as I tried to explain in "Whither Wind?," wind power saves fuel at a virtual 1-for-1 rate. With few exceptions, each kilowatt-hour from wind displaces a kilowatt-hour elsewhere on the grid, thus averting the burning of fossil fuel that otherwise would have generated it. That's a fact, and Boone and other anti-wind activists can't wish it away.

Boone wants wind power's allegedly "massive subsidies" tied to reductions in the use of fossil fuels. Yet wind power's production tax credit (now 1.9 cents per kWh produced) is based on that very tie, insofar as the power grid reduces its call on fossil production in direct proportion to wind power's contribution.

If fuel use nationwide, or even in regions where wind turbines operate, keeps increasing, that's not the fault of wind power (or wind developers); at least the wind turbines are helping hold down the increase. Responsibility for reducing energy usage lies elsewhere - in projects like those I pursue in New York City, such as Greening A Block and bicycle promotion, and analogous ones that I trust Boone, with his love of wild nature, pursues as well.

Re Comment #17

This comment confuses capacity (megawatts) with energy (megawatt-hours), and thus misinterprets the conclusions of Germany's leading wind-generating utility, E.ON Netz.

Netz and I are speaking with one voice concerning fuel displacement by wind. This is from the Netz report, Wind Year 2003, An Overview: "[W]ind power plants cannot replace the usual power station capacities to a significant degree, but can basically only save on fuel." From "Whither Wind?": "[S]ince wind is variable ... the power grid can't necessarily retire fossil fuel generators at the same rate as it takes on windmills... But when the wind blows, those generators can spin down... It follows that more electrons from wind power mean proportionately fewer from fossil fuel burning." Netz and I thus are in accord that wind power displaces fossil fuels; whether the fossil-fuel stations are dismantled is irrelevant.

Re Comment #22

This commenter asks if coal-fired plants can ramp up or down with fluctuations in wind power output. Yes, they can, quite easily and with little or no loss in efficiency, just as they do with fluctuations in customer demand.

Re Comment #23

I would like Yen Chin to know that I wrestle constantly with the issues he raises.

Like him, I put "conservation" before "efficiency," though the line between the two can be blurry in practice. Aside from a computer, I have no electronic gadgets - not even a cell phone. I don't own a car, and my wife and I are raising our kids without television. In our home, compact fluorescent lights outnumber incandescent bulbs 28 to 2. And my commitment to bicycling, for its simplicity, not to mention independence from America's murderous oil-and-car culture, is documented on my Web site.

In my environmental awakening, circa 1970, I thought that a conservation way of life could save the Western canyonlands from fossil-fuel destruction. Now I believe it's essential to saving our planet from climate destruction. But I don't know how others can be moved to embrace it. I try to live by Gandhi's dictum, "Be the change you want in the world," but the results seem uncertain and slow.

While I harbor hope for a planet-wide shift in consciousness, I believe our best bet for meeting the climate crisis is to push energy-efficiency so that total energy use shrinks despite the continuing onslaught of "stuff" that Yen Chin and I both abjure. Because of efficiency's social and logistical limits, wind turbines will still be needed - big ones and lots of them - to quickly phase out carbon. Carbon tax-shifting is also a must to accelerate these transitions. Rather than crushing poor and middle-class households, as Yen Chin fears, ecological tax-shifting can be done progressively, as I explain in my essays at http://www.komanoff.net/fossil/.


Re Comment #24

Whether or not "our present culture will use as much power as can be generated" is beside the point. What determines electricity use isn't the capacity of the grid but the number and type of lights, motors, gadgets, etc. installed in our homes, businesses and factories, and how often they are turned on. Shrinking usage through conservation and efficiency while simultaneously installing wind turbines (and photovoltaics as they become affordable) is the fastest and surest way to remove fossil fuels from the electricity sector.

Re Comment #26

Tim Young is aggrieved by the despoliation of the natural world. As am I. His dystopian vision in which "the sight of a corporate owned wind development offers reassurance that everything will work out fine" is as foreign to me as it is to him.

What I would find welcome in that sight is that it would signify "negative despoliation" elsewhere - damage that won't take place because the wind generation is displacing fuels that would otherwise be dug up and burned for power (see Comment #2, in which a coalfield resident agrees). And I also hold out hope that by taking the dirty secret of energy production out of the shadows of West Virginia and Wyoming and Kuwait and putting it squarely in front of our picture windows and windshields, the sight of the wind farm will spur some of us to take responsibility for conserving energy and otherwise minimizing our imprint on the natural world.

As for Young's urging me to stick to my own backyard, I already spend most of my time on New York matters, as he can see by visiting http://www.greeningablock.org/ and http://www.cars-suck.org/, as well as http://www.komanoff.net/. Still, not all issues are local, as the ruins of the World Trade Center, seven blocks from my home, constantly remind me.

Re Comments #29 and #32

George Marsh is correct that the Fenner Wind Farm hasn't yet attained the 34% capacity factor I claimed for it in my article. Based on annual 2002-2005 output data provided by the project's owner, ENEL North America, the correct figure is 28%. I apologize for that error.

Annual fossil-fuel displacement by the 20-turbine Fenner project is thus 18% less than I represented in my article (since 28/34 equals 0.82). Assuming this correction also applies to the seven-turbine Madison project, fuel displacement by the 27 wind turbines in Madison County in their first four years was approximately 650,000 barrels of oil or 160,000 tons of coal -enough to cover a 50-acre farm with a two-foot-high oil slick or coal pile.

Marsh belittles this on grounds that "The rising rate of growth in demand for electricity likely will swallow any offset in use of coal due [to] output to the grid by a few dozen wind turbines." I addressed this straw man in my reply to Comment #7. Marsh can cite projections of increased coal use from now until the Greenland ice sheet melts away, but they don't change the fact that coal usage, whether rising or falling, will be less with the wind turbines than without.

Re Comment #33

This commenter seized on Commenter #27's estimate of the possible cost of reserve power for a future 70% wind-based grid, and absurdly applied it to a present-day power system (the United Kingdom's) which derives only 1-2% of its energy from wind. Accordingly, his calculation of wind power subsidies for shoring up the grid is, shall we say, overblown.

More tellingly, neither this nor any other anti-wind blogger saw fit to mention the grand-daddy of all energy subsidies - exclusion of climate damage from the prices paid for fossil fuels. Why is that?

Re Comment #36

"I never thought I would see the day when the Sierra Club would spend money to promote the energy industry," said this commenter, lamenting the Club's endorsement not just of "wind power" in the abstract but of actual wind projects on the ground. As one whose life was shaped by the vision and example of David Brower, I say hooray that the Sierra Club is keeping the promises it made in bygone struggles against coal and nuclear power, to support renewable energy once it became viable.

"When did the environmental movement give up on population control, energy conservation and efficiency, and reduced consumption as the salvation for our planet?," this commenter asked? Probably when it looked squarely at the evidence of onrushing climate destruction and realized that time had run out and that henceforth the good old "either/or" approach to eliminating fossil fuels was too little, too late.

Re Comment #44

I'm no more a "wind industry apologist" than this commenter is a coal and oil industry apologist. Labels aren't helpful, and I suggest we steer clear of them.

As a math guy, I do mind uninformed attacks on my arithmetic. I'll answer them here, with the caution that not every reader will find it worth the slog.

Indiana's area is 36,418 square miles, and Maine's is 35,385, per the Census Bureau. Those respective figures are 3% and 6% less than the 37,500 square miles that 400,000 wind turbines would encompass (400,000 x 60 acres divided by 640 acres per square mile equals 37,500), supporting my statement that the turbines "would need ... roughly all the land in Indiana or Maine." Which of course isn't the same as saying that those turbines could necessarily fit into either state. Similarly, my assertion that 400,000 Cape Wind turbine bases require only 6 square miles, was simply a device to help readers translate abstract numbers into a physical correlative.

The Indiana/Maine land comparison doesn't need to be tripled, since the 400,000-turbine figure already includes an adjustment for capacity factor. U.S. electricity generation in 2005 was 4,040 TWh (terawatt-hours, or trillion watt-hours). Of that amount, 2,014 TWh were generated from coal, 122 TWh from petroleum, and 752 TWh from natural gas (Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, Monthly Energy Review), for a total of 2,888 TWh from fossil fuels, or 71.5%. I rounded 71.5% upward to 75% because for the next half-dozen years at least, most growth in U.S. electricity generation will come from burning additional fossil fuels. To produce 75% of 4,040 TWh requires 1 TW operating at an average capacity factor of 34.6% (because 1 TW x 0.346 x 24 h/d x 365 d/y = 4,040 TWh x 0.75). Since a terawatt is one million megawatts, 1 TW of wind power capacity can be provided by 400,000 turbines of 2.5 MW each.

It's surprising that this commenter charged that I "dismiss conservation," given my constant invocation of the need to go all-out for conservation and energy efficiency, not to mention my allusions to my work in that arena. It's no knock at conservation to point out that it will take more than conservation alone to slash carbon emissions and save our climate. As for his contention that my "claim ... on one-for-one substitution of wind energy for fossil fuel plant production ... is patent nonsense," he can either read elsewhere in this post or consult any utility grid operator.

Last - for what it's worth - the term "orders of magnitude" is usually employed to give meaning to a large ratio or factor. It is calculated as the logarithm of the ratio (base 10). Hence, "four orders of magnitude" indeed denotes a factor of 10,000, not 1,000, as he claimed.

Final Note

Readers wishing a footnoted copy of the text of "Whither Wind?" with citations and calculations, should contact me directly, at http://www.komanoff.net/.