How and why did windmills lose their appeal with the Green Crowd?

[JRDelirious]

Around these parts, we got a wide gamut of proponents and opponents.

Proponents include:
[ul]“Green power” types who are really committed to renewable energy on the merit of nonpollution and sparing of resources

“Energy Independence” types who just want to cut back on the oil habit

Farmers who feel it would not be too bad a deal to get paid a royalty for siting these things in the middle of pastures, after all the cows won’t complain

Mayors who feel that hey, some tax assessment for the towers or else a Payment In Lieu Of Taxes could come the town’s way for hosting this

Industries who feel this could be a viable alternative to buying power from the power Authority grid[/ul]
Overt opponents include:
[ul]Species-conservation types who do worry about endangered birds ramming into the devices

Landscape conservationist types who worry that this will disrupt sightlines and change land-uses for the worst

Tourism sector types, along the lines of “people pay $200 a night to see unspoiled tropical beach, not windmills”

Some homeowners on similar grounds

Whoever is the political opposition to the mayor, just to be contrary.[/ul]

Not really opposed in principle but might as well be:
[ul]A certain flavor of our hard-left types who seem opposed on principle to anyone possibly making a profit out of stewarding a natural resource

Another faction who seem opposed to anyone NOT LOCAL making a profit that way

Rural poor communities who, sadly, have gotten TOO used to some slick-talking outsider coming in, setting up a boondoggle next to THEM rather than to the nice neighborhood, and then leavign them shafted.

Large sectors of both the management and union of the Power Authority, who operate out of the belief that since they can no longer ban anyone else from being in this business, then they should be able to prevent such “anyone elses” from undercutting their price or showing you can do the same job with 1/3 the employees

Factions within our harder line environmental organizations, who seem to feel that making it cleaner and easier to generate electricity goes against the true goal of reversing the consumption-based economy[/ul]

[Airman_Doors_USAF]

@RTFirefly

The one instance I can recall where they’ve run into big trouble in the U.S. was the whole Martha’s Vineyard thing, and that seemed almost set up as an opportunity to create bullshit opposition. The U.S. has vast areas of practically deserted territory in its interior, but they were proposing to set up turbines where they’d have cluttered a view that rich people pay a lot of money for.

So much for that good old Democratic egalitarianism. Yes, it is indeed a cheap shot, but I note without even a hint of irony that the Republicans are castigated for their irresponsible energy policy, often with the tagline “the rich keep getting richer and the little guy gets slugged”, and yet somehow you find a way to defend the rights of the rich residents of Martha’s Vineyard who would have the windfarms put anywhere but in their backyard in the name of clean energy, conservation, and environmental responsibility.

Hypocrisy does not become you, especially when it’s so transparent as to demand that someone calls you out on it.

[Steve_MB]

A mix of factors:

1. NIMBYism: Windmills are fairly large, intruding upon the view and (if close enough) making noise.

2. Bird/bat kills from flying into windmill blades.

3. Technophobia. For some factions of the environmental movement, the goal isn’t to generate energy in a less damaging manner – it’s to end high-tech civilization as inherently evil in itself.

[Kimstu]

@Airman Doors

So much for that good old Democratic egalitarianism. Yes, it is indeed a cheap shot, but I note without even a hint of irony that the Republicans are castigated for their irresponsible energy policy, often with the tagline “the rich keep getting richer and the little guy gets slugged”, and yet somehow you find a way to defend the rights of the rich residents of Martha’s Vineyard who would have the windfarms put anywhere but in their backyard in the name of clean energy, conservation, and environmental responsibility.

Um, Airman, did you notice that RTFirefly in the first sentence that you quoted described the anti-Cape-Wind stance of rich Martha’s Vineyard residents as “bullshit opposition”? I really don’t think that Rufus was actually trying to defend the anti-wind-farm position there.

[Kimstu]

@Maastricht

I’m beginning to suspect these people are not really interested in solutions, only in placing blame and making us feel guilty.

Well, that’s certainly true for some subset of any social or political movement. There are always going to be some people who just like to be “anti-” and to buck the trend of popular opinion, irrespective of ideological consistency or practical common sense.

I think what you’re seeing now is the result of the success of the wind-power concept; it’s become sufficiently mainstream that the “anti-” zealots consider it more chic to oppose it than to support it. Moreover, as a mainstream policy it comes in for a lot more criticism, and a greater variety of criticism, than it did when it was just a tiny little idealistic cause loved by its champions but ignored by pretty much everyone else.

[marshmallow]

@jjimm

On the one hand you’ve got someone getting sentimental over a few mashed vultures. On the other you have someone who is concerned about meltdowns, radioactive leaks, poisoning of the water table, the continued production of tonnes of deadly waste, that can be co-opted for weapons of mass distruction, with a half-life of fifty thousand years plus (and thus the longevity of the infrastructure required to keep it under wraps for that long).

If the cure is worse than the disease then we rightly reject the cure. If these manageable issues with widespread nuclear use are worse than allowing global warming to run its course then global warming isn’t a problem at all IMO. YMMV.

[Airman_Doors_USAF]

@Kimstu

Um, Airman, did you notice that RTFirefly in the first sentence that you quoted described the anti-Cape-Wind stance of rich Martha’s Vineyard residents as “bullshit opposition”? I really don’t think that Rufus was actually trying to defend the anti-wind-farm position there.

Sorry, but in this thread he espoused the opinion that the windmills should be built elsewhere, to wit:

The other thing we get to do if we nationalize this, is insist that all the nondescript locales for good windfarms are filled up before we get to places that are notable for their beauty. Are all the good sites in the Great Plains already taken? Just askin’. But it seems unreasonable to have it both ways with respect to geography - if this is a state issue, then it’s up to Massachusetts residents to decide whether MV is the best site remaining in their state for a windfarm, and they can do that without the help of the rest of us. But if it’s a national issue, then the question is, is MV the next logical site nationwide to put a windfarm on?

At any rate, the reason the Vineyard is expensive is that people think it’s beautiful. The Plains have their austere beauty, too, but there’s a lot more Great Plains - hundreds of thousands of square miles of it - than there are people clamoring to spend time amidst its beauty. IOW, there seems to be a consensus of sorts that the beauty of the Plains is less scarce than that of the Vineyard.

This last comment totally ignores the idea that while electricity is transmissible to other places, what they make in Iowa with windfarms will never, ever make it to Massachusetts because it’s impractical and inefficient to do so. More:

I live about a mile from the Chesapeake Bay. I wouldn’t at all mind having a row of wind turbines a mile from my house, as long as they were a mile in the opposite direction from the Bay. But put 'em along the shore of the Bay, or even within a quarter-mile of it, and we’ve got an argument.

So I wouldn’t mind having them in my proverbial backyard - so long as they were in the less aesthetically troubling corner of it.

In other words, don’t spoil my view. A pretty lame argument in light of the Al Gore-Inconvenient Truth crowd stumping for something, anything to be done to save the environment.

To be fair, I’m willing to accept that RTFirefly has a more nuanced position, as indicated in this thread:

Certainly Cronkite and the Kennedys don’t speak for liberals in general. They certainly don’t speak for me.

However, I’m not really getting the nuance. It seems that he is mixing elements of NIMBYism and pragmatism but not sticking by either of them. And that’s OK, too. I’d like to pin this down with him, if he would be so gracious as to elaborate on his position.

As you may have noticed, he and I have many ideological differences (to say the least) and we’re both a bit passionate about them, but that being said I’m really not attacking him as much as I’m trying to figure out where he really stands. Even after all the conversations we have had I’ve rarely been able to pin him down on anything except his outright hatred for President Bush and the Republican Party, and that’s kinda obvious so I don’t really consider that much of an accomplishment.

[Sailboat]

@jjimm

It may stand, but it’s a silly point.

On the one hand you’ve got someone getting sentimental over a few mashed vultures. On the other you have someone who is concerned about meltdowns, radioactive leaks, poisoning of the water table, the continued production of tonnes of deadly waste, that can be co-opted for weapons of mass distruction, with a half-life of fifty thousand years plus (and thus the longevity of the infrastructure required to keep it under wraps for that long).

One is trivial sentimentality; the other is a serious concern that has a large amount of merit.

I’m not arguing pro-nuclear by any means, but to refer to bird/bat kills as a an issue of trivial sentimentality is pure ad hominem.

The conservation issue with windmills could be summed up as follows:

IF we build significant wind power it will mean large numbers of turbines in all the major consistent wind corridors…any lesser effort is not going to produce much power.

We KNOW migratory birds travel in dense streams, using consistent wind corridors to save energy. Entire populations migrate at the same time.

IF turbines kill a significant number (still a lot of conflicting claims on this!), they could make serious inroads on entire populations quickly. Dense streams are more vulnerable than onesy-twosy flying birds.

SINCE populations can “crash” at certain levels, in some cases requiring a minimum number of individuals for any to reproduce successfully (some birds can only raise young in lareg colonies), a sharp reduction, even one that does not kill a majority of a given poulation, could still drive a species into extinction.

I don’t regard the issue as proven in either direction, but the concern is based on much more than trivial sentimentality over a few dead buzzards.

Sailboat

[Steve_MB]

@jjimm

Wind turbines, that is, not conservationists.While I am an aspirant greenie who favours nuclear power, ya gotta admit that nuclear waste is a little bit more of a serious issue than shredded eagles.

Not really. There are quite a few ways to seal up nuclear waste so that it can’t get into the biosphere; there is just no way to build a windmill that can’t kill birds (as somebody noted, a cage around it would screw up the airflow).

[vibrotronica]

@Polycarp

…equipping a naval gun to fire a 50- or 100-foot Ninja death star across the countryside.

Now I’m even MORE in favor of wind power! It’s Real Ultimate Power!

[Anne_Neville]

There are some windmills visible from where I work. I think they’re cool-looking.

@Szlater

You know what they should do about windfarm nimbyism.

When they put the application in for building the wind farm, they should put an application in for building a nuclear powerstation on the same site and an asylum-seeker detention facility next door. The locals will expend all their energy preventing the nuclear plant and the detention facility from being approved the wind farm will slip by unnoticed, or possibly even welcomed.

I’m currently working on a plan to eliminate nuclear powerstation nimbyism, but I have a feeling it’ll have to involve paedophiles, terrorists and fox hunting with babies.

I really like this idea. Will you please move to the US and run for political office?

[RTFirefly]

It’s worth watching the ad to read this Salon article on wind power off the Delaware coast:

In Delaware, however, residents seem less concerned about their views than by the quality of their air and by scientists’ predictions that one-third of their state could be under water if Greenland melts. More than 90 percent of respondents in a University of Delaware opinion survey, said they preferred offshore wind to fossil fuels, even if they’d have to pay more.

So what about the birds? While the toll on birds flying into turbines has long been a grisly problem for wind buffs, it hasn’t influenced Delaware’s debate for some good reasons. A lot has changed since wind’s first huge bird-related fiasco: California’s ill-conceived Altamont Pass wind farm. Built in 1982 as one of the first U.S. commercial wind plants, its turbines were placed along a major raptor migration corridor, in the heart of the highest concentration of golden eagles in America. A report by the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity says the project has killed as many as 1,300 birds of prey each year.

Three things have happened in the past quarter-century, however. Strict avian-impact studies are now required for wind development. Wind technologies have become less lethal, with slower-moving blades and warning systems. And perhaps most important, as predictions of global-warming risks have become steadily more alarming, bird lovers are getting a grip. Last winter even the National Audubon Society went on record as supporting wind. Its president, John Flicker, pointed out that while bird kills by windmills may be grisly, the toll is far lower than that exacted by coal power, via air and water pollution and climate change, which are hastening the extinction of entire species.

So: Delaware residents aren’t bothered by the effect on their view (they probably figure people will keep coming to Rehoboth, no matter what), and the bird advocates are supporting wind power. And if you delve into the article a bit more (no good snippets, just read the whole thing), the article as a whole is about the struggle of a loose group of citizen activists to get the Delaware political power structure to give wind a chance.

Sounds to me like the Green crowd’s still behind wind power.

[RTFirefly]

The article also mentions the Stanford - U. of Delaware study discussed in more detail in this article:

The wind resource off the Mid-Atlantic coast could supply the energy needs of nine states from Massachusetts to North Carolina, plus the District of Columbia–with enough left over to support a 50 percent increase in future energy demand–according to a study by researchers at the University of Delaware and Stanford University.

Willett Kempton, Richard Garvine and Amardeep Dhanju at the University of Delaware and Mark Jacobson and Cristina Archer at Stanford, found that the wind over the Middle Atlantic Bight, the aquatic region from Cape Cod, Mass., to Cape Hatteras, N.C., could produce 330 gigawatts (GW) of average electrical power if thousands of wind turbines were installed off the coast.

The estimated power supply from offshore wind substantially exceeds the region’s current energy use, which the scientists estimate at 185 gigawatts, from electricity, gasoline, fuel oil and natural gas sources.

The study marks the first empirical analysis in the United States of a large-scale region’s potential offshore wind-energy supply using a model that links geophysics with wind-electric technology–and that defines where wind turbines at sea may be located in relation to water depth, geology and “exclusion zones” for bird flyways, shipping lanes and other uses.

The results are published in the Jan. 24 issue of Geophysical Research Letters <snip>
“In doing our surveys and watching the public debate, we saw that no one had solid empirical data on the actual size of the offshore wind resource, and we felt this was important for policy decisions,” Kempton said.

Indeed! For 330 gigawatts of clean, carbon-free juice, you can clutter up my offshore view all you want, thanks.

The scientists’ estimate of the full-resource, average wind power output of 330 gigawatts over the Middle Atlantic Bight is based on the installation of 166,720 wind turbines, each generating up to 5 megawatts of power. The wind turbines would be located at varying distances from shore, out to 100 meters of water depth, over an ocean area spanning more than 50,000 square miles, from Cape Cod to Cape Hatteras.

One thing that’s worth remembering about the Atlantic shelf is that it’s wide - you’ve got to go out quite a ways before you get into water >100 meters deep. As in, further away from shore than the Chesapeake Bay is wide at its widest point.

Lots of room to put lots of big-ass windmills.

Let’s face it, there’s a big difference with potentially messing up the view to make a small dent in the overall power picture. But if they’re serious that they can basically power the entire fucking Eastern seaboard off wind power, then bring 'em on!

[Yookeroo]

@Lars Aruns

Ok then, no cages around a turbine. What about putting some lights on the blades themselves, powered by the turbine itself? In this way, incoming birds would see some big, shiny thing waving its arms, and hopefully be scared off.

Light them like you see on some small handheld fans* How cool would one of those windfarms look?
*Youtube link

[Duke_of_Rat]

Wind farms are gaining popularity here (Texas). Airtricity is planning a 4,200 megawatt farm here, that’s quite a bit larger than the 80 to 220 MW farms that are becoming pretty common. These farms don’t run at capacity, but according to this, Hoover dam’s total plant capacity is 2,079 MW. So maybe like having a Hoover dam where there is very little water.

[DSeid]

“The wind business is growing by more than 30% a year worldwide” -The Economist March 31- April 6th 2007 edition- so much so that growth is held back by shortages of turbines.

Anytime something grows rapidly it has the potential to be implemented poorly, or at least for some to percieve it to be so. Greens may like wind power but as individuals they feel no obligation to therefore like any implementation of windpower, no matter what consequences. I may like nuclear power but I’d still object to a plant that I believed was without adequate safeguards. And I could be wrong in my assessment of that plant.

[Airman_Doors_USAF]

@DSeid

Anytime something grows rapidly it has the potential to be implemented poorly, or at least for some to percieve it to be so. Greens may like wind power but as individuals they feel no obligation to therefore like any implementation of windpower, no matter what consequences. I may like nuclear power but I’d still object to a plant that I believed was without adequate safeguards. And I could be wrong in my assessment of that plant.

There’s nothing at all irrational about that stance. However, you can build a nuclear plant anywhere. Not so with windmills. The one thing you need to run windmills is, unsurprisingly, wind. You can’t just erect some windmills anywhere and watch the magical power production.

The other problem is line loss in the transfer. There’s a reason why we didn’t simply erect a gazillion power plants in BFE and distribute the power wherever it is needed. That’s horribly inefficient. So every region has their own facilities. If the political climate of that region is that we need clean power, well, they can set the trend right in their own backyard. Otherwise, it’s a bit pretentious to assert that others should do so in their stead in order to preserve something as ethereal and subjective as a view that, according to them, won’t even be there in a few years because we’re not doing enough for the environment, as they sit on the sidelines.

[Kevbo]

I have not yet seen mention of the issue of reliability. Not of the machines, but of the availability of of the power source (wind) when it is needed. Electricity (on a large scale) is the most perishable of commodities…it has to be consumed virtually the same instant it is generated. Even the best of storage systems are wildly inefficient.

Unlike hydro, which can store large reserves of capacity in a reservoir until needed, or even coal, you can’t store the prime power source, and can’t even reliably predict it’s availability beyond a few days at most.

Thus in addition to the capital cost of wind machines, add in the price of “plan B” generating capacity, to take the load when a high pressure cell parks itself over your wind farm for 3 days. So while wind power can augment the generating capacity, it needs to remain a modest percentage if the grid is not to become as vulnerable to fair weather as it is to foul.

Some of this can be mitigated by diversity of the wind farms, but in a given area, the best sites tend to favor the same weather patterns.