The processes of envisioning and goal setting are extremely important (at all levels of problem solving) and they are also very underdeveloped skills in our society. We must therefore begin to train people in the skill of envisioning and begin to construct shared visions if we hope to achieve a sustainable society (Meadows 1996).

© Stephen E. Ludwig

Stephen E. Ludwig

Town of Georgetown, New York

April 15, 2008

_{______________________________________________________________________}

_____________________________________________________________

References and Additional Readings

Article 1:

http://www.uticaod.com/viewpoints/x1149879744/

__________________________________________________________________________

Article 2:

INDUSTRIAL WIND: A BILL OF GOODS

As an environmentalist who believes we should minimize our footprint on the earth while conserving the land, I too was seduced some years ago by the lure of wind technology, hoping it would provide, as a reporter recently wrote, “abundant power without pollution or carbon emissions”—and, as claimed, replace dirty burning coal plants, eliminate the destructive practice of mountaintop removal coal mining, clean the air, improve public health, reduce dependence on foreign oil, and mitigate the forces evidently causing the warming of the earth. However, I knew that if something seems too good to be true, it almost always is.

Start, as I did, by a more considered evaluation of the potential for “renewable energy,” and I think you’ll find it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be.  Simply because a power source is renewable and produces cleanly without burning carbon does not mean it is green.

Now there is a swell of support for wind. I became an intervenor in several Maryland Public Service Commission wind hearings, where I heard the technology rarely killed migrating birds, makes only the slightest noise, like the sound of “leaves rustling in the breeze,” enhances nearby property, and is virtually invisible atop mountain ridges. Wind developers gushed about how neighbors loved their “wind farms” and “wind parks.” Given my knowledge about birds, I challenged claims of safety made about them, knowing them to be false, for I was concerned that a cascade of many hundred industrial wind plants sited throughout the Appalachians, with thousands of skyscraper-sized turbines, each with rotors longer than a football field, would create “a gauntlet of risk” jeopardizing millions.

I began to investigate other claims made for the technology, frustrated with the inadequate and self-serving punditry from experts who had testified on behalf of the industry, watching them tailor their comments to suit the needs of their clients. The industry also employed “communication” specialists to pitch disinformation. And so I sought the truth. Armed with a good camera and sound recorder, I went to Meyersdale, Pennsylvania, asking the residents near the wind plant located there to tell their story in their own words while capturing on film images of the wind turbines around the town, recording the sounds they made. At the same time, I found devalued properties and the real story about the taxes, jobs and local revenues wind developers actually delivered, in contrast to what they had promised. The result is what you have seen in Life Under a Windplant, which I submitted as part of my PSC testimony.

From there, I moved on to evaluate the industry’s bedrock claim: that it would reduce significant carbon emissions in the production of electricity while backing down the coal industry.

FRAMING A HOUSE OF LIES

For five years, I’ve studied the claims of wind industry developers, their trade organization, the American Wind Energy Association, and the National Renewable Energy Lab, an agency of the US Department of Energy, with staff whose jobs are dependent upon the success of renewable technologies. I’ve concluded that industrial wind energy in the eastern United States exemplifies American business at its worst, promising to save the environment while wreaking havoc on it. Spawned, then supported, by government welfare measures at considerable public expense, it produces no meaningful product or service yet provides enormous profit to a few wealthy investors, primarily multinational energy companies in search of increased bottom lines. It’s an environmental plunderer, with its hirelings and parasites using a few truths, many half-truths, and the politics of wishful thinking to frame a house of lies. It’s all a bill of goods. Not a single claim made for industrial wind energy is true.

I’ll thumbnail the evidence exposing some of the more blatant deceptions about wildlife and basic nuisances, and then later detail why wind technology is so problematic.

The noise you heard in the Meyersdale documentary is what people around the world hear as they experience life near wind facilities. At times it will exceed the legal limit. I The wind industry denies there is a noise problem and resists any regulation of it.

Property devaluations near wind installations are well documented throughout the world. 

For those eager to believe that massively tall and lighted wind turbines won’t kill migrating birds of prey, song birds, and bats, I urge you to read Bridget Stutchbury’s newly published book, Silence of the Songbirds, in which she details her concerns about this issue, relating, among other instances, the infamous wind facility in California at Altamont Pass that kills thousands of birds annually. In recent testimony before Congress, Dr. Michael Fry of the American Bird Conservancy concluded that by the year 2030 as many as 1.8 million birds annually could be killed by wind turbines.

Two years ago, Ed Arnett, a biologist with Bat Conservation International, released his study of two Florida Power and Light wind plants in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. His research reaffirmed earlier studies showing major bat mortality.

Wind developers repeatedly say their newer models won’t kill wildlife. Given where they wish to place them in the Eastern United States, this is highly unlikely, since tall structures kill migrating birds; millions of them die annually after collisions at night under low cloud conditions. For reasons not well understood, bats seem unusually attracted to wind turbine rotors. Where independent studies have been permitted, the bat mortality indicates large-scale wind deployment might have catastrophic consequences.

Only highly trained imported crews, likely from Europe, build technically specialized industrial wind facilities; few local workers and no union employees found work.  It’s extremely unlikely, as happened in Meyersdale, that promised tax revenues will accrue to local jurisdictions, despite ardent but unsecured promises to the contrary.

What are the penalties for lying? If the amount of local taxes promised your community failed to materialize because of arcane legal tax offsets known only to skilled accountants, what could Chautauqua County officials do? Contemplate a lawsuit? Since their companies are limited liability operations, wind developers anticipate and budget for the possibility of lawsuits from local government, as well as suits brought by private citizens aggrieved by the range of nuisances and health concerns wind projects produce. They know the costs of legal actions are difficult for private citizens and rural municipalities to maintain over the many years it often takes to resolve them. Confidential wind leases actually exculpate wind developers from legal liability from the very nuisances they assert they don’t create. Moreover, if there’s illegal noise, who’s going to shut a wind plant down, once it’s constructed? If, as is the case at California’s Altamont Pass, a wind facility slaughters thousands of wildlife species, the courts will likely refuse to intervene, arguing that those concerned about wildlife have no legal standing. When I asked a wind developer in the MSPSC hearing whether he would vouch for the $750,000 in first year taxes his company had pledged to a Maryland county in its written application, he stated only that he would “do what the law requires.”

We have arrived at a point in our legal culture where no negative consequences seem to exist for making false or misleading claims to sell energy. There is a range of wind plant-generated nuisances verified across three continents. The failure of many local governments to provide appropriate leadership on this issue is appalling. After-the-fact lawsuits brought because of predictable nuisances are difficult, expensive, and time consuming. These massive wind plants precipitate incivility, pitting neighbor against neighbor. A major duty of government is to anticipate, then eliminate or mitigate this kind of incivility. Those who endorse or profit from placing such industrial complexes near the homes of others evidently don’t have a clue about how to foster civil society.

A bedrock premise of science is that all scientific claims must be falsifiable. That is, those who make assertions about the natural world must provide testable evidence subject to disproof. A claim’s successful predictions provide evidence in support of its truth; however, only one unsuccessful prediction is necessary to cast doubt. Or one inaccurate claim. Take special note of the many wind industry boasts that cannot be tested because their proof, if it exists, is enshrouded in confidentiality—such as the industry’s leases, wind potential studies, capacity factors, and performance indicators. When confronted with overwhelming evidence of their technology’s failings, a few wind developers have admitted problems. But then they play their ace: Some must sacrifice if our society is to achieve clean, green energy from the wind (although evidently not those living in Annapolis or Albany). They say their projects will eliminate millions of tons of climate changing carbon dioxide emissions now produced by coal plants. But is this claim—the one at the root of the industry’s reason for being—true? Concerns about various nuisances, wildlife mortality and civil society, although genuine, often distract from asking whether wind technology works effectively. In fact, wind developers are more than content to dwell on those distractions in order to deflect an examination of their technology’s effectiveness. Let’s examine the evidence for it.

THE WAYWARD WIND

Demand for electricity, a cornerstone of modern society, accounts for about 39 % of all energy use, even though electricity accounts for 30% of the energy used for heating. We doubled our demand for electricity from 1970-2000 and are on pace to add another 20% by 2009. We expect electricity to be highly reliable, affordable, and secure, made more difficult because it must be used immediately at industrial levels; unlike the water supply, it can’t be stored. An electricity grid is a complex regional network organized to supply demand and transmission for a variety of residential, commercial, industrial, and public sector customers. Collectively, conventional generators—coal, nuclear, natural gas, and hydro—provide over 95% of the nation’s electricity power. All of them must pass stringent tests for reliable performance before they are deployed. Together, they provide the most important quality for consumers and grid operators: capacity, a steady stream of dependable power when it’s needed to meet any peak or valley of demand.

Slow, inflexible but highly productive nuclear and large coal plants, along with certain hydro facilities, are best at providing a base level of supply upon which others can be built. Smaller conventional generators like natural gas, certain hydro, and small coal units, are highly responsive to commands and can be dispatched to meet changes in levels of demand, as well as balance continuous demand fluctuations every second. With over a century of experience, grid operators can predict demand cycles very precisely, which allows them to plan for and assemble the most appropriate, cost effective, combination of power plants to get the job done.

Nationally, we use oil to generate less than 3% of our electric power, which means that wind technology will do nothing to reduce our dependence upon it for transportation and heating, our main energy uses. Coal-fired plants are responsible for half of our electricity production and about 30% of the CO2 emissions our technology releases into the atmosphere; this is what the wind industry promises to reduce. Efficiently run natural gas units typically burn about 60% cleaner than coal, while nuclear and hydro plants emit no carbon gasses. Concerns about safe storage of nuclear waste, among others, have halted construction of new nuclear plants; none has been built in the US since 1979. Hydro, although an effective energy producer, destroys entire watersheds. All power-generating systems have their downsides. Including wind energy.

The whole point of the modern grid is that one can count upon capacity, that is, power precisely when it’s needed, which is why adequate supply must always precisely match demand.  

Wind technology is inimical to the process of providing capacity. It is usually unpredictable, always intermittent, and relentlessly fluctuating, reflecting as it does the random nature of its power source. Wind doesn’t correlate with demand cycles, producing most during the night at times of minimum demand—and least during the day at critical peak demand times.  Even with thousands of turbines, the wind industry can reliably provide only 5% of its rated capacity at any peak time. On the other hand, conventional power units have capacity values approaching 100%.

Wind turbines don't begin generating electricity until wind speeds hit around 5 mph and they shut off at wind speeds exceeding 55 mph to avoid damage. They achieve their rated capacity typically at wind speeds of 29-37 mph. Because of its intermittent variability, along with downtime for maintenance, no wind projects located in the eastern United States have achieved a capacity factor of more than 30%; the national average is around 25%.

Since it’s not dependable, wind cannot supply base demand or contribute to the regulatory reserves. One can never generalize about a wind turbine, for its performance in one year, or month, or day, or minute, is unlikely to be the same at any other time or place. The challenge for the grid is how to reconcile the square peg of firm reliability with the round hole of wind’s fluttering caprice. As it skitters unbidden on and off the grid, like sandpipers at the beach, wind is indistinguishable from demand fluctuations: when it appears, it’s equivalent to people turning off their appliances; when it departs, it’s like people turning the lights back on. Its perturbations increase the grid’s instability, for the additional wind flux is even greater than demand flux--and much less predictable. A 100MW wind facility may produce 60MW in one hour, a few minutes later, only 20MW, and, 15 minutes later, it may produce nothing. Integrating this kind of instability with existing conventional generators and transmission systems is possible up to around 20% of the grid’s capacity—but not without increased costs, both in dollars and carbon emissions.

At small levels of wind penetration, grid operators deploy existing flexible generators designed expressly for balancing demand fluctuations—the spinning reserves-- to also balance the additional flux of wind energy, for desultory wind can’t be loosed on the grid by itself; it’s only one ingredient in a fuel mix. For example, volatile fluctuations from the Judith Gap wind plant in Montana are causing major headaches for the grid, even though the amount of wind energy is relatively minute. The state utility was forced to buy more short-term power than expected from other energy sources to balance the grid's supply, driving costs upward. The larger the wind penetration, the greater need for the spinning reserves as the wind output bounces around both slowly and quickly. If the total wind energy approaches, say, 5-10% of the grid’s actual production, this would near the upper limit of the reserve supply and threaten the grid’s security. To avoid this, additional conventional generation must be built into the system at 90% of the wind generation’s installed capacity, along with new transmission and interconnection systems—a reality now confronting wind technology in Germany.

Many factors affect the volume of carbon emissions wind energy might save in the production of electricity, factors such as what generators wind actually displaces and what generators are used to balance it, among others—including calculating what is needed to offset the CO2 emitted in the making of each huge concrete anchor pad. Because it’s so capricious, wind energy will almost surely not displace inflexible, slow ramping basic demand generators like nuclear and large coal facilities, as many believe. More than likely wind will substitute for flexible, rapid start generators such as hydro and natural gas. If the former, there would be no carbon emissions savings; if the latter, only minimal direct carbon savings accrue, since natural gas burns much cleaner than coal. But either hydro or natural gas—or both—will also be the units used to balance wind’s fluctuations, as well as small coal and oil plants, since they are also used to balance demand fluctuations, operating inefficiently to do so. Studies in Europe have demonstrated that a 2% increase in inefficiency for fossil-fueled units can result in a 16% increase in carbon emissions throughout a grid system, much like the increased emissions from an automobile in stalled traffic.

Should you believe General Electric’s claim that all of its worldwide wind turbines by themselves could together produce enough power for 2.4 million US homes?  If wind were merely intermittent but produced steady generation, the grid could rather easily integrate it. Instead, since wind technology does not produce at a steady rate, its relentless fidgeting must be continuously compensated for, either with reliable conventional generators or by large numbers of widely scattered wind plants, assuming that somewhere the wind might be blowing at the appropriate level—not to mention the need for additional transmission lines and interconnection hubs. T

No unpredictably intermittent, highly variable power source can alone, provide capacity for anyone, given modern expectations of reliability and performance—despite all the media puffery implying it can. A 100MW wind plant in Chautauqua County might contribute, on a hit-or-miss basis, an annual average of 25MW to the state’s grid.

An electricity grid generally accepts wind energy not because it works well, but because it has to, the result of political decisions to legislate Renewable Portfolio Standards that now exist in 23 states, including New York, requiring utilities to purchase a certain percentage of renewable energy. No one is building new hydro and all the other renewables, such as wind, solar, biomass and geothermal, have enormous drawbacks. Wind and solar provide no capacity while biomass and geothermal pose challenging environmental threats. Given increasing demand for electricity, there will be no choice but to increase the number of reliable generators. Since no one is building new nuclear plants, and natural gas is so costly, the remaining reliable is the old standby—coal.  Even if we install thousands of wind plants, we’re likely to build more capacity-providing coal plants, despite all the public relations rhetoric suggesting otherwise.

Crucial for the case against wind, no independent, transparent measurement has demonstrated system-wide CO2 emissions savings due to wind technology anywhere in the world.

To foster the transparent measurement necessary to substantiate its claim about CO2, savings, the wind industry must remove the cloak of confidentiality now concealing information about the performance of its technology.

WIND AS A TAX SHELTER GENERATOR

The same corporations that own most of the nation’s wind plants also own and control the majority of the nation’s coal operations. Contrary to public perception, wind technology has been around since the Bronze Age, and over the last 25 years has received more than $1 billion of public financing, making it, on a per kilowatt hour basis, the country’s most heavily subsidized form of industrial electrical generation. Enron owned the country’s largest stock of wind facilities before selling them to General Electric. Today, G.E., along with the nation’s third largest utility, Florida Power and Light, BP, and AES, own most of the nation’s wind projects—as well as most of the country’s dirtiest burning coal facilities. They use wind’s unearned environmental cachet for public relations while cashing in on the wind’s lucrative subsidies. What is particularly galling is their practice of using wind’s cap-and-trade and renewable energy credits—provided by the most cynical or gullible of politicians—to avoid the cost of cleaning up their coal plants. These politicians give the appearance of challenging Big Coal when in reality they're reinforcing it, especially since more wind facilities very likely will result in more coal plants. Although conventional power is also heavily subsidized, these subsidies result in reliable service. The subsidies for industrial wind, which can provide virtually no capacity to the system while delivering energy in fits and starts, will be used to make ineffective and uneconomical technology falsely appear to be effective and economical.

Publicly funded tax avoidance schemes reimburse wind developers as much as two-thirds of the capital cost of each $3 million turbine, with many states creating incentives to cover on average an additional 10% of these costs. A recent Beacon Hill Institute study showed that such incentive programs would allow the Cape Wind project proposed for Nantucket Sound to be reimbursed up to 78% of its capital costs over the life of the facility. Wind plant owners can use these tax shelters themselves, or sell them, or enter into “equity partnerships” with other companies —all to reduce their corporate tax obligations by tens of millions each year, as the Marriott Corporation did a few years ago with a similar clean energy scheme, within a year reducing its corporate tax obligations from 36% to 6%— generating tax credits worth $159 million and a return of 246% on its investment in just one year.

The Florida Power and Light Group, the parent of FPL Energy, paid no federal income tax in 2002 and 2003, according to Citizens for Tax Justice, despite having revenues of $2.2 billion during those years.  FPL Energy boasted a 2006 profit of $610 million, triple its earnings in 2005. That followed an earnings increase of 200% between 1998 and 2002, then significant profit growth each year thereafter, mostly fueled by wind projects. These profits are the unpaid taxes due the federal treasury that all the rest of us must now pay.

OVERBLOWN

My opposition to this technology is a considered response to the fact it doesn’t work very well, even as an occasional fuel substitute, certainly not commensurate with the damage it causes and the monies it drains from rate and taxpayers.  Their massive footprint will transform the landscape, changing its appearance from scenes of nature into one dominated by industrial machinery. How green is this? In the process, nearby property values will plummet while a number of residents will experience relentless noise, at times exceeding the legal limit. The county will likely receive only a fraction of promised revenues and taxes (officials should carefully scrutinize promised PILOT payments), and it’s extremely unlikely the wind facilities will employ more than a handful of county residents or union workers. And like all tall structures that are lit at night, they will kill thousands of migrating birds and especially bats. All of these problems have been well documented—many of them admitted in “confidential” property leases that exculpate wind companies for creating them. 

The politicalization of electricity production, which is what is happening here, corrupts any reasonable sense of enlightened public policy, driven as it is by propagandized sloganeering and a press that much of the time couldn’t hit water with an accurate story if it fell out of a boat. New York State’s Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), levy of a renewable energy surcharge is nothing more than a legalized bunko scheme for defrauding consumers.

Jon Boone

Westfield, New York

October 17, 2007

I edited this article for clarity and concision.  See article in full at:

http://www.wind-watch.org/documents/industrial-wind-a-bill-of-goods/

(end of article 2)

__________________________________________________________________

photos © Stephen E. Ludwig