Local Blowback From Wind Farms

  • Two cranes lift wind turbine blades off the ground at the Noble Environmental Power wind farm in Ellenburg, NY. (Photo by David Sommerstein)

America’s hunger for new, greener sources of electricity, and a generous
federal tax credit, are fueling a wind power boom. According to the
industry, almost 6,000 megawatts of new wind energy are under construction
nationwide. That’s 40% of all existing wind power in the U.S. The federal
government doesn’t regulate many aspects of wind power. Neither do many
states. That puts a lot of pressure on local town councils to decide if a wind
farm will be a good neighbor. David Sommerstein reports:

Transcript

America’s hunger for new, greener sources of electricity, and a generous
federal tax credit, are fueling a wind power boom. According to the
industry, almost 6,000 megawatts of new wind energy are under construction
nationwide. That’s 40% of all existing wind power in the U.S. The federal
government doesn’t regulate many aspects of wind power. Neither do many
states. That puts a lot of pressure on local town councils to decide if a wind
farm will be a good neighbor. David Sommerstein reports:


It’s 7:30 in the morning on a crystal clear day in northern New York State.
A dozen ironworkers huddle between two monstrous red cranes and one
gleaming white tower, rising 22 stories tall:


“Everybody know their tasks? Anybody got any questions? Got a beautiful
day to fly this thing. No wind.”


Today the crew’s going to lift the thing you see spinning on a wind turbine –
three blades twice the length of semi trucks – to the top of the tower and
attach it. Dave Talley’s the supervisor. He’s from Petersburg, Tennessee:


“I live 20 miles from the Jack Daniels distillery.”


Talley’s helped build some of the wonders of the modern world: the
monorail at Disney World, the world’s largest furnace, the largest stamping
press.


“Yeah, we got a saying in our business. My work is my play, my play is my
work. I work harder than I play, and I play hard. If it ain’t hard, I ain’t
playin’. If it ain’t fun, I ain’t sayin’. And that’s all I’m sayin’.”


The cranes ease the blades into the air. Talley’s crew will do this 122 times
to erect Noble Environmental Power’s wind farm here. Noble’s owned by JP
Morgan Partners. The company spent millions of dollars and years of
permitting and negotiating to get to this point.


The wind farm touched off a fiery debate in town. Local board meetings
erupted in yelling. Neighbors and families became estranged:


“I think there’s a lot of people who have family members who totally fight
over it. I mean my sister and I don’t. We just don’t discuss it.”


Julie Ribot can see the turbines from her porch. Her sister works for the
wind power company. Ribot, however, is dead set against them:


“I don’t want to live here. There’s supposed to be 27 going up across the
street alone. Somebody said, ‘oh, it’s just like a ceiling fan.’ Well, would
you want 27 ceiling fans going off in your living room? No.”


Just next door to Ribot, Richard Widalski thinks they’re great:


“We do have to find an alternative source of energy. The price of oil and
everything, it’s getting ridiculous. I was told it’ll put up 1.5 megawatts of
power, which will, y’know, supply power for quite a few homes.”


Wind developers pay landowners thousands of dollars a year for hosting
turbines on their land. But neighbors have to live with the windmills, too,
and they don’t get paid. Planner John Tenbush says money pits haves
against have-nots in a small town:


“One guy’s gonna get a lot of money and the guy right next door, who’s
going to suffer from the noise or the blinking effect or some other adverse
impact, gets nothing.”


Across the country, industrial-scale wind project are forcing small, mostly
rural town councils to make big decisions. The federal government and
most states offer little guidance on a blizzard of complicated issues: how far
should the turbines be from a house or a road? How loud can they be? Do
they boost or blemish property values? Do they kill too many birds?


David Duff is on the planning board in nearby St. Lawrence County. He
says it’s easy for town councils to get in over their heads:


“Maybe they buy snowplows and they put out contracts for salt. They are
not in the same league in terms of negotiating as a multinational company
who has done this before.”


Until regulation catches up, the burden falls on local town councils when
wind power moves in.


For the Environment Report, I’m David Sommerstein.

Related Links

Rooftop Wind Power

  • Power lines lead from a wind turbine placed near a coast to catch steady breezes. New designs for smaller turbines might be used in urban areas where wind is more turbulent. (Photo by Lester Graham)

The government wants 20% of the
energy generated in the nation from renewable
resources. Today, we’re at a mere fraction of
that goal. Lisa Ann Pinkerton reports experts
believe the US could get there sooner if wind power
technology can be moved successfully to where the
electricity is actually consumed, America’s
cities:

Transcript

The government wants 20% of the
energy generated in the nation from renewable
resources. Today, we’re at a mere fraction of
that goal. Lisa Ann Pinkerton reports experts
believe the US could get there sooner if wind power
technology can be moved successfully to where the
electricity is actually consumed, America’s
cities:


Right next to Lake Erie, a large wind turbine spins hypnotically in the
breeze. Its three big propeller blades provide only around 6% of
the energy consumed at the museum where it’s located, the Great Lake
Science Center. So the big turbine is mainly for educational purposes.
The museum’s Executive Director, Linda Abraham Silver says turbine
catches the steady winds off the lake:


“We don’t want turbulence, that’s right. Steady wind is what produces
the best energy and saves the gears and instrumentation inside.”


The single wind turbine stands in a wide open space near Lake Erie, but here
on the streets of downtown Cleveland, the wind is blustery and
unpredictable. These conditions are hostile to traditional turbines.
So the conventional wisdom was wind power couldn’t flourish in urban
environments… that is, until now.


“I think the problem was the propeller, not the whole idea that wind
power was somehow unable to be captured in the city. Some people even tell
you there is no wind power in the city”


Bill Becker is an urban wind developer from Chicago. He’s abandoned the three-propeller design for a horizontal one.
And it kind of looks like a metal DNA double-helix strand. He says it’s
actually two turbine designs in one so the machine can function in low and high winds. The turbine, manufactured
by Aerotecture, is a lot smaller than traditional ones so it can be mounted on rooftops. Becker’s installed 16 on skyscrapers in
Boston and Chicago. They can generate enough electricity to power two homes annually in a typical breezy day.


Becker’s not the only inventor who thinks there are better alternatives
to expansive turbine wind farms sprouting up on ridges and bluffs
across the country. And in England, the three-blade concept isn’t dead
yet.


The company Quiet Revolution has a vertical turbine with blades curving
up and down it. It creates power in even the slightest breeze, but that
power isn’t any more than Becker’s model and it costs 4 times as much.


Instead of catching open wind, in California entrepreneurs are
capturing a very specific type of wind: breezes traveling up and over
building parapets. Those are walls that extend past the roof lines of
big box retailers and factories:


“There’s a potentially great wind resource on those buildings that’s
not being tapped into today.”


Spokesman Steve Gitlin says the company AeroVironment is tapping into
this wind with systems of 15 turbines each. These futuristic rotating
fans, each about six feet tall, line the parapets of flat-roofed
buildings:


“What we’ve done is figured out there’s a unique acceleration of wind over that edge of the building
so the turbine’s designed to actually extend above and angle slightly downward
over that acceleration zone.”


The AeroVironment system is the most expensive… six times as much as the Aerotecture double-helix
design and generates slightly more electricity. It does, however, operate in very low wind, five miles per hour or less.


Ken Silverstein says this range in cost and efficiency shows the urban wind industry is
still growing. He edits Energy Biz magazine, and
adds to make an impact on the market, these turbine costs must come
down. And the government could help jumpstart the industry:


“It needs to develop, it needs to reach economies of scale so that the
technology improves, so that the costs come down and so that wind becomes more widespread than it is today.”


But Silverstein says, urban wind designs like these offers the hope
that businesses and even homeowners could capture the energy of the wind
directly on their own.


For the Environment Report, I’m Lisa Ann Pinkerton

Related Links

WIND ENERGY SWEEPING AWAY WILDLIFE? (Short Version)

Wind energy is among the fastest growing sources of new electricity generation. Now, scientists are looking at ways to make
wind turbines safer for birds and bats. The GLRC’s Dustin Dwyer has more:

Transcript

Wind energy is among the fastest growing sources of new electricity generation. Now,
scientists are looking at ways to make wind turbines safer for birds and bats. The
GLRC’s Dustin Dwyer has more:


A study published last year by the Government Accountability Office says wind farms
have had little impact so far on birds and bats, but the study says that could change as
more wind farms go up. The question is how to minimize the risk.


Alex Hoar is with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service:


“Not all turbines cause a problem. There are turbines around that had bird
problems. There are lots of turbines that don’t. And we’re trying to learn why.”


Hoar says scientists know a lot about migration patterns for both birds and bats. But they
haven’t tracked the animals’ behavior while they’re in the air. Scientists are now using
thermal imaging and radar to study flight patterns in detail, and Bowling Green State
University in Ohio recently won a one million dollar grant to study the impact of smaller
turbines on wildlife.


For the GLRC, I’m Dustin Dwyer.

Related Links

Green Technology Can Defeat Terrorism

Small-scale on-site power generation technologies help protect the environment. Will they also help to protect us against terrorism? Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Byron Kennard argues that they can:

Transcript

Small-scale on-site power generation technologies help protect the environment. Will they also help to protect us against terrorism? Our commentator Byron Kennard argues that they do.


Like every American, I am mourning the tragic losses that terrorists have inflicted on our nation. But I mourn too because I fear that in the aftermath of these attacks, environmental protection efforts will be sacrificed to the awful necessities of war. I am reminded of a remark Tolstoy once made to a young friend, “You may not be interested in war,” Tolstoy warned,” but war is interested in you.” War’s interest in the young is fully matched by its interest in the environment.


Apart from what the US does to go after bin Laden, we must also pursue peaceful solutions to this challenge. The best of these options is to vastly increase economic opportunity for the world’s poor. After all, it’s their desperation that provides the breeding grounds for fanaticism. As Jessica Stern, author of The Ultimate Terrorists, observes: “Force is not nearly enough. We need to drain the swamps where these young men thrive. We need to devote a much higher priority to health, education, and economic development or new Osamas will continue to arise.”


Economic development will be hard to achieve and will take much time. But in it environmentalists can find some solace. There are environmental ways to develop economies and often these make the most sense for the world’s poor. For example, two billion people in the world have no access to electricity. Providing them electricity for lighting, clean water, refrigeration and health care, and radio and television is perhaps the best single way “to drain the swamps.” The best way to make electricity available to the world’s poor is through on-site generating technologies that are the environment friendly.


These “micro power” devices generate electric power on a small scale close to where it is actually used. They include fuel cells, photovoltaics, micro generators, small wind turbines, and modular biomass systems. For instance, a micro generator the size of a refrigerator can generate 25 kilowatts of electricity, enough to power a village in the developing world.


The environmental approach toward energy sufficiency in developing nations has been to utilize micro credit. That means providing poor people with affordable mini-loans to purchase on-site energy generators, or micro generation. Currently the US leads the world in exporting solar electric, small wind, fuel cells, and modular biomass systems to the developing world. Such exports of energy generation have become a $5 billion per year market, so this environmentally benign strategy is also economically productive. In short, electrifying the poor regions of the world will benefit our people, our planet and the cause of peace.