Resource Library Category: U.K. (75 items)
Documents presented here are not the product of nor are they necessarily endorsed by National Wind Watch. This resource library is provided to assist anyone wishing to research the issue of industrial wind power and the impacts of its development. The information should be evaluated by each reader to come to their own conclusions about the many areas of debate.
Complaint against the UK in re: UN Convention on Persons with Disabilities
Source: Watson, George
I lodge the following complaint against the United Kingdom Government in relation to the terms and Articles contained in the United Nations Convention on Persons with Disabilities. The UK Government are responsible for the drafting, administration and enactment of the UK planning legislation throughout the countries that make up the United Kingdom. In addition, the United Kingdom Government are the signatories of the aforementioned UN Convention and are bound by the terms contained thereof.
I would advise you that should the UK Government permit (directly or indirectly), encourage, or are complicit in any planning consent awards for ANY ADDITIONAL wind turbines throughout the United Kingdom that would not comply with the provisions of the Convention, I reserve the right to make an application to the courts for an Interim Interdict/Injunction that would protect the legal rights of persons with Disabilities. The medical evidence is clear and unequivocal that wind turbines cause serious medical problems and exacerbate current medical conditions.
I submit my complaint as follows:
United Nations Convention on Persons with Disabilities:
1) Article 3 – General Principles: (c) Full and effective participation and inclusion in society;
(e) Equality of opportunity; Disabled persons do not participate in the planning process on an equal basis with those without a Disability. The Governments involved fail to provide planning applications in ‘Braille’ to allow those with a visual Disability to have ‘Effective Participation’ in the planning process. The obvious health problems from wind turbines on ALL groups in society make it even more important that the vulnerable members of society are allowed to have an effective participation. There are no special procedures put in place in the UK to allow those with a Disability to address the Planning Committee on particular applications.
a) Article 3 will be violated by a failure to ‘effective participation’ by the authorities failing to provide the application in ‘Braille’ to allow those with a visual impairment to participate in the process.
2) Article 10 – Right to Life: If the person with a Disability had walking difficulties, or was unable to walk, they would be at a substantial disadvantage to someone without a Disability from the on-going health and other issue’s from wind turbines. They would not be able to simply ‘get out’ for the day due to their Disability or they may suffer from a mental health Disability and do not know or understand that they are in danger from wind turbines. Governments are failing to acknowledge or accept the mounting medical evidence against wind turbines and are exposing the most vulnerable members of society to long term health problems from wind turbines.
3) Article 11 – Situations of Risk – Governments shall take, in accordance with their obligations under International law, including International Humanitarian law and International Human Rights law, all necessary measures to ensure the protection and safety of persons with Disabilities in situations of risk…This can be interpreted as including ‘protection and safety of persons from Government policies if they are a threat to the life and health of a person with a Disability’ under the terms of International Human Rights law.
4) Article 12 – Equal recognition before the law – (3) State parties shall take appropriate measures to provide access by persons with Disabilities to the support they may require in exercising their legal capacity. This includes free legal representation whilst exercising their rights and protection from ‘undue influence’ from Government.
5) Article 13 -Access to Justice – This includes all legal proceedings, at investigative and preliminary stages as direct or indirect participants.
6) Article 15 – Freedom from torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment – The World Health Organisation has stated that ‘Sleep Deprivation’ is a form of torture. There is a mountain of information that clearly shows that wind turbines cause ‘Sleep Deprivation’ in every sited area throughout the United Kingdom.
a) Article 15 will be violated when any wind turbine causes the complainant to have an interruption to their sleep for prolonged periods in the same night. The World Health Organisation has stated that noise above 30db in a bedroom will cause ‘Sleep Deprivation’.
7) Article 16 – Freedom from exploitation – The definition of ‘exploitation’ is “to take advantage of (a person, situation, etc) esp unethically or unjustly for one’s own ends”. The UK Government has failed to provide a planning application in ‘Braille’ that would allow the visually impaired to participate in the planning process. This would be self evident in the number of objectors or supporters of a planning application from the visually impaired currently on record. The United Kingdom Government has already confirmed that they have no record of any planning objections from the visually impaired and that they are unaware of planning applications being available in ‘Braille’.
a) Article 16 would be violated as those with a visual impairment are prohibited from being included in the planning process.
b) Article 16(2) states that “State Parties shall also take all appropriate measures to prevent all forms of exploitation …. State Parties have allowed the Energy Companies to make planning applications for wind turbines knowing that those with a visual impairment would be excluded from participating. The United Kingdom Government are complicit in the exploitation of the visually impaired and thereby in violation of the aforementioned Article.
c) Article 16(3) states “In order to prevent the occurrence of all forms of exploitation, violence and abuse, State Parties shall ensure that all facilities and programmes designed to serve persons with disabilities are effectively monitored by Independent Authorities”. The United Kingdom Government have no such regime in operation and are in violation of the aforementioned Article.
d) Article 16(5) states “State Parties shall put in place effective legislation and policies, including women – and child focussed legislation and policies, to ensure that instances of exploitation, violence and abuse against persons with disabilities are identified, investigated and, where appropriate, prosecuted.” No such legislation or policy decisions have been put in place by the United Kingdom Government that prevents cases of ‘exploitation’ of the visually impaired by the planning system. In addition, there have been no prosecutions for violations by the United Kingdom planning system. The United Kingdom Government are in violation and, complicit in continued violation, of the aforementioned Article.
8) Article 17 – Protecting the Integrity of the Person – states “Every person with disabilities has a right to respect for his or her physical or mental integrity on an equal basis with others.” A person with learning difficulties will be subjected to additional and exacerbated health problems from wind turbines. The person with learning difficulties will not have the mental capacity to participate in the planning process to object, as no provisions are made for such an occurrence by the United Kingdom Government. In addition, the United Kingdom Government has a legal obligation to protect the most vulnerable in society and a failure to act is a violation of the aforementioned Article.
9) Article 21 – Freedom of expression and opinion, and access to information – states “State parties shall take all appropriate measures to ensure that persons with disabilities can exercise the right to freedom of expression and opinion, including the freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas on an equal basis with others and through all forms of communication of their choice, as defined in Article 2 of the present Convention, including by:
a) Providing information intended for the general public to persons with disabilities in accessible formats and technologies appropriate to different kinds of disabilities in a timely manner and without additional cost;
b) Accepting and facilitating the use of sign language, Braille, augmentative and alternative communication, and all other accessible means, modes and formats of communication of their choice by persons with disabilities in official interactions.
c) Urging private entities that provide services to the general public, including through the Internet, to provide information and services in accessible and useable formats for persons with disabilities.
d) The current planning process in the United Kingdom violates the aforementioned Article as any planning application is only in a single format and does not take into consideration persons with a disability. Those who are visually impaired are unable to scrutinise the planning application in Braille and does not conform to the Convention principles.
10) Article 22 – Respect for Privacy – states “No person with disabilities, regardless of place of residence or living arrangements, shall be subject to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her privacy, family, home or correspondence or other types of communication or to unlawful attacks on his or her honour and reputation. Persons with disabilities have the right to protection of the law against such interference or attacks.” The United Kingdom Government are in violation of this Article as the planning system does not make special provisions for the participation of persons with disabilities. The granting of planning consent for wind turbines is unlawful due to the failure of persons with disabilities participating in the planning process. This is also a violation of privacy, family and home of people with disabilities due to the unlawful granting of planning consent due to the planning application only being presented in a single format and does not take into consideration those with a visual impairment.
I request that you acknowledge receipt of my complaint.
Yours sincerely
George Watson
Wind Turbines Can Be Bad For Your Health
Source: Juby, Bernard
In the lemming-like world rush to build these uneconomic monstrosities (where only huge, often hidden, tax-payer subsidies make them viable) there are numerous reasons why they should not be built. This Blog concentrates only on the potential damage to peoples’ health.
Not all wind farms cause a problem with noise. Earlier examples which were built in remote parts rarely caused problems but as these sites became used developers looked more and more towards developed areas and thus came ever closer to human habitation.
There are two potential sources of noise: that from the turbine blades passing through the air at the speed of a light aircraft and that from the gearbox and generator in the nacelle (or housing). The aerofoil blade (usually three) the length of a jumbo jet’s wing whose tip travels at 150 miles per hour (241 km/h) and harvesting 0.6 MW or more of power inevitably makes a substantial sound. The air passing through the rotor is swept into turbulent wake vortices (which, incidentally, attract, trap and kill many bats in a process akin to the “bends” in divers) is the source of much of the sound. Within a few feet it encounters an obstruction in the form of the tower as a blade passes every one to two seconds, even at its slowest viable turning speed. This imposes a pulsating quality to the aerodynamic sound which many people find deeply disturbing.
Other periodic sounds arise as the blades sweep down into the region of wind shear so that the lowest blade position experiences both a different wind speed and varying turbulence. Some developers state categorically that, “Noise isn’t a problem” but they rely on ETSU-R-97 which is not a fit instrument to assess it.
Clusters of windfarms can produce further interaction of sound periodicity as the rotors of different machines go into and out of phase creating the periodic sounds (aerodynamic or amplitude modulation) generating the “whoomph, whoomph” at one or two second intervals rising and falling in loudness — an effect which disturbs some people and which can be likened to the base “woofer” speaker in a sound system.
Furthermore, as well as the normally audible sounds machines produce a low frequency sound from vibrations which ranges from the barely audible “sub-woofer” frequencies below 200 Hz down to wavelengths which cannot be heard but often sensed as bodily discomfort (below 20 Hz) and often referred to as infrasound which is difficult to measure instrumentally but which effects ALL animals, including horses, cattle and sheep.
Why ETSU-R-97 isn’t fit for purpose
Noise is measured in decibels (dB) which is a logarithmic measure of sound pressure levels in the air and shown as a ratio to a reference pressure. An increase of, say, 3dB doubles the noise level.
Environmental noise levels are usually expressed in dB(A) which includes a correction for the frequencies best heard by the human ear. Unfortunately this biases against the low frequency end of the spectrum and fails where low frequencies such as repetetive bass notes in music and the “whoomph” of turbine blades are important.
The C weighting curve [dB(C)] is better as it is less selective against low frequency but ETSU-R-97 mandates dB(A) rather than dB(C) — as do many other sound measuring conventions.
In the Whinash Enquiry (2005) acoustic consultant R. Bowdler stated, “ETSU-R-97 Why It Is Wrong”:
The conclusions of ETSU-R-97 are so badly argued as to be laughable in parts (the daytime standard is based on the principle that it does not matter if people cannot get to sleep on their patio so long as they can get to sleep in their bedrooms. [But what about night workers? —BJ] It is the only standard where the permissable night time level is higher than the permissable day time level.
He further comments, in Para. 1 of the Executive Summary:
This document describes a framework for the measurement of wind farm noise and gives indicative noise levels thought to offer a reasonable degree of protection to wind farm neighbours without placing unreasonable restrictions on wind farm development or adding unduly to the costs and administrative burdens on wind farm developers or local authorities.
Furthermore, in technical publications, writers such as G.P. Van den Berg’s investigation of a Dutch wind farm of variable speed turbines (10-20 rpm) found that complaints about noise, especially at night, extended to 1.9 km whereas the developer had claimed that there would be no problem over 0.5 km (2004, “Effects of the wind profile at night on wind turbine sound” — Journal of Sound and Vibration, 277, 955-970.)
He also showed that the night time wind speed at hub height was up to 2.6 times higher than expected from the conventional extrapolation from wind speed measured at 10m height. The higher wind speed causes faster rotation and up to 15 dB higher sound levels relative to the same reference wind speed during the day.
He concluded that day or night the background noise did not effectively mask the thumping sound of the blades passing the tower. More telling is the fact that the thumping is not perceptible close to the turbines but only at a distance.
Shadow Flicker — The Stroboscopic Effect
When the sun passes behind the hub of a turbine shadows of the rotating blades are repeatedly cast over nearby properties. The seasonal timing and duration of this flickering can be calculated from the size, relative alignment of the site and its geographical position.
The flicker rate from a typical three-bladed turbine is below three per second (at 60 rpm) so photosensitive epilepsy from any stroboscopic effect is unlikely. The problem arises when there are several such turbines in alignment with any habitation whereby the shadows of the blades can inter-react with one another causing a cumulative flicker of over 3 per second. Flicker rate is not affected by distance so any risk does not significantly decrease until it reaches about 100 times the hub height — 10 km approx. for a big turbine; (Harding et al, 2008)
Siting turbines so that they catch the early morning or late evening sun can compound the problem by silhouetting.
As recently as March 2011, under the head-line, “Flicker of Hope for wind-turbine victims” the UK national daily press reported (inter alia) that, “The misery of shadow flicker, which blights the lives of people living near some wind turbines, could soon be over.” It goes on to say that the report commissioned by the Department for Energy and Climate Change recommended that turbines should not be built any closer that 10 rotor diameters from the nearest homes. Translated this means that an 80m blade span (262′) should be at least 800m or half a mile away. Currently, in France for example, they are proposing and have built them within 400m of habitation.
The report recommended that buildings within a third of a mile should not suffer flicker for more than 30 minutes a day or 30 hours per year.
The paper reports one Lee Moroney, a wind energy expert with the Renewable Energy Foundation, as saying “that wind turbines should not be built within a mile of residential areas”.
Les turbines de vent peuvent être mauvaises pour votre santé
Cliquez ici pour cet article en français.
Global Backlash Against Wind Energy
Source: Bryce, Robert
Three years ago this month, T. Boone Pickens launched a multi-million dollar crusade to bring more wind energy to the US. “Building new wind generation facilities,” along with energy efficiency and more consumption of domestic natural gas, the Dallas billionaire claimed, would allow the US to “replace more than one-third of our foreign oil imports in 10 years.”
Those were halcyon times for the wind industry. These days, Pickens never talks about wind. He’s focused instead on getting a fat chunk of federal subsidies so he can sell more natural gas to long-haul truckers through his company, Clean Energy Fuels.
(Pickens and his wife, Madeleine, own about half of the stock of Clean Energy, a stake worth about $550 million.) While the billionaire works the halls of Congress seeking a subsidy of his very own, he’s also trying to find a buyer for the $2 billion worth of wind turbines he contracted for back in 2008. The last news report that I saw indicated that he was trying to foist the turbines off onto the Canadians.
Being dumped by Pickens is only one of a panoply of problems facing the global wind industry. Among the issues: an abundance of relatively cheap natural gas, a growing backlash against industrial wind projects due to concerns about visual blight and noise, increasing concerns about the murderous effect that wind turbines have on bats and birds, the extremely high costs of offshore wind energy, and a new study which finds that wind energy’s ability to cut carbon dioxide emissions have been overstated.
Yeah, that’s a long list of things. But the mainstream media rarely casts a critical eye on the wind industry. So bear with me for a few minutes. And in doing so, consider how the backlash against industrial wind is playing out in Wales, where, on May 27, the BBC reports that some 1,500 protesters descended on the Welsh assembly, demanding that a massive wind project planned for central Wales be halted.
Earlier this month, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. came out with another broadside (this one in the Wall Street Journal) against the Cape Wind project off Cape Cod, not far from the Kennedy clan’s place in Hyannisport. Kennedy says New England shouldn’t put 130 wind turbines in Nantucket Sound, instead, it should import hydropower from Canada. He neglected to say that Cape Wind likely won’t ever get built because the Department of Energy is withholding its financing of the project.
Over the past few days, protesters in Denmark have been camping on a wooded tract in Northern Jutland in order to prevent the clearing of a protected forest where the government plans to build a test center that aims to install a series of wind turbines 250 meters high.
The increasing opposition to industrial wind projects – opposition that’s coming from grassroots organizations all over the world – should be a wake up call for advocates of renewable energy. Instead, the wind industry’s apologists continue to claim that they are victims of a conspiracy, and that they are under attack from the “fossil fuel industry.” That’s been the typical response from the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) and its hirelings, who prefer to use character assassination rather than engage in factual debate.
Here’s the reality: the wind industry is under a full-blown attack from market forces. Those markets are economic, political, social, and environmental. And the wind scammers are losing on nearly all fronts.
Let’s start with natural gas.
Few people know the natural gas business better than Pickens, and he’ll tell you that himself. Many times. Two years ago, shortly after he launched his high-profile plan, Pickens said natural gas prices must be at least $9 for wind energy to be competitive. In March 2010, Pickens was still hawking wind energy, but he’d lowered his price threshold saying “The place where it works best is with natural gas at $7.” By January of this year Pickens was complaining that you can’t “finance a wind deal unless you have $6 gas.”
That may be true, but on the spot market, natural gas now sells for about $4.50 per million Btu. Today’s relatively low natural gas prices are a direct result of the drilling industry’s new-found prowess at unlocking galaxies of methane from shale beds. Those lower prices are great for consumers but terrible for the wind business.
The difficulties faced by the wind industry are evident in the numbers: Last year, total US wind generation capacity grew by 5,100 megawatts, about half as much capacity as was added in 2009. During the first quarter of this year, new wind installations totaled just 1,100 megawatts, indicating that this year will likely be even worse than 2010.
For its part, the wind industry continues to claim that it’s creating lots of “green” – oops, I mean “clean” – energy jobs. Last year, after the lame-duck Congress passed a one-year extension of the investment tax credit for renewable energy projects, AWEA said it would “help save tens of thousands of American jobs.” Perhaps. But those jobs are so expensive that not even Pickens could afford many of them. Last December, about the same time that Congress was voting to continue the wind subsidies, Texas Comptroller Susan Combs reported that tax breaks for wind projects in the Lone Star State cost nearly $1.6 million per job. And that “green” job bonanza is happening in Texas, America’s biggest natural gas producer.
Few people in the Obama administration have been more fulsome in their backing of wind than Energy Secretary Steve Chu. A few weeks ago, while at the Aspen Institute, I ran into Chu at a cocktail party. During our conversation, Chu casually dismissed the widespread opposition to industrial wind projects as a bunch of “NIMBYs.” (That is, “not in my backyard.”)
If Chu had done even the smallest bit of homework, he would know that the European Platform Against Windfarms now has 485 signatory organizations from 22 European countries. In the UK, where fights are raging against industrial wind projects in Wales, Scotland, and elsewhere, some 250 anti-wind groups have been formed. In Canada, the province of Ontario alone has more than 50 anti-wind groups. The US has about 170 anti-wind groups.
Over the past year or so, I have personally interviewed people in Wisconsin, Maine, New York, Nova Scotia, Ontario, the U.K., New Zealand, and Australia. All of them used almost identical language in describing the health problems caused by the noise coming from wind turbines that had built near their homes.
Janet Warren, who was raising sheep on her 500-acre family farm near Makara, New Zealand, told me via email that the turbines put up near her home emit “continuous noise and vibration” which she said was resulting in “genuine sleep deprivation causing loss of concentration, irritability, and short-term memory effects.” A few months ago, Warren and her family decided they couldn’t stand to live with the noise any longer and moved out of their home to another location.
Or consider the case of Billy Armstrong, a plumbing and heating engineer who lives in County Durham, England. Armstrong must endure the noise from several wind turbines that were recently installed 800 yards from his home. When we talked by phone, Armstrong told me that he is frequently awakened by the noise from the turbines, particularly during the summer months. What is his advice for other rural landowners facing the prospect of wind turbines being built near their homes? His reply: “Fight them. Don’t let them do it.”
The problems associated with low-frequency noise caused by wind turbines if finally getting proper attention from the scientific community. The August issue of the journal Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, has nine articles that address various aspects of the turbine-noise issue. The most important: low-frequency noise, also known as infrasound. Although inaudible to most humans, infrasound can cause a number of maladies including headaches, sleeplessness, and vertigo.
One of peer-reviewed articles that appears in the Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, is by Carl V. Phillips, a Harvard-trained PhD. Phillips concludes that there is “overwhelming evidence that wind turbines cause serious health problems in nearby residents, usually stress-disorder type diseases, at a nontrivial rate.”
Among the most prominent critics of the wind industry on the noise issue is Dr. Robert McMurtry, an Ontario-based orthopedic surgeon. McMurtry has impeccable credentials. He’s a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Canada. Earlier this month he was named a Member of the Order of Canada, the country’s highest civilian award.
Over the past two years, McMurtry has spearheaded the effort to stop industrial wind projects in Ontario while also leading efforts to get peer-reviewed medical studies done on the deleterious effects of turbine-produced infrasound. “The people who are forced to live near these turbines are being abused,” McMurtry told me a few months ago. “It is compromising their health.”
But the wind industry has taken a stand: never mind the science; ignore the complainers. That’s the stance taken by AWEA and other wind lobby groups who continue to deny that there are any problems with wind turbine noise and that those who are complaining merely need psychological counseling. In late 2009, AWEA and the Canadian Wind Energy Association, published a paper which attempted to quiet critics on the noise issue, by declaring that “There is no evidence that the audible or sub-audible sounds emitted by wind turbines have any direct adverse physiological effects.” It also suggested that the symptoms being attributed to wind turbine noise were psychosomatic and declared flatly that the vibrations from the turbines are “too weak to be detected by, or to affect, humans.”
And lest you think that the research being done on wind turbine noise is collegial, think again. Last year, during a webinar that was sponsored in part, by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, an arm of the US Department of Energy, Geoff Leventhall, a consultant who was working for AWEA, said that one of the researchers who has been investigating the health effects of infrasound caused by wind turbines was “stupid.”
If that’s the case, then there are thousands of stupid people protesting against industrial wind, and they are located all over the world. Here’s a small sampling of recent news:
– Last November, five people, several of them from Earth First! were arrested near Lincoln, Maine, after they blocked a road leading to a construction site for a 60-megawatt wind project on Rollins Mountain. According to a story written by Tux Turkel of the Portland Press Herald, one of the protesters carried a sign which read “Stop the rape of rural Maine.”
– On May 12, the first industrial wind facility proposed for rural Connecticut was rejected by the state’s siting council, which said the “visual effects” of the project were “in conflict with the policies of the state.” The project had been vigorously opposed by Save Prospect, a group founded by an affable high school teacher named Tim Reilly.
– Denmark, the supposed Valhalla of wind energy, is seeing fierce opposition to the energy sprawl required by wind. On July 22, 2010, the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten reported that there are some 40 anti-wind groups in Denmark and that “more and more neighbors are protesting against new, large wind turbines.” It cited the Svendborg city council which recently refused to provide a permit for turbines over 80 meters high, after a local group “protested violently against two wind turbines” that had been erected a few months earlier. The story continued, saying that “neighbors complain especially about the noise” from the turbines. It then quoted the town deputy mayor as saying that due to “the violent protests and the uncertainty of low-frequency noise” coming from the turbines, the town would “not expose our citizens” to large wind turbines.
– Last August, the Danish Society for Nature Conservation filed a complaint with the European Union in order to stop the parliament’s move to install 250-meter high wind turbines in a protected area in northern Jutland. According to the Danish press, the government is going ahead with the plans for the wind turbine testing center, and in recent days, Danish police have been forced to call in reinforcements because more than 30 protesters have been camping in the forest to prevent the project from going forward.
– Last September, the Copenhagen Post reported that “State-owned energy firm Dong Energy has given up building more wind turbines on Danish land, following protests from residents complaining about the noise the turbines make.” The article quotes company CEO Anders Eldrup, as saying “It is very difficult to get the public’s acceptance if the turbines are built close to residential buildings, and therefore we are now looking at maritime options.”
– Residents of Falmouth, Massachusetts, a small town on Cape Cod, continue to complain about noise coming from a 1.65 megawatt turbine that was installed in their town. The July 12 issue of the Cape Cod Times quotes Falmouth resident Neil Andersen, who says that at certain times, the turbine “gets jet engine loud … To put it simple, they drive one crazy."
– Residents of Vinalhaven, Maine continue to complain to state and local officials about the noise coming from turbines erected in their town. And some residents have chosen to abandon their homes rather than continue to live with the noise.
Of course, the wind industry claims that it has huge opportunities offshore. That’s true if money is no object. Building offshore wind projects costs about $5,000 per kilowatt, or about the same as a new nuclear plant, even though a nuclear plant will have a capacity factor at least three times that of the wind project. Put another way, building offshore wind costs about five times as much as the $1,000 or so per kilowatt needed for a new natural gas fired generator.
Those high costs will mean high costs for ratepayers. The likely cost for electricity from Cape Wind, the controversial wind project located off of Cape Code, will be about $0.21 per kilowatt-hour – if that project ever gets built.
Last year, an offshore project off the coast of Rhode Island, Deepwater Wind, was rejected by that state’s public utility commission because the cost of electricity from the project was expected to be $0.244 per kilowatt-hour with annual increases of 3.5% per year. For reference, the average retail price of electricity in the US is about $0.10.
While the wind industry continues to hope for more mandates and subsidies that will increase the cost of electricity for ratepayers, America’s wildlife is being subjected to a double standard. Indeed, the apparent appeal of “green” energy is so great that the US wind industry has a get-out-of-jail-free card when it comes to federal wildlife laws. Despite overwhelming evidence that shows tens of thousands of violations, the US wind industry has never been prosecuted under the Eagle Protection Act nor the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, one of the oldest wildlife laws in America.
In 2008, a study funded by the Alameda County Community Development Agency, estimated that about 2,400 raptors, including burrowing owls, American kestrels, and red-tailed hawks – as well as about 7,500 other birds, nearly all of which are protected under the MBTA – are being killed every year by the wind turbines located at Altamont Pass, California.
Last month, the Los Angeles Times reported that 70 golden eagles per year are being killed by the turbines at Altamont Pass. But again, the federal government has not brought a single case against the wind industry. Wildlife biologists estimate that the region around the pass would need 167 pairs of nesting golden eagles to produce enough offspring in order to make up for all of the eagles being killed by the bird Cuisinarts at Altamont. But the region only has 60 pairs of eagles.
Indeed, the only time the wind industry has ever faced legal action for killing birds occurred last year when the state of California reached a $2.5 million settlement with NextEra Energy Resources for the bird kills at Altamont. As part of that deal, the company agreed to remove or replace all of the turbines at Altamont by 2015.
The lack of prosecution of the wind industry for bird kills underscores a pernicious double standard in the enforcement of federal wildlife laws: at the very same time that federal law enforcement officials are bringing cases against oil and gas companies and electric utilities under the MBTA, they have given a de facto exemption to the wind industry for any enforcement action under that same statute. Indeed, over the past two decades or so, federal authorities have brought hundreds of cases against the oil and gas industry for violations of the MBTA. A recent example: On August 13, 2009, Exxon Mobil pled guilty in federal court to charges that it killed 85 birds – all of which were protected under the MBTA. The company agreed to pay $600,000 in fines and fees for the bird kills, which occurred after the animals came in contact with hydrocarbons in uncovered tanks and waste water facilities on company properties located in five western states.
Despite the toll that wind turbines are taking on birds, the industry continues to claim that efforts to protect bird life are just too stringent. In May, the Fish and Wildlife Service announced guidelines for the siting of wind turbines, but AWEA immediately objected, with the lobby group’s boss, Denise Bode, denouncing the guidelines as “unworkable.”
Bats are getting whacked, too. On July 17, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that the 420 wind turbines that have been erected in Pennsylvania “killed more than 10,000 bats last year…That’s an average of 25 bats per turbine per year, and the Nature Conservancy predicts that as many as 2,900 turbines will be set up across the state by 2030.”
A study of a 44-turbine wind farm in West Virginia found that up to 4,000 bats had been killed by the turbines in 2004 alone. A 2008 study of dead bats found on the ground near a Canadian wind farm found that many of the bats had been killed by a change in air pressure near the turbine blades that causes fatal damage to their lungs, a condition known as “barotrauma.”
Bat Conservation International, an Austin-based group dedicated to preserving the flying mammals and their habitats, has called the proliferation of wind turbines “a lethal crisis.” In 2009, I interviewed Ed Arnett, who heads the group’s research efforts on wind power. He said that the head-long rush to develop wind power is having major detrimental effects on bat populations but few environmental groups are willing to discuss the problem because those groups are so focused on the issue of carbon dioxide emissions and the possibility of global warming. “To compromise today’s wildlife values and environmental impacts for tomorrow’s speculated hopes is irresponsible,” Arnett said. But Arnett added that only a handful of bat species are protected by federal law. And thus the killing of bats by wind turbines gets little attention from the media.
The final issue to be addressed is the one that drives the wind energy devotees to total distraction: carbon dioxide. For years, it has been assumed that wind energy can provide a cost-effective method of reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The reality: wind energy’s carbon dioxide-cutting benefits are vastly overstated. Furthermore, if wind energy does help reduce carbon emissions, those reductions are likely too expensive to be used on any kind of scale.
Those are the findings of an exhaustive new study from Bentek Energy, a Colorado-based energy analytics firm. Rather than rely on computer models that use theoretical emissions data, the authors of the study, Porter Bennett and Brannin McBee, analyzed actual emissions data from electric generation plants located in four regions: the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, Bonneville Power Administration, California Independent System Operator, and the Midwest Independent System Operator. Those four system operators serve about 110 million customers, or about one-third of the US population.
Bennett and McBee looked at more than 300,000 hourly records from 2007 through 2009. Their results show that the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) and other wind boosters have vastly overstated wind’s ability to cut sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxide, and carbon dioxide. Indeed, the study found that in some regions of the country, like California, using wind energy doesn’t reduce sulfur dioxide emissions at all. But the most important conclusion from the study is that wind energy is not “a cost-effective solution for reducing carbon dioxide if carbon is valued at less than $33 per ton.” With the US economy still in recession and unemployment numbers near record levels, Congress cannot, will not, attempt to impose a carbon tax, no matter how small.
The wind industry’s apologists are desperate to dismiss the Bentek study, which is a more thorough version of a similar study the firm did in early 2010.
But the Bentek study is similar to several other studies that have come to almost identical conclusions. For instance, in 2003, a paper presented at the International Energy Workshop in Laxenburg, Austria by a group of Estonian researchers concluded that using traditional power plants to compensate for the highly variable, incurably intermittent electricity produced by wind turbines “eliminates the major part of the expected positive effect of wind energy,” and that “In some cases the environmental gain from the wind energy use was lost almost totally.”
In 2004, the Irish Electricity Supply Board found that as the level of wind capacity increases, “the CO2 emissions actually increase as a direct result of having to cope with the variation of wind-power output.”
In a 2008 article published in the journal Energy Policy, James Oswald and his two co-authors concluded that increased use of wind will likely cause utilities to invest in lower-efficiency gas-fired generators that will be switched on and off frequently, a move that further lowers their energy efficiency. Upon publication of the study, Oswald said that carbon dioxide savings from wind power “will be less than expected, because cheaper, less efficient [gas-fired] plant[s] will be used to support these wind power fluctuations. Neither these extra costs nor the increased carbon production are being taken into account in the government figures for wind power.”
In November 2009, Kent Hawkins, a Canadian electrical engineer, published a detailed analysis on the frequency with which gas-fired generators must be cycled on and off in order to back up wind power. Hawkins findings: the frequent switching on and off results in more gas consumption than if there were no wind turbines at all. His analysis suggests that it would be more efficient in terms of carbon dioxide emissions to simply run combined-cycle gas turbines on a continuous basis rather than use wind turbines backed up by gas-fired generators that are constantly being turned on and off. Hawkins concludes that wind power is not an “effective CO2 mitigation” strategy “because of inefficiencies introduced by fast-ramping (inefficient) operation of gas turbines.”
If wind energy doesn’t effectively cut carbon dioxide, then the wind sector has few reasons to exist. The Global Wind Energy Council claims that reducing the amount of carbon dioxide into atmosphere “is the most important environmental benefit from wind power generation.” For its part, the American Wind Energy Association insists that the wind business “could avoid 825 million tons of carbon dioxide annually by 2030.”
That 825 million tons sounds like a lot. It’s not. In 2010, global carbon dioxide emissions totaled 33.1 billion tons. Thus, if the US went on a wind energy binge, and installed thousands of turbines in every available location, doing so might reduce global carbon dioxide emissions by about 2.5%. And that calculation assumes that global carbon dioxide emissions will stay flat over the next two decades. They won’t.
And that leads to the obvious question: if wind energy doesn’t significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions, then why does the industry get such hefty subsidies? The key subsidy is the federal production tax credit of $0.022 for each kilowatt-hour of electricity. That amounts to subsidy of $6.44 per million BTU of energy produced. For comparison, in 2008, the Energy Information Administration reported that subsidies to the oil and gas sector totaled $1.9 billion per year, or about $0.03 per million BTU of energy produced. In other words, subsidies to the wind sector are more than 200 times as great as those given to the oil and gas sector on the basis of per-unit-of-energy produced.
If those fat subsidies go away, then the US wind sector will be stopped dead in its tracks. And for consumers, that should be welcome news.
The wind energy business is the electric sector’s equivalent of the corn ethanol scam: it’s an over-subsidized industry that depends wholly on taxpayer dollars to remain solvent while providing an inferior product to consumers that does little, if anything, to reduce our need for hydrocarbons or cut carbon dioxide emissions. Indeed, it only increases costs and complexity for the utilities, which, in turn, means higher costs for consumers.
A final point: whenever you hear people like Steve Chu complain about “NIMBYs” who don’t want wind turbines on their property, be sure to include billionaires on the list of NIMBYs.
You see, people like Boone Pickens are eager to have wind turbines and transmission lines put up on other people’s land, not theirs. In 2008, Pickens declared that his 68,000-acre ranch located in the Texas Panhandle, one of America’s windiest regions, will not sport a single turbine. “I’m not going to have the windmills on my ranch,” Pickens declared. “They’re ugly.”
Robert Bryce is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His fourth book, Power Hungry: The Myths of “Green” Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future, was recently issued in paperback.
Renewable energy and jobs: 4 studies
Source: Various
Study of the effects on employment of public aid to renewable energy sources [Spain]
Wind energy: The case of Denmark
Economic impacts from the promotion of renewable energies: The German experience
The economic impact of renewable energy policy in Scotland and the UK
