Wind can't curb carbon emissions
Mike Tidwell opined that the winds of Kitty Hawk, which helped launch the Brothers Wright, should metaphorically augur support for industrial wind initiatives (“Let’s make history again,” Commentary, July 23).
However, the Mid-Atlantic region, onshore and off, needs more ecologically threatening wind projects like a prom queen needs acne.
The energy flow from wind projects fluctuates erratically, which means that wind power projects must take vast amounts of power from the power grid to work reliably.
Wind technology is a highly variable, nondispatchable source of electricity. In most places in the United States, massive wind facilities will produce little or no power at times of peak demand (as has been amply documented by the record of wind projects in California, Texas and New York).
The financial and thermal costs of the integration of wind power into most grid systems have grave implications for wind power’s capacity to offset carbon emissions, which is often wind power’s raison d’être.
The use of wind power and coal power are not inversely related to one another: all other things being equal — and given continued increases in demand — the more wind projects there are, the more we will need to use reliable conventional power generators such as coal.
As a producer of sporadic electricity, wind can do nothing to dampen “our addiction to oil,” since virtually no oil is used to produce electricity.
Jon Boone
Oakland
2 August 2008
Tags: Wind power, Wind energy
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