Four years ago, Shell Wind Energy, a unit of the oil company,
looked for a suitable site for a wind farm on the Northern
California coast. Its scouts found a large acreage — cattle
pastures — high on the hills about six miles from the town of
Ferndale. They secured permission from the rancher-owners to use
the land and announced the project. All hell broke loose.
The local weekly in the tight-knit town was flooded with
concerned letters to the editor: One of two narrow roads into the
hill area carried all the daily traffic of a large hinterland; the
other was largely dirt. They would be clogged for months with
construction trucks. Wind turbine blades will kill thousands of
birds. The constant noise of the turning blades will keep local
ranch families awake. The wind farm will spoil the view and forever
alter the bucolic nature of the land.
Protest meetings followed. Shell representatives tried to allay
fears. They even talked about carrying the huge blades to the site
by helicopter to avoid using the roads. Nothing worked. The town
passed a resolution opposing the project. Shell finally threw in
the towel, saying the project would be uneconomical.
Increasingly, this seems to be the fate of Big Wind, one of the
two mainstays of President Obama’s “alternative energy” plan. The
other is solar energy where the Obama Administration’s record is
one mostly of failures. For the federal government to subsidize
research and development of promising technologies is one thing,
but acting as a venture capitalist is quite another. It thought it
picked winners, but got losers by throwing dollars at several
failing solar panel manufacturers.
The wind farm business is now feeling the cumulative effects of
opposition by neighbors and potential neighbors, bird lovers and
people who oppose inefficient, uneconomical government
projects.
Take the NIMBY aspect. From the left, the newsletter and website
CounterPunch reports on several protests. In July a group
blocked a road as part of an effort to stop construction of a
21-turbine farm on a mountain top. In October, residents near
Utica, New York, sued the owners of a wind project, asserting the
turbines gave them headaches, interrupted sleep, and endangered
property values. In 2011, an Environmental Review Panel in Ontario,
Canada, after studying a new wind facility, concluded that such
things can cause harm to humans “if placed too close to
residents.”
As for killing birds, there is plenty for Audubon and PETA
people to complain about. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service
estimates that an estimated 440,000 birds are killed by turbine
blades annually. The Alameda County, California, Community
Development Agency estimates that 2,400 raptors and 7,500 other
birds are killed annually in the Altamont Pass turbine farm east of
Oakland, through which I-80 passes.
The most ardent environmentalists are implacable in their
opposition to fossil fuels and so, apparently, is Barack Obama. The
world’s demand for electricity, however, continues to grow and
solar panels and wind turbines cannot possibly meet that
demand.
The underlying argument for using wind power is that it reduces
carbon dioxide.
If one believes the global warming (“climate change”) theory, it
follows that one believes humans are causing it by their use of
hydrocarbons. Thus, wind farms reduce emissions.
Can they produce enough energy to reduce the use of natural gas,
oil, nuclear?
In a word, no. The International Energy Agency estimates that
the world’s demand for electricity will grow every year over the
next two decades by the equivalent of Brazil’s annual usage.
(Brazil uses about 475 tetrawatt hours a year.) The world’s total
wind turbine energy output in 2011 was 437 tetrawatts, of which the
U.S. share was a little under 20 percent. So, just to keep up with
demand (without displacing any of the traditional energy sources)
the world’s wind energy industry would have to develop five times
the 2011 U.S. capacity every year for years to come. That’s a
definition of Mission Impossible.
