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RE: A FLIGHTY WIND
Franz Schoenhofer and Susan Gawarecki wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: Franz Schoenhofer [mailto:franz.schoenhofer@CHELLO.AT]
Sent: Sunday, May 09, 2004 12:08 PM
To: Susan Gawarecki; RadSafe
Subject: AW: A FLIGHTY WIND
Susan and RADSAFErs,
I can confirm the Guardian article. The euphoria has has been changed to deep scepticism. One must be a really stubborn "environmentalist" to regard the so-called "windfarms" as beautiful, nice and fitting into the landscape. I have seen several of them both in Scandinavia, in Hawaii (Big Island) and on the Spanish South Coast - and they look terrible, not to talk about their noise. Some clever business men wanted to place a lot of them in an area of Austria, which is a conservation area, where not even a motorway was allowed to be built - their attempts have denied.
Wind power is a very modern way of fraud: Those financing wind energy and invest into it, want to have their guaranteed financial return and of course the government "has" to guarantee it. The federal electricity board has to buy the electricity from those wind facilities at a price manyfold compared to electricity from conventional generation - coal, water, nuclear. No wind - no electricity - what a fine situation when an important sports event is on TV! Finally of course the consumers have to pay, who could otherwise be supplied with cheaper electricity. Investors make the big money, but the consumers are usually not aware of this fact, because "green" electricity fascinates the average consumer and those who realize the fraud still are not pro-nuclear, simply because nuclear is regarded as being "the devil".
I wonder, when people will find out that they are cheated? Those complaining about noise and the ugly view are of course not against wind electricity - it should only be in others backyard.
Regards,
Franz
-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: owner-radsafe@list.vanderbilt.edu [mailto:owner-radsafe@list.vanderbilt.edu]Im Auftrag von Susan Gawarecki
Gesendet: Freitag, 07. Mai 2004 23:47
An: RadSafe
Betreff: A FLIGHTY WIND
The Guardian article (link below) goes into more detail on the wind vs. nuclear debate in England.
--Susan Gawarecki
A FLIGHTY WIND
Wind Power Sparks Controversy Across Western Europe
In Western European countries, where thousands of wind farms are sprouting up across the landscape, fierce bickering has broken out over the benefits and drawbacks of wind energy. In the U.K. and Germany, activists and rural residents are waging a ferocious battle against what the Germans call "Verspargelung der Landschaft" -- the transformation of the landscape into an asparagus field. While renewable energy in general enjoys wide public support -- and heavy government subsidies -- in these countries, wind farms have drawn the ire of groups that claim they foul the landscape, create noise pollution, kill birds, and cost vastly more than most other sources of energy. U.K. conservationist David Bellamy calls wind power "sheer lunacy" and says "it beggars belief that some environmental groups say [wind turbines] are 'green.'" In turn, Tony Juniper of Friends of the Earth U.K. calls anti-wind forces "parochial, shortsighted, selfish, peddling falsehoods and misconceptions."
!
Wi!
nd-power advocates say that, in order to stave off climate change and a resurgence of nuclear power, society needs to use what clean-energy sources are available, and for now, that's wind.
straight to the source: The Guardian, John Vidal, 07 May 2004 <http://www.gristmagazine.com/cgi-bin/forward.pl?forward_id=2426>
straight to the source: The Christian Science Monitor, Charles Hawley, 05 May 2004 <http://www.gristmagazine.com/cgi-bin/forward.pl?forward_id=2428>
====================
Just a few words on our local experience.
There are 400-500 wind turbines within a few miles of the Tri-Cities and Walla Walla in Washington State, sitting on ridgelines near the upstream end of the 200-mile long Columbia River gorge. They are sited on land leased from wheat farmers and at some distance from residences. There has not been any significant local opposition to these windfarms, although another proposed site was abandoned, partly because the vibrations would have compromised the experimental work at LIGO, the state-of-the-art Laser Interferometry Gravitational Observatory.
I have not seen any figures on capacity factor for the local windfarms, but I would be surprised if it were as low as the Gaspe Peninsula number. The Columbia Gorge is renowned for its strong and steady wind -- wind surfers come from all over the world to the Hood River stretch of the Gorge.
My sense is that there is a modest government subsidy, but a BPA project engineer who talked to the local chapter of the IEEE said that they are basically competitive with fossil generation in the Northwest. Financial support for these projects is mostly commercial, with Florida Power and Light as the lead partner (FPL also has developed several other windfarms around the country). The Pacific NW has a lot of relatively inexpensive hydropower, but new hydropower is next to impossible and both new fossil and new nuclear would face fierce opposition.
Of course, we in the US, and the Northwest in particular, benefit from a lot more open space well away from residences and businesses that might be negatively impacted. I can understand how the view in Germany and the UK might be much darker.
Best regards.
Jim Dukelow
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Richland, WA
jim.dukelow@pnl.gov
These comments are mine and have not been reviewed and/or approved by my management or by the U.S. Department of Energy.
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