By Matt Wasson, Appalachian Voices
As Congress was returning from the August recess, there wasn't much news about the climate bill. The only energy-related news breaking through the coverage of the rancorous health care debates and town-hall tea parties was a study on "energy sprawl" published by five staff members of the Nature Conservancy.
"Renewable Energy Needs Land, Lots Of Land" was the headline of an August 28th story on NPR about the study.
"Renewable technologies increase energy sprawl," was the headline summary on the journal Nature's website.
Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, in an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal, summed up the message that was heard by legislators and the public from the news coverage of the study:
So the coverage was generated not by the study's results, but entirely by the assumptions that went into it about the relative impacts of renewable versus conventional energy technologies. Looking at the counter-intuitive findings (wind is 8 times as destructive as coal), it's no wonder that the media took such an interest.
To put those assumptions in perspective, the habitat impact of the Mount Storm Wind Farm in the first image is assumed to be 25% greater than the impact of the 12,000-acre Hobet mountaintop removal mine in the second image (images are taken from the same altitude and perspective; the bright connect-the-dots feature in the wind farm image is the actual area disturbed):
"Garbage in, garbage out" is a concept most people are familiar with, but the problems with the "energy sprawl" study go farther than that.
When I taught a course in ecological modeling, we used a hypothetical study on acts of violence in industrialized countries to examine how you could generate any result you desire simply by choosing how to define an "act of violence." For instance, if you wanted to show that the French are the most violent industrialized society, you might define rude treatment by waiters as an act of violence. The study does something very similar, but worse -- it fails to define a consistent measure of land-use impact across the various energy technologies it purports to compare. It's as though we defined "acts of violence" to include rude treatment only by French waiters, but not by German, English or American waiters.
While I won't get into details of the math and science (a full analysis and response is in preparation), here are just a few of the jaw-dropping errors and assumptions that went into the study:
* A 2 megawatt wind turbine is assumed to disturb between 100 and 120 acres of wildlife habitat (smell test: does it really make sense that one of those wind turbines you always see on television is disturbing more than 100 football fields worth of land?). These estimates were not from published studies, but from portions of brochures [pdf] discussing the area required for ideal placement of a wind farm. Instead of using additional estimates from those same brochures that only 3-5% of that area is directly impacted, the study used vaguely-worded, unreferenced and unsupportable biological justifications to include the other 95-97% in their analysis.
* The acreage impacts of coal mining, from Wyoming to Alabama, were extrapolated from one mine in Illinois, and apparently one other mine, though no location, details or references were provided. In the case of Appalachian mining, a casual examination of available data reveals that many -- probably most -- Appalachian mines exhibit a "land-use intensity" 5 to 10 times higher than either estimate used in the study.
* The impacts of blowing up a mountain and dumping resulting toxic-laden waste into nearby valleys and streams is treated as a comparable disturbance to, say, being located several hundred yards away from a wind turbine. Worse, fragmentation of habitat (the category that increased wind's alleged impacts by 95-97%), was only considered for renewable technologies but not for nuclear and coal, despite a wealth of published studies showing fragmentation effects as much as five times greater than the footprint of a strip mine.
It's obvious that the authors of this study don't spend a lot of time thinking about coal mining (the fact that they refer to underground or deep mines as "pit" mines is revealing). That could partly explain the distorted picture the study gives of the impacts of coal mining, but the assumptions are so consistently weighted against renewable energy that it gets hard to ignore. If the pattern of assumptions so consistently tilted against renewables and in favor of coal and nuclear doesn't raise a red flag, consider the language used in the study. The EIA's "No International Offsets/Limited Alternatives" scenario, which would emphasize rapid expansion of renewable energy technologies (and which purportedly creates the most "energy sprawl"), was renamed the "Few Options" scenario by the authors. A real gem of a PR strategy from the group that came up with "energy sprawl."
As for the policy options that the study's results (and assumptions) favor, the "Core" scenario from the EIA's analysis of the Warner-Lieberman climate bill was renamed the "CCS" scenario -- shorthand for carbon capture and storage. This could also represent a real tipping of the hand as to the policy priorities at the Nature Conservancy. That, in turn, would go a long way toward explaining the blind spot the Nature Conservancy possesses regarding the wholesale destruction of the most biologically diverse forests and streams on the continent through mountaintop removal coal mining. The fact that plants installing CCS will need to consume at least 15-30% more coal to produce the same amount of electricity (if and when CCS becomes available), would cause a little cognitive dissonance in anyone concerned about the environment but supportive of widespread CCS deployment.
What the study didn't look at
From the perspective of communities impacted by coal mining, a study on energy impacts that looked no further than the land area affected by mining was never going to carry much weight anyway. EPA biologist Gregory Pond, who published a study in 2008 showing the loss of entire orders of insects downstream from mountaintop removal mines, told the news media when the study was released:
The most important factors in the "what the study doesn't look at" category, however, are the impacts of energy on people and communities. The thousands of people in Appalachia without access to clean and safe drinking water do not show up in the "energy sprawl" study's land impact estimates. The photo on the right of a child in Prenter, West Virginia, is the lead photo of a remarkable piece of reporting from the New York Times that provides a lot of insight into the awful tragedies faced daily by families in Appalachia who are forced to drink and bathe in water polluted with coal waste.
The authors of the "energy sprawl" study stated explicitly that aquatic and health issues are not what the study was about, and it wouldn't be fair to blame them for any failure to address those problems. It's the inevitable distortions of the study that do the most violence to those fighting for safe homes and clean drinking water in coal and uranium-bearing regions. The lead author addressed some of those distortions directly, shortly after Senator Alexander's "We're destroying the environment in the name of saving it" op-ed. Here are a few excerpts from his post on the Nature Conservancy's blog:
The study also does a lot of harm to those working to reduce the impacts of mining and to promote green jobs in their communities. "Nature Conservancy says wind and solar are more harmful than coal" is a talking point that will be repeated in mine permit hearings, utilities commission proceedings, letters to the editor and at coal rallies across the country for years into the future.
There is no way to repair the concept of "energy sprawl" at this point. Environmental and climate advocates would do well to strike that buzzword from their lexicons and literature entirely.
Burn this blog post after reading.
Matt Wasson is the director of programs for Appalachian Voices, a Boone, N.C.-based organization that works to solve environmental problems impacting the central and southern Appalachian mountain region. Wasson has a doctorate in ecology from Cornell University.
As Congress was returning from the August recess, there wasn't much news about the climate bill. The only energy-related news breaking through the coverage of the rancorous health care debates and town-hall tea parties was a study on "energy sprawl" published by five staff members of the Nature Conservancy.
"Renewable Energy Needs Land, Lots Of Land" was the headline of an August 28th story on NPR about the study.
"Renewable technologies increase energy sprawl," was the headline summary on the journal Nature's website.
Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, in an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal, summed up the message that was heard by legislators and the public from the news coverage of the study:
"We're about to destroy the environment in the name of saving it."The interesting thing about the news coverage is that none of it addressed the actual analysis. The study didn't actually measure the impacts of different energy technologies, but rather compiled estimates from a smattering of reports, fact sheets and brochures from government and industry sources in order to arrive at an acre-per-unit of energy figure for each energy technology. Those figures were then applied to the Energy Information Administration's modeling of four climate policy scenarios under consideration by Congress.
So the coverage was generated not by the study's results, but entirely by the assumptions that went into it about the relative impacts of renewable versus conventional energy technologies. Looking at the counter-intuitive findings (wind is 8 times as destructive as coal), it's no wonder that the media took such an interest.
To put those assumptions in perspective, the habitat impact of the Mount Storm Wind Farm in the first image is assumed to be 25% greater than the impact of the 12,000-acre Hobet mountaintop removal mine in the second image (images are taken from the same altitude and perspective; the bright connect-the-dots feature in the wind farm image is the actual area disturbed):
"Garbage in, garbage out" is a concept most people are familiar with, but the problems with the "energy sprawl" study go farther than that.When I taught a course in ecological modeling, we used a hypothetical study on acts of violence in industrialized countries to examine how you could generate any result you desire simply by choosing how to define an "act of violence." For instance, if you wanted to show that the French are the most violent industrialized society, you might define rude treatment by waiters as an act of violence. The study does something very similar, but worse -- it fails to define a consistent measure of land-use impact across the various energy technologies it purports to compare. It's as though we defined "acts of violence" to include rude treatment only by French waiters, but not by German, English or American waiters.
While I won't get into details of the math and science (a full analysis and response is in preparation), here are just a few of the jaw-dropping errors and assumptions that went into the study:
* A 2 megawatt wind turbine is assumed to disturb between 100 and 120 acres of wildlife habitat (smell test: does it really make sense that one of those wind turbines you always see on television is disturbing more than 100 football fields worth of land?). These estimates were not from published studies, but from portions of brochures [pdf] discussing the area required for ideal placement of a wind farm. Instead of using additional estimates from those same brochures that only 3-5% of that area is directly impacted, the study used vaguely-worded, unreferenced and unsupportable biological justifications to include the other 95-97% in their analysis.
* The acreage impacts of coal mining, from Wyoming to Alabama, were extrapolated from one mine in Illinois, and apparently one other mine, though no location, details or references were provided. In the case of Appalachian mining, a casual examination of available data reveals that many -- probably most -- Appalachian mines exhibit a "land-use intensity" 5 to 10 times higher than either estimate used in the study.
* The impacts of blowing up a mountain and dumping resulting toxic-laden waste into nearby valleys and streams is treated as a comparable disturbance to, say, being located several hundred yards away from a wind turbine. Worse, fragmentation of habitat (the category that increased wind's alleged impacts by 95-97%), was only considered for renewable technologies but not for nuclear and coal, despite a wealth of published studies showing fragmentation effects as much as five times greater than the footprint of a strip mine.
It's obvious that the authors of this study don't spend a lot of time thinking about coal mining (the fact that they refer to underground or deep mines as "pit" mines is revealing). That could partly explain the distorted picture the study gives of the impacts of coal mining, but the assumptions are so consistently weighted against renewable energy that it gets hard to ignore. If the pattern of assumptions so consistently tilted against renewables and in favor of coal and nuclear doesn't raise a red flag, consider the language used in the study. The EIA's "No International Offsets/Limited Alternatives" scenario, which would emphasize rapid expansion of renewable energy technologies (and which purportedly creates the most "energy sprawl"), was renamed the "Few Options" scenario by the authors. A real gem of a PR strategy from the group that came up with "energy sprawl."
As for the policy options that the study's results (and assumptions) favor, the "Core" scenario from the EIA's analysis of the Warner-Lieberman climate bill was renamed the "CCS" scenario -- shorthand for carbon capture and storage. This could also represent a real tipping of the hand as to the policy priorities at the Nature Conservancy. That, in turn, would go a long way toward explaining the blind spot the Nature Conservancy possesses regarding the wholesale destruction of the most biologically diverse forests and streams on the continent through mountaintop removal coal mining. The fact that plants installing CCS will need to consume at least 15-30% more coal to produce the same amount of electricity (if and when CCS becomes available), would cause a little cognitive dissonance in anyone concerned about the environment but supportive of widespread CCS deployment.
What the study didn't look at
From the perspective of communities impacted by coal mining, a study on energy impacts that looked no further than the land area affected by mining was never going to carry much weight anyway. EPA biologist Gregory Pond, who published a study in 2008 showing the loss of entire orders of insects downstream from mountaintop removal mines, told the news media when the study was released:
While habitat degradation from mountaintop mining is what one sees on the surface, we found that chemical effects are quite pronounced and limit much of the expected biodiversity from what were once naturally rich, diverse Appalachian stream systems.
The most important factors in the "what the study doesn't look at" category, however, are the impacts of energy on people and communities. The thousands of people in Appalachia without access to clean and safe drinking water do not show up in the "energy sprawl" study's land impact estimates. The photo on the right of a child in Prenter, West Virginia, is the lead photo of a remarkable piece of reporting from the New York Times that provides a lot of insight into the awful tragedies faced daily by families in Appalachia who are forced to drink and bathe in water polluted with coal waste.The authors of the "energy sprawl" study stated explicitly that aquatic and health issues are not what the study was about, and it wouldn't be fair to blame them for any failure to address those problems. It's the inevitable distortions of the study that do the most violence to those fighting for safe homes and clean drinking water in coal and uranium-bearing regions. The lead author addressed some of those distortions directly, shortly after Senator Alexander's "We're destroying the environment in the name of saving it" op-ed. Here are a few excerpts from his post on the Nature Conservancy's blog:
First, climate change is the big threat to America's wildlife (and to our communities). Severe climate change has the potential to imperil many more species than energy sprawl.The Nature Conservancy's tireless efforts to support energy efficiency, build awareness of climate change, and bring climate policy to the table deserve both thanks and respect. But the concept of "energy sprawl," now that it has been associated with such a distorted picture of the impacts of wind, solar, coal and nuclear technologies, adds nothing but confusion and false impressions to the debate over climate.
Moreover, we show in our paper that most of the energy sprawl from now to 2030 will happen regardless of whether or not there is a comprehensive climate bill. By far the largest amount of energy sprawl will come from biofuel production, driven by the renewable fuel standard and other laws already in place.
So I say to everyone writing or blogging about energy sprawl: If you are concerned about energy sprawl, then fight for energy efficiency!
The study also does a lot of harm to those working to reduce the impacts of mining and to promote green jobs in their communities. "Nature Conservancy says wind and solar are more harmful than coal" is a talking point that will be repeated in mine permit hearings, utilities commission proceedings, letters to the editor and at coal rallies across the country for years into the future.
There is no way to repair the concept of "energy sprawl" at this point. Environmental and climate advocates would do well to strike that buzzword from their lexicons and literature entirely.
Burn this blog post after reading.
Matt Wasson is the director of programs for Appalachian Voices, a Boone, N.C.-based organization that works to solve environmental problems impacting the central and southern Appalachian mountain region. Wasson has a doctorate in ecology from Cornell University.
Kudos to Matt Wasson for writing this, and ISS for publishing. I skimmed the Nature Conservancy study and was so disgusted, I couldn't finish it. I admire Matt for soldiering-through and refuting it so carefully.
The sad thing is that sloppy science requires patience and thoroughness in retort. Thanks to Matt, consider this one debunked.
October 5, 2009 4:46 PM | Reply
I was pleased to read such a carefully researched rebuttal to both the original study and the falsely-spun oped that it inspired.
"Impact" is a very subjective word - a carefully sited wind farm may be visible for many tens of miles but may result in few if any adverse ecological impacts to the nearby region. On the other hand, a coal plant might have minimal visibility impact in siting, but all other ecological and human-health impacts from burning coal - mining, transporting, burning, storing coal ash waste - are well documented.
October 6, 2009 11:06 AM | Reply
Wasson unfortunately choses to ignore a key point in his article bashing research done by several TNC scientists - which is that new windplants won't appreciably reduce the demand for construction of new coal mines.
He also failed to compare apples to apples with his claim that a recent forest impact study (see: http://www.srs.fs.usda.gov/pubs/ja/ja_wickham008.pdf ) indicates the acreage loss of forest interior habitat is 5x greater than the acreage of forest loss due to coal mining activities. The 5x "result" of the research is based on a distance-to-edge of 1,200 meters, whereas this research found that using the metric of a 120-meter "distance to edge" yielded a ratio of forest-interior to forest loss of about 2.4x for ALL forms of coal-mining in a portion of southern WV (research results actually included any source of forest loss between 1992 and 2001 - not just due to mining) . Note that using a 100-meter distance for "edge effect", my analyses of forest and forest-interior habitat impact by windplants in our region - employing far more detailed aerial imagery (2-meter resolution aerial photos vs. 45 meter resolution satellite image) - showed a forest-interior to forest loss ratio that was about 4x to nearly 8x - see: http://www.jvas.org/cc_forest_impact_ar_wndplnt.html and http://www.kutztown.edu/acad/geography/wildlife&windconf/Speaker_Presentations/Boone_GIS.pdf .
A more fair comparison would be to evaluate the forest/forest-interior impacts based on the MWh yield from coal mined from the Complex versus the equivalent # of wind turbines to produce the same MWh output over 25 or 30 year span (turbine lifespan). Of course, doing so would not support Wasson's bias...
Note the grossly exaggerated claim by Wasson involving the Google-Earth photo of the 82 2-MW wind turbines - which comprise the Phase 1 portion of the NedPower windplant. Wasson asserts that this windplant's resulting forest impact would be 25% greater than the 12,000 acres of forest supposedly impacted by the Hobet Mine Complex (adjoining image in his article). Even using the upper limit of 120 acre per 2MW wind turbine for forest-interior impact based on an assumption used in the TNC research report, the shown image's impact of NedPower windplant would be only 10,000 acres - not 15,000 acres as he implied (an exaggeration of 50%).
However, Wasson's contention that 100 to 120 acres of forest impact is lost per 2MW wind turbine is based on an assumption in TNC's research report about wind energy development's rate of land-use impact (see report's Table 1) - which shouldn't be construed to mean forest-only impacts. Furthermore, Wassen's contention is predicated on the assumption that a 2MW wind turbine would operate with an Annual Capacity Factor of 35%. In reality the NedPower windplant has operated over the past 2 years with only a 28% CF - which means his extrapolation (based on TNC's estimate of habitat impact) should have been less than 90 acres per 2MW wind turbine, and that the 82 turbines in Phase 1 of the NedPower windplant should have been expected to have less than 7,500 acres of habitat impact using TNC"s estimate that wind energy development has an Land-Use Intensity of 72.1 square-kilometers per million-MWh/yr of electricity generation (see figure 1). Thus, Wassen has doubled the expected comparative impact of the NedPower windplant - i.e., an exaggeration of 100%.
Matt Wasson and Appalachian Voices are not fairly assessing or recognizing the environmental impacts of industrial wind energy development, and sadly they have grossly misrepresented this technology's capability to appreciably reduce the admittedly horrendous and unacceptable impacts associated with the mining and burning of coal.
October 6, 2009 11:25 AM | Reply
Kudos to Matt Wasson for exposing the Nature Conservancy's continual push against wind energy projects, extending from the Pacific NW across the Great Plains, and into Appalachian Coal Country where Dan Boone leads the TNC anti-wind charge.
I would go further as to suggest that TNC finds renewable energy as a direct threat to their money making scheme, which is scooping up land for cheap, and selling it to the government for cash.
It is of absolutely no surprise that Dan Boone, a TNC member and anti-wind hysteric, would come to defend a study that he and others within TNC published in order to continue to delay the adoption of energy independence and clean energy. TNC's tainting of their pre-existing political inroads though state and federal government with anti-renewables rhetoric is among the greatest little known secrets in the modern day environmental movement. Exposed, it will likely be greater than TNC's dirty little secret of selling conservation lands to their board members and strategic political contacts.
October 7, 2009 5:34 PM | Reply
The abusive ad hominem attack cowardly made against me by an "anonymous" commentor of course has no relevance to the merits of the concerns my post raised. But for the record I am NOT a "member" of The Nature Conservancy. In the distant past I have contributed financially to and been a member of TNC as well as Appalachian Voices - along with many other conservation organizations. However, I fully support TNC in their mission to protect biodiversity. Regarding Appalachian Voices, I am deeply disturbed by the bias presented in favor of industrial wind energy development via their publications and website.
A case in point is the misleading info provided by this organization's staff in the article on page 18 of the June/July 2009 issue of The Appalachian Voice - specifically, the magnitude of bat mortality at windplants built along Appalachian ridgetops - see: http://appvoices.org/pdfs/voice_2009_03_junejuly.pdf . This article provided merely the number of dead bat carcasses that were found by researchers underneath a sampling of wind turbines instead of disclosing the much greater number of bats which the researcher estimated were actually killed during this brief period.
For example, the Appalachian Voice article claimed "One 2005 study found that during a six-week study period, 398 bats were killed at the Mountaineer wind farm in West Virginia..." However, that same study's report on page 8 refutes this low bat mortality claim - "The total number of bats estimated to have been killed by the 44 turbines [of the Mountaineer windplant] just during this 6-week period was 1,364–1,980." The actual number of bats killed at the WV windplant likely was 4 to 5 times greater in magnitude than what the staff of Appalachian Voices informed its members and others. The research report referenced in The Appalachian Voice article can be downloaded via this weblink: http://www.batsandwind.org/pdf/postconpatbatfatal.pdf .
I can enumerate many other false and misleading claims about the issue of industrial wind energy development which have been made by staff of Applachian Voices.
October 7, 2009 9:32 PM | Reply
Dan, thanks for contributing to the discussion. Your first point that "new windplants won't appreciably reduce the demand for construction of new coal mines" I'll address last, as it's the only point that is entirely unhelpful to the discussion.
As for comparing apples to apples on habitat fragmentation, I had no intention of making any comparisons between the impacts of mining and wind turbines, but was simply listing three of the jaw-dropping problems with the "energy sprawl" study. Indeed, my larger point was that comparing such different types of impacts is fraught with peril at best and a fool's errand at worst. At a minimum, any such comparison, to be credible, would need to use both a thorough and balanced accounting of a broad range of impacts of various technologies. For instance, if the study were going to include "avoidance behaviors" by wildlife, it would be best to consider those for mining as well as for wind or else not include them. While I haven't seen any studies, my ecological instincts tell me that blasts of ammonium-nitrate explosives powerful enough to rattle shelves, break windows and crack foundations of homes more than a mile away from surface mine sites could lead to "avoidance behaviors" in a variety of animals for a considerable distance outside of the footprint of a mine permit.
The fact that the study included avoidance behaviors and fragmentation with respect to renewables but not conventional technologies is itself a fatal flaw in the "energy sprawl" study's methodology, though it's only one of many even more significant criticisms I have. In general, my concern wasn't so much that the study failed to "compare apples to apples," but that it compared watermelons to kumquats - the magnitude of the impacts it compared for wind and coal weren't even on the same scale, nor were the ecological value of the habitats where different impacts occured. Worse, the impacts of wind on wildlife were not estimated from Dan Boone's data or anyone else's, but were assumed to be equivalent to the spacing between turbines recommended in DOE and AWEA brochures in regard to minimizing energy losses due to turbulence in a wind farm. None of the concerns you mention contest those basic flaws that lead to enormously distorted and biologically unsupportable conclusions.
The concern you raise about my overstating the study's estimate of the Mount Storm Wind Farm is valid, as I was unaware that only Phase I of the planned 264 MW wind farm was represented in the image. Fortunately, I am confident that the comparison would have had precisely the same impact had I correctly stated that "the habitat impact of the Mount Storm Wind Farm in the first image is assumed to be more than 80% of the impact of the 12,000-acre Hobet mountaintop removal mine in the second image" so we can rest assured that nobody was seriously misled by my error. Nevertheless, I will take care to correct the error should I use the comparison again.
As for the "wind doesn't replace coal" concern...
In the first half of 2009, wind generated 1.8% of US electricity (compared to 1.3% in the first half of 2008 and .8% in the first half of 2007), while coal has generated 45% - the lowest level in 25 years, possibly since there's been an electric grid. A number of European nations already generate 10% or more of their electricity from wind and the Department of Energy estimates that 20% is a reasonable goal for the US. There are thousands of engineers and planners across the world designing energy portfolios that strategically pair various sources of renewable energy like wind, hydro, solar and biomass to eliminate the need for storage when using intermittent sources like wind. Tens of billions of dollars are being invested by really smart investors every year to build wind power capacity.
I'm searching for that elusive "point of agreement" and perhaps this is it: when all of those millions of people across the world working to design energy portfolios, enact policies, design turbines and finance and construct wind farms wake up one day and realize that the technology isn't a viable solution to meet a significant portion of our energy needs, you'll be well positioned to say "I told you so."
October 7, 2009 11:16 PM | Reply
Thank you to Dan Boone for putting the "other side" of the wind energy argument out there for the public to see. You have the support of many people here in Western North Carolina. I also support the Nature Conservancy in their brave stance. Appalachian Voices should be ashamed as you threw out the name of Hugh Morton for years. You supported his vision of not allowing commercialization of the protected ridges. Now you have jumped on another bandwagon with individuals who have lost their obligation to tell the truth. Steve Smith with SACE, Avram Friedman with Canary Coalition, and Dennis Scanlin...shame on each of you for NEVER reporting to the public what this wonderful man told you in 2003.
On February 5, 2003, Dennis Scanlin, Avram Friedman and Steve Smith met with Hugh Morton at Grandfather Mountain to discuss wind energy possibilities. Since Hugh Morton was one of the major drivers of the original ridge law and because he is the owner of Grandfather Mountain, one of the major tourist attractions in Western North Carolina, it was considered prudent to get his input on the possibility of modifying the ridge law. During the course of the meeting, Morton stated that he was concerned about modifying the ridge law because of the potential that development of ridge tops could not be limited if the ridge law was modified.
Another web site that tells the "other" side of the wind argument is www. keepersoftheblueridge.com
October 12, 2009 8:57 PM | Reply
All of the recent information from Denmark shows that commercial wind energy does not work. Read "The Case of Denmark."
There have been decades of experience and huge installations in Denmark, Germany, and Spain, but the utility sized turbines have not been shown to reduce the use of other fuels on the electric grid -- such as coal and nuclear, Also, their ability to reduce carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to global warming or pollutants that cause acid rain and health problems such as asthma is doubtful and unproven, despite their tremendous size and sprawl.
Denmark is who Obama refers to as an example of how to build wind power. There is enough evidence from Denmark to tell us that commercial wind plants should not be part of the renewable energy mix, period.
October 12, 2009 10:23 PM | Reply
This comments sounds like it came straight from the mouth of Appalachian Institute of Renewable Energy. Put downs are their specialty instead of putting down anything of intelligence.
October 13, 2009 12:43 AM | Reply