August 18, 2008 Is windpower the solution?

When we were traveling through Minnesota, we had the opportunity to view windmills atop a ridge that stretched for many miles. To us they looked peaceful and beautiful. We could not imagine why, as a country, we were not developing all the potential windpower we could. It's clean, reliable, renewable.

Then I read recently this article in the New York Times online, and this Newsweek story. As is usually the case, there is another side to this issue, and it is a human one. Whether it's for greed, corruption, hardship or tradition, many have taken a stand against the proliferation of wind turbines in our landscape. In reading a bit more about the issue, I found the following information:

Wind power is expensive (even with subsidies), intermittent and unreliable. Many modern turbines are 400 feet tall and carry 130-foot, 7-ton blades. They operate at only 20%-30% of rated efficiency -- compared with 85% for coal, gas and nuclear plants -- and provide little power during summer daytime hours, when air-conditioning demand is highest, but winds are at low ebb. Wind turbines cannot store energy.

Using wind to replace all gas-fired power plants would require more than 300,000 turbines, covering Midwestern "wind belt" agricultural and wildlife acreage equivalent to the size of South Carolina.

Building and installing these turbines requires 5 to 10 times more steel and concrete than is needed to build nuclear plants to generate the same electricity more reliably, says Berkeley engineer Per Peterson. Add in steel and cement needed to build transmission lines from distant wind farms to urban consumers, and the costs multiply.
Wind thus means more quarries, mines, cement plants and steel mills to supply those materials.

What are the alternatives?
A single 1,000-MW nuclear power plant would reliably generate more electricity than 2,800 1.5-MW intermittent wind turbines on 175,000 acres. Permitting more nukes would meet increasing electricity demand for our growing population and millions of plug-in hybrid cars.

Coal offers centuries of affordable, reliable fuel for electricity and synthetic gas and oil, with steadily diminishing emissions. Between 1970 and 2006, coal-fired electricity generation nearly tripled -- while nitrogen oxide emissions remained at 1970 levels, sulfur dioxide pollution fell nearly 40% below 1970 emissions, and fine particulates declined to 90% below 1970 levels.

Perhaps a rational approach would be to look at ALL our options. Unfortunately, we have not had either a president or a congress with the testicular fortitude to move this along since the oil embargo in 1973, when we first figured out that we needed a homegrown solution to our thirst for energy.