….Serves to advance an honest mind,” is how John Donne finished that line back in 1633.

Donne was writing what he called a song, and it was fun. This exercise in how an honest mind should judge the efficacy of wind- generated electricity would be less enjoyable even if the guy putting it together had a tenth of Donne’s talent, which, for the record, he does not. What follows is a slog through fact and data (while trying to avoid conjecture and bias), a whole lot less entertaining than wit and rhyme.

There are several arguments on behalf of developing wind power in Vermont. It would create some jobs. In the spirit of Vermont self-reliance, the energy would be home-grown, even though no one knows where the juice powering his or her appliances really originates.

But the climate change case is the sine qua non of the pro-wind forces, the reason wind power development seems to have (those the polls should be treated with some skepticism) the support of most Vermonters. So there is one central question: will erecting hundreds of wind towers on Vermont’s high ridges mean Vermonters and other Americans will burn less coal, oil, and natural gas, and therefore stop making the world hotter, or at least stop making it hotter as quickly?

Because this is no more a suspense novel than a poem, the answer will come right now: NO.

Or at least the overwhelming preponderance of the evidence says that it will not.

Or at the very best (or worst, depending on one’s sentiments) it will do so infinitesimally.

Obviously, creating any power without producing climate-warming greenhouse gases (GHG) contains the potential for reducing the creation of power from sources that do produce those gases.

For instance, according to First Wind, the company now clearing land for a wind power project in Sheffield, that project will provide 115,000 megawatt hours of power per year. Considering that a typical ton of coal produces 2,000 MWh of power (or so says the National Mining Association) might not those figures mean that exploiting Sheffield’s wind could avoid burning 57,500 tons of carbon-filled coal?

If it did, big deal. More than a billion tons of coal was burned in the U.S. in 2009 (the last year for which figures are available, and lower than the previous year thanks to the recession). This is rounding error territory.

Besides, the Sheffield project would not have any such impact. The 115,000 MWh figure comes from the developer, and is meaningless out of context, as are claims, so often parroted by local news organizations, that a proposed project will provide power to X thousand Vermont homes.

Better to stick to the official, carefully-researched, and presumably un-biased projections of the U.S. Government (which supports more wind power, so any bias would be pro-wind).

According to the National Renewal Energy Laboratory (NREL, part of the U.S. Department of Energy) if all Vermont ridge lines with “suitable wind resource for wind development” (average annual wind speeds of 6.5 meters per second or greater) were in fact developed, they would produce  2,948.7 megawatts, or, to keep it simple, the equivalent of 2.9 gigawatts (GW) of wind capacity (a gigawatt is a billion watts). If all the suitable sites throughout the Northeast were exploited, the total would be 52 GW. (This is for inland areas only; offshore wind power potential is greater).

That sounds like a lot of power, but these are estimates of “gross capacity…not adjusted for losses.” That’s official jargon meaning the estimate assumes the wind would be blowing at about 6.5 m/s all the time. It doesn’t. Sometimes it doesn’t blow at all.

The hard-line anti-wind activists are wrong when they say this means wind power would be worthless and unreliable. No method of generating electricity works at full capacity all day, every day, all year long. Coal, natural gas, and nuclear plants have to shut down for maintenance, repair, and inspection (few of them as often as Vermont Yankee).

It does mean that the actual – as opposed to theoretical – production capacity of wind projects has to be adjusted downward,  70 percent downward according to NREL.

So the Northeast really contributes some 15.6 GW and Vermont less than nine tenths of one GW. And remember: that’s assuming maximum production on all sites, which is unlikely ever to happen.

Electricity consumption nationwide is equivalent to about 450 GW annually.

So Northeast wind would add up to roughly 3.7 percent of the nation’s energy use. Could producing that wind power reduce fossil fuel emissions by 3.7 percent?

No. First of all, not all power is produced by burning fossil fuels. Nuclear, biomass, and other non-polluting (or at least non-greenhouse gas-emitting) sources provide roughly a third of all electrical power. In the Northeast, where Vermont wind power would be used, that power would be more likely to replace (if it replaced anything) electricity made from natural gas – a carbon emission, but with roughly half the carbon of coal, further diminishing whatever savings in GHG might ensue. In addition, most greenhouse gases are not produced by electricity generation. Estimates range from 34 percent (the U.S. Department of Agriculture) to 41 percent (the Energy Department). Either way, the potential GHG savings from infusing a few GWs of eastern wind power into the system appear to be tiny.

Or maybe non-existent. Here we are in the realm of conjecture because no data exist. But it is undoubtedly possible – and perhaps likely – that the result of adding a few more GWs into the system would be that…a few more GWs would be used. Instead of replacing power now generated by fossil fuels, they would supplement them. People – or at least Americans – seem to have an effectively infinite capacity for using electricity, especially these days when so many appliances keep eating the stuff up even when they are turned off. Yes, energy efficiency efforts have been somewhat successful. That doesn’t mean people won’t use more power if the system creates more power.

This might not be the case if the whole country produced a great deal of wind power, say a couple of hundred GWs instead of Vermont’s paltry less-than-one. At some point, the overload could lead to real replacement of fossil fuels by renewables.

Now we come to an important part of the political debate in Vermont. Because (though some of the pro-wind zealots seem to deny this) almost nobody is opposed to developing more wind power where: (a) there is lots of it; and (b) its ecological impact would be acceptable. The “almost” is needed in that previous sentence because there are a few folks –die-hard supporters of nuclear power and/or global warming deniers – who dismiss wind power outright.

But that does not describe most opponents of putting wind towers on Vermont’s ridges. It certainly does not describe Ben Luce, the Lyndon State College science professor who called attention to the NREL analysis when he spoke at the press conference Wednesday held by Vermont wind power opponents.

Describing himself as “a long-time advocate of utility-scale wind development,” Luce said wind power can “make a meaningful contribution to US clean energy generation,” but that Vermont ridges “are not actually major league renewable energy resources,” and that the wind projects will cause “enormous and adverse impacts to Vermont’s fragile wilderness.”

(As noted in an earlier post on this subject, these areas, remote and wild though they may be, are not really “wilderness.”)

Wind power production, Luce said, should take place where there is a lot of wind, and where the ecological impact would be less severe and perhaps more acceptable.

It’s not much of a mystery to see where that would be. Take a look at that map above. In the Great Plains, from Minnesota to Texas, the wind speeds are often more than eight or even nine meters per second. Most of the land is flat. Flat does not mean unimportant. It often does mean that development is less threatening to the land’s ecological integrity.

(Here Luce and his allies can be accused of NIMBYism, supporting change elsewhere but “not in my back yard.” But that’s a separate discussion. Besides, there’s nothing wrong with NIMBYism; it’s the American Way).

But wait a minute. Is there no evidence in official or quasi-official sources pointing the other way, suggesting that Vermont wind power could have a real impact on greenhouse gas emissions?

In official sources, no.

The Energy Department’s Energy Information Agency does predict that “generation from wind power increases from 1.3 percent…to 4.1 percent in 2035.” More than a tripling, but still a tiny percentage of the total. And that’s nationwide. Almost all of that increase is likely to come from…believe it or not, where almost all the “suitable wind resources for wind development” are located – out on the great Plains. Vermont simply does not have enough wind resources to make a difference.

ISO New England, the area’s Regional Transmission Organization, has projected that in New England alone, 12,000 megawatts of wind power could be generated by 2030, 7,500 MW inland, another 4,500 off-shore. That’s comparable to the NREL assessment, and while ISO New England said that development would represent “a major shift” in the region’s resources, it still isn’t much power, hardly enough to reduce GHG emissions.

But Seth Kaplan, the Boston-based wind power expert for the Conservation Law Foundation, said the ISO New England projections reveal the possibility of even more wind power in the Northeast, perhaps enough to allow substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

Come back Monday for an examination of whether he and ISO have a good case, and also of whether, if they do, most Vermonters would be happy about it.

Tags: Ben Luce, ISO New England, Seth Kaplan, wind power

This entry was posted on Friday, November 19th, 2010 at 12:14 am and is filed under Business & Economy, Energy & Environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.