Where are wind-energy opponents' alternatives?

Guelph Mercury - May 02, 2012, Page:A8
Roger Short, Letter to the Editor

Dear editor: 

I would like to compliment you on Owen Roberts’ column from Monday: Wind Energy Predictions in Ontario Hit New Highs. 

It attempts to lay out facts and points of view with balance and objectivity for a subject that is very much on many tongues these days.

The one area which all interested parties have been unable to discover to date is the reasoned alternative that opponents would recommend as their energy mix for Ontario’s future, say for the next 20 years or so. 

I believe all parties would benefit from this disclosure, which should be in sufficient depth to disclose full real lifetime costs and impacts for each energy type, including subsidies attached to each energy type, estimated using a consistent pricing model along with the pros and cons of each energy.

From this, Ontarians might be better equipped to contribute to this critical matter.

For greater clarification, I’d like to see recognized items such as the following: the price of energy for each type, and comments on their risk, given events outside Canada, which could impact them. I’d like to see recognition that health costs associated with fossil fuels (deaths and independently verified annual costs) be added to the costs of that type of energy. Further, carbon cost attributions should be estimated, along with any assumptions about “clean coal” and its costs and risks, as appropriate. 

Also, I’d like it acknowledged that nuclear energy comes with a number of encumbrances not currently included such as the debt retirement charge, which has not yet been expunged. Without government underwriting, this industry is unlikely to be insurable or financeable independently.

To date, the Ontario industry record for on-time-on-budget for either a new nuclear plant or major overhauls has been appalling. In addition, there still isn’t any permanent solution to the spent fuel disposal issue, which is growing daily.

What are the operating risks and security costs related to this form of power generation? What is the impact that Ontario’s inflexible nuclear technology has on the sale of surplus base load power into the spot market, especially since major decisions on nuclear expansion are imminent?

Finally, we need to be discussing how Ontario’s grid infrastructure is in dire need of upgrading and modernizing after years of neglect; this is regardless of fuel but a significant capital investment. 

Roger J. Short 

Kimberley, Ontario, May 1, 2012 

Shame on Collingwood-area residents building tiny houses to block wind farm

The Star, April 22, 2012

Heather Mallick

Click here for the article.

What won’t people do to keep wind turbines out of their backyard, or somewhere farther away from their backyard, or a greater distance than that?

Nothing, apparently.

People who live near Collingwood, Ont., will travel beyond ridicule and into public humiliation so that someone else will have to stare at the tall white structures that create clean energy. They are building tiny little houses in a planned wind farm’s mapped-out path in order to invoke and abuse the regulations that keep the turbines 550 metres away from private homes.

Seriously, several Clearview Township residents are building birdhouses to human size, with electricity, running water and a septic system, to preserve their pristine view, the Star has reported. The itty-bitty homes look like slave quarters on a plantation.

And in light of the terrible lack of affordable rental housing in Toronto, it does grind country dirt in the faces of Ontarians to know that there are homes available but only for the esthetic assistance of wealthy rural residents with no thought to the future.

We humans have no idea how we will cope with climate change. If we think our missing winters and painfully uncomfortable summers are weird now, imagine life in 40 years. The Ontario government is indeed trying to imagine it. They’re preparing for the future, which is the greatest task of all governments. Green energy has to start somewhere.

They can’t go on the horizon of Lake Ontario, city dwellers having declared themselves offended by the sight of the elegant towers with their extended starfish arms. And now they can’t go in the countryside because cranky localtons are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars planting little Monopoly houses in their way.

I look at a photo of three Clearview elders, Kevin Elwood, Michael Dickinson and Chuck Magwood, posing in front of a fake houselet like farmers in Grant Wood’s 1930 American Gothic. All that’s missing is a pitchfork. The pinched expressions are the same.

And yes, Magwood is the man who was in charge of building the Rogers Centre, Toronto’s biggest concrete eyesore and a concert venue so clanging that it turns all music into a wall of sound. From huts to hangars, this man irritates me.

“I don’t like what they look like,” Magwood says of wind farms. “I don’t like the political game plan. And the economic model is a joke.”

Elwood, a tree farmer and commercial pilot, doesn’t like the turbines interfering with the flight path on his private landing strip. It’s risky, he says.

“They’re trying to ram it down the wrong people’s throats,” says Dickinson, charmingly. Hey, you turbines, get off my lawn!

These men will be long dead by the time climate change begins to make human life crushingly difficult. I will be in my grave as well. But the point about 2050 isn’t coffin-dodgers like us. It’s the billions alive and yet to be born, desperate for water, coolness, energy, food and respite.

What is to be done? I ask this in despair and anger. Six of the eight turbines in the proposed wind farm development will be on the land of a good man named John Beattie. He’s thinking of the future. Someone has to.

“I will do whatever I can to help save the planet for my children and grandchildren,” he told the Star. “I am proud to be part of a green energy project. And if more green energy projects come along, I will jump into them with both feet.”

It stirs my soul to hear Beattie’s words, such a change from standard-issue NIMBYism. How we fool ourselves, as if our resolute wrecking of our children’s future is some kind of guarantee that we will live forever in endless moneyed comfort.

It won’t work out that way. We live inside a planetary dome. It will grow hotter and hotter in those turbine-hostile dollhouses. If only their owners were forced to actually live in them, a Big Brother test case of how well — or how badly — we’ll endure a pressure-cooked future.

Bird expert threatens ducks

Here's an interesting piece of irony.  Dr. Scott Petrie was featured in a CBC article "Wind turbines threaten swans, says bird expert", where the article states:


Dr. Scott Petrie said building industrial wind farms in Grand Bend, Ont., will scare the birds from their annual migration stop.
He said the province isn't considering how the 250 turbines proposed for the area will affect wildlife.

He is quoted as saying the same thing in this article almost seven years ago when the Erie Shores project was in the planning stages:

E.T. (Ted) Whitworth, Councilor Ward 1 of Norfolk County in attendance at the function commented on recent objections put forth by biologist Dr. Scott Petrie from the Long Point Waterfowl and Wetland Research Fund and representatives from Bird Studies Canada to wind turbines in Norfolk. Dr. Petrie said at a recent Norfolk County Council meeting that, in his opinion, wind turbines in the Messiah’s Corners area would alter the path of tundra swans that use the area as a staging (feeding) area on their migratory route. Councilor Whitworth said, “I’ve lived here all my life and never seen a dead swan . . . the Bird Studies Canada building that’s a 3 story, 100’ long, glass walled giant would kill more birds than a wind turbine.”

Two years after construction, there have been no swan injuries at the Erie Shores project.  In fact, a report by ornithologist Dr. James Ross, showed a thriving bird population.

Apparently, Dr. Petrie is an avid hunter (he even lists "hunter" on his resumé) and was featured in a segment of Canada in the Rough.

Thomas will be joined on today's hunt by Tim Brandt of Federal Premium Ammunition, with them will also be internationally acclaimed waterfowl biologist Scott Petrie. Scott heads up "Long Point Waterfowl Research", he and his group have significantly contributed to the health and future of waterfowl and waterfowling, not just in Long Point but throughout North America. Our Ontario duck hunting adventure begins with a wonderful public land hunt at Long Point with Thousands of ducks on the water and in the air, and winds up at the historic "Turkey Point Company" hunt club, as we take part in a traditional wetlands duck hunt with "Ducks Unlimited Canada" past president "Dr. Duncan Sinclair". 

Renewable energy developers are required to perform an Environmental Impact Study prior to receiving an authorization to proceed.  In contrast to Dr. Petrie's assertions about wind turbines and birds, the developer of the wind farm in Grand Bend, Northland Power, is undertaking a number of studies as part of its application:

Field studies are ongoing to confirm the presence, significance, sensitivity and abundance of wildlife and wildlife habitat, including:

o various bird surveys;

o bat habitat surveys;

o dens, tracks and scat surveys;

o amphibian call surveys;

o turtle and snake surveys;

o incidental observations; and,

o targeted species at risk surveys.

An Environmental Impact Study will be completed to identify potential impacts and recommend mitigation measures to minimize impacts.

If required, a permit or permits under the Ontario Endangered Species Act will be

obtained.

Consultation will be undertaken with relevant First Nations and Métis communities

These studies, in turn, are subject to scrutiny by the public during a review period plus by the Ministry of the Environment.

**************

Has anyone performed an environmental assessment of the slaughter of millions of birds by hunters such as Dr. Petrie?  Or whether shooting at them as they are resting during their migration might "scare the birds from their annual migration stop" (to quote Dr. Petrie).

Does wind displace carbon dioxide emissions?

Does wind displace CO2 in the electrical power system?  Simple question.

On the surface, here's the simple answer:

Since electricity can't easily be stored, whenever wind blows (or the sun shines on solar panels or snow-melt cascades through a run-of-river hydro generator) then some other generating source must be throttled back.  In Ontario, it's the job of the Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) to issue commands to various generators to maintain that balance.  It's called dispatch.

Normally, the IESO will throttle back the generator with the highest variable price (called the marginal generator).  It's critical to understand that the IESO uses the variable price, not the full price that would include capital costs.  For renewable energy, that price is based on the generator's variable cost which is essentially zero in the short run.  For fossil fuel generators, that price is based on fuel value.  

Therefore, when a renewable energy generator ramps up, a fossil fuel generator ramps down.  So, when wind goes up, coal or gas use goes down.  After that, it's simple math to figure out the CO2 impact.  And that's where you see claims that a KWh of wind displaces x tonnes of CO2.  That's also why x is different for every jurisdiction.  Each jurisdiction has a different coal/gas mix.

Now it gets slightly more complicated:

What is being displaced, coal or gas?  If the IESO is optimizing the system purely on price to the consumer, the fuel most frequently displaced (at least historically) is gas because its fuel cost has been higher than coal.  It's a bit of a toss-up right now.  However, in Ontario, coal versus gas is less relevant because the government has intervened in a couple of ways.

1. In 2009, it placed a coal price adder on power generated from coal.  The government owns OPG, so this was simple to do.  The coal price adder was simply a form of carbon tax.  The concept worked for awhile until the recession knocked demand down and the adder became an inadequate deterrent for OPG to not burn coal.

2. It then placed a CO2 tonnage limit on OPG with the limit dropping every year.  At some point that declining tonnage limit was simply translated into a generator unit shutdown schedule.

So, clearly, coal was being taken out of the system.  The number of TWh (a TWh is 1,000 GWh or 1,000,000 MWh) of energy from coal went from 23.2 TWh in 2008 to 12.6 TWh in 2010. [source: IESO]. It was replaced by new sources of renewable energy (predominantly wind at 2.8 Twh).  Plus natural gas and imported hydro for the times when the wind doesn't blow.  OPA contracted for a few 1000 MW's of natural gas generation and Hydro One built a 1100 MW tie-line to Hydro Quebec to accomplish this.

Simple math would suggest that the reduction of energy supplied from coal would exactly match the increase in energy derived from wind plus natural gas plus imported hydro.  Not quite.

Now it gets complicated:

If you want to skip the details, just go to the end of this section to see what the experts say.  Otherwise, here we go.

Claims have been made by many anti-wind or pro-fossil fuel advocates that all the theoretical displacement of CO2 is lost by the need to keep backup fossil fuel generators running.  The argument typically goes like this:

1. Assume a 100 MW wind farm.

2. That wind farm will need a 100 MW gas turbine to back it up.

3. That gas turbine will cycle up and down in an inverse relationship with wind.

4. In doing so, it is typically running at a fraction of full capacity, where its CO2 output per kWh goes through the roof.

5. In some cases, at low wind speeds, wind actually causes a net increase in CO2 output.

Let's take this apart, line by line.

1. You don't have a 100 MW wind farm.  You have a network of wind farms, rated in total at closer to 1500 MW, connected to an electricity system.

2. The 1500 MW wind network will need backup for the summer peak when wind is at its seasonal low.  Solar will be at its seasonal high, though, so as solar expands, less backup is required.  And if tie-lines to Quebec are strengthened, then even less backup is required.  However, some gas capacity will likely be needed, especially since Pickering nuclear capacity starts coming off line in about 5 years.

3. The electricity system already has enough spinning reserve to cover the largest contingency in the system.  In Ontario, that's the loss of a Darlington unit - roughly 900MW.  Depending on the time of day and week, that reserve could be Ontario hydro-electric (Ontario actually has quite a bit of stored water), Ontario gas, Quebec hydro-electric via the tie-line; or gas turbines.  Any variations in wind plant output will be handled by this and other reserves.  The IESO has done this sort of balancing for years and they're very good at it.  Renewable energy increases the variability somewhat, but it's manageable.  After all, today, the variability in the output of wind is less than the variability in demand that occurs hour-to-hour during the day.

4. The only way that this concept comes off the rails is if the backup is unresponsive (this is called a low ramp rate).  Hydro-electric is very responsive but there may be times when it's not available and thermal generation is required.  Historically, only peaking gas turbines had that kind of ramp rate (and they were inefficient) but modern combined cycle gas turbines provide the necessary CO2 efficiency and high ramp rates.  Tom Adams, the energy watchdog, used to worry about gas turbine ramp rates but he's revised his thinking (he's still against wind turbines, I believe, but he's changed the basis of his argument).

5. I think that I've proven that item 5 is impossible.  If one wants further proof, though, just look at the hourly generation factors for gas turbines - at the unit level.  You have to get beyond the IESO data and look at individual turbines.  For example, Greenfield GS has a rating of 1005.0 MW, but it is actually composed of 3 gas turbines plus a steam turbine (the complex is called a combined cycle gas turbine, or CCGT).  If you look at the output per turbine over the course of the day, you'll see that they typically come on at over 70% of each turbine rating, sometimes in sequence and sometimes all together.  This is because the operators don't want to run at inefficient levels and because the IESO is able to dispatch it's turbine fleet as discrete units.  In other words, they don't say "OK, everyone run at 30% output".  Instead they say, "OK, you three run full out, you seven standby".

So, what's the answer?

If this explanation isn't  sufficient, maybe the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) can help. The IEEE has collected numerous studies by utilities around the world and they all point to the same conclusion.  In an article  in the Power Engineering Society Journal, they demonstrate that only 4% of CO2 displacement is lost by a need for backup. 

If you want to listen to more experts from Ontario's power system, go to Glen Estill's wonderful blog.

In praise of wind turbines

A close friend from the UK passed this opinion piece on to us.  In a nutshell, the author (Will Self) reminds us that our bucolic rural settings have been created by man over many centuries and that wind turbines are just a natural evolution of that development.

It's a bit long but I encourage you to read it in entirety - with a dictionary for some of the flowery parts.

BBC News Magazine
October 14, 2011
Will Self

The countryside is often a man-made landscape, not a natural idyll, and wind turbines are just part of that tradition, writes Will Self.

When chanced upon unexpectedly the tips of their vast blades appear to pierce the horizon, as if these were the parts of a strange machine arranged seriatim and devised to sew the land to the sky.

Or else, looked at against the setting sun with long cloudy striate streaming behind their propellers, they can invert your entire perspective so that for a fleeting moment you imagine the Earth itself to be the envelope of an enormous airship, being powered through the sky.

Then again, when I've seen them from the window of a car moving at speed and tried to judge their size in relation to some other feature, be it hilltop or church spire, the parallax view will make of them an elegant herd of white-limbed alien creatures bounding over the terrain.

Curious they may be, the wind turbines, and to those of us who remember the landscape before their erection they may always seem a little outlandish. But no-one could reasonably claim they are objectively ugly, any more than they could say the vista of coal-fired power stations that clusters around the Humber estuary is ugly.

Indeed, viewed from across the flat striping of harvested wheat fields, the cooling towers of the Drax, the Eggborough and the Ferrybridge power stations resemble the fat-bellied trunks of baobab trees, their pale concrete bark dappled with the dark shadows cast by the steam clouds belching from their own mouths.

Even the nuclear power station Sizewell B, on the Suffolk coast - which I lived close to for a couple of years - has a strange if minatory loveliness, what with its dully-gleaming white dome, that like the compound eye of Moloch sits atop its iridescent blue plinth.

No, the power stations are not ugly and nor are the great pylons that stride away from them across Britain, their steely forms linked by crackling cables.

The pylons have an irrefutable majesty, and with their heads in the clouds and their feet in the grass, it's impossible not to anthropomorphise them. These giant humanoid figures are clearly the handiwork of smaller humanoid figures, yet this does not make them strangers to our countryside. On the contrary, this is what tells you that they belong here.

Land patterns

It was that arch-conservative GK Chesterton, inveighing against the rural purists of his own era, who said "the artificial is, if anything older than the natural", and that "in the middle of the wildest fields the most rustic child is, 10 to one, playing at steam engines".

He understood intuitively what the work of Oliver Rackham, that great historian of the British countryside, subsequently established factually - that the pattern of land use we see the length and breadth of these isles is as much a human artefact as Stephenson's Rocket.

Rackham estimated that by the time of the Roman invasion the primordial British woodland had been cleared almost to the extent we see today. What further depredation there has been occurred in the post-war period, when hedges were grubbed up and pesticides lain down in furtherance of the monocultures so beloved of agribusiness.

The vista the wind turbine revolves within, whether it be the fens of East Anglia or the bens of the Scots Highlands, is a man-made one. However, that doesn't in and of itself mean that it is unnatural, for we are by no means the only animal on this green Earth to adapt its environment. You might as well describe beavers' dams or termites' mounds as "unnatural".

Indeed, the very idea of wilderness is itself a perverse human invention. A massive category error imposed by the British colonists in North America on a landscape of dispersed woodland and glade that they assumed to be "natural", but which was in fact the result of centuries of concerted Native American management.

Discoveries down under

It was the same in Australia, where the British arrivistes declared the land to be "terra nullius" on the basis that no human hand had mixed its labour with it - and so ripe for their exploitation.

Coming from their own immemorial associations of field, coppiced woodland, dew pond and commons, the British were unable to see the contours of the careful footprint that the Aboriginals' firing of the bush to encourage crops had left, any more than they could appreciate the cultural richness and diversity of this 40,000-year-old oral culture, replete with magic and mysticism. And besides, the British weren't altogether minded to see the Aboriginals as human at all.

But before you shake your head at the hopelessly bigoted attitudes of the remote past, it's worth considering that we have here today, in Surrey and Shropshire and Somerset, colonists of our own who are every bit as blinkered. Yes, blinkered because they cannot understand that the preservation of our countryside demands not a rose-tinted vision of it, but a steely determination to utilise it effectively.

It would seem to me that most of those who energetically campaign against the planting of wind farms in their bosky vales do so not out of a profound appreciation of the dew-jewelled web of life, but merely as spectators who wish the show that they've paid admission for to go as advertised. After all, hardly anyone really lives in the country any more and a mere fraction of the population work on the land.

For the rest, they look upon it from their terraces and their decking, they stroll a few hundred yards across it, and then they get in their off-road vehicles to drive on the road to the nearest town or city, where they sit in an office staring at a computer screen.

I once walked from my house in central London to Newhaven on the Sussex coast. It took me three days and apart from when I was traversing two areas that had been government-mandated as "areas of outstanding natural beauty" - the Ashdown Forest and the South Downs - I saw a mere handful of people in the countryside.

Dream or reality?

For hour upon hour I tramped in splendid isolation - and this in one of the most densely populated regions on Earth. It made me wonder what it is, precisely, that people feel moved to protect in our countryside. Is it its reality, the patchwork of chemically-drenched fields and pay-per-kill pheasant-stocked woodlands interspersed with crowded National Parks? Or is it a bucolic reverie the elements of which have come to them not through direct experience, but the media?

Now the government is intent on changing the planning guidelines so that effectively the presumption will be in favour of the developer. The need, they say, is for more housing and yet street upon street of terraces lie vacant and festering on the outskirts of some of our cities.

Surely, the truth of the matter is that the desire is for more green-field housing because only such habitations have the added-value that ex-urbanites seek and developers can charge for. The aim, it is said, is not only to provide housing but to stimulate growth. Growth, the zeitgeist buzzword that will, with an insistent chainsaw whine chop down and supplant that former favourite, sustainability.

Well, I daresay they will build their new dormitory communities and they will get their growth. The irony being that while the first colonists will doubtless be happy enough to enjoy their view, soon enough they will begin to complain about this or that intrusion into the wilderness. Before too long they will have grown into a community, united in opposition to the very changes that their own new estate was predicated upon.

Perhaps when the entire landmass has been so subdivided that there remains not a single portion that cannot be identified as someone or other's backyard, then, and only then, will the property owners be able to acknowledge after all that there's something really rather beautiful about a wind turbine.

Unfortunately, by then it will be too late because there won't be white blades whirring at the end of the garden, but black clouds belching from the chimneys necessary to power all that rural idiocy.

For the full article click here.  I recommend that you also read the comments, ranked by "Highest Rated".