Which Way Does the Wind Blow?
October 10th, 2007 at 4:10 pm
And just when you thought wind, the leading energy alternative to fossil fuels, was squeaky clean we learn, not so much…
The Coastal Habitat Alliance, which is fighting a massive wind farm proposed for the Kenedy Ranch in South Texas, has raised some troubling, not terribly well-studied problems with wind power - namely it may take a toll on wildlife.
As it happens, the Kenedy Ranch is smack dab in the middle of one of the most important corridors for migratory birds in the U.S., a sort of feathery superhighway. You’ve heard of radioactive fallout, but how about bird fallout? It’s when migratory birds, exhausted from travel, make an emergency pit stop for water, food, and rest. The Lower Laguna Madre and the Kenedy Ranch are a key fallout spot for birds passing through Texas.
All the related infrastructure for the Kenedy wind farm - roads, concrete pads, the giant transmission line - threaten the critical habitat for the fallouts as well as indigenous species, according to the Alliance. (Here’s a map.) A filing with the Public Utility Commission by the Coastal Habitat Alliance, which includes the Audobon Society and the Lower Laguna Madre Foundation, reads:
The proposed transmission line will have negative ecological impacts throughout this undeveloped region and beyond. Ecological fragmentation and the impacts to migrant and resident species will be felt in adjacent ranches such as the Armstrong Ranch and King Ranch and will affect birding groups that view these species as well as those that use the Laguna Madre. The impacts associated with construction, maintenance, and operation of the transmission line must be considered, irrespective of the secondary impacts of the wind generation facilities themselves.
This is a tricky spot for these environmentally-minded groups to find themselves in. All sources of energy have trade-offs. On one hand, each new wind turbine arguably displaces a carbon-intensive, polluting coal- or natural gas-fired plant. And there’s probably no greater threat to the very existence of wildlife than climate change. On the other hand, scaling up wind to the level needed to truly make a difference could mean serious negative impacts on habitat and species. The Alliance, except the King Ranch, has made a point of saying its members are not opposed to wind power on other sites. In fact many of the individual groups have wholeheartedly thrown their support behind the burgeoning industry. They just object to this particular (sensitive) location.
“There are plenty of places in the state of Texas that have plenty of wind that don’t have the endangered species problem, that don’t have the migratory bird problem, that don’t have the wetlands problem,” said Elyse Yates, spokeswoman for the Alliance. “This is just a horrible site.”
At this point the Alliance’s demands are pretty simple - before the PUC grants a permit to build the 21-mile, high-voltage power line, they want a study commissioned on the impact to the birds, bats and bees. So far the PUC has turned the Alliance down, but an appeal is set to be heard on October 17.
October 11th, 2007 at 8:04 am
**With Corrections**
The romance of wind power should not detract from some fundamental problems with the Kenedy Ranch deal:
First, this is one manifestation of the general scheme to raise the monopoly price of wholesale electricity distributed on the statewide grid, so-called “de-regulation”.
It is flim-flam. The economic effect is to make a multiple of the new capacity in older, obsolete base-load capacity more profitable and, thereby, to delay its replacement with newer, cleaner technology. So, this is a sucker-deal for rate-payers — gaming the TPUC and simply bribing the Texas Legislature.
This is not economic infrastructure for a modern, high-wage economy. Have we learned nothing since STNP?
Wind power is best used to pump fluids and complement other forms of solar power on micro-grids. The net effect of new wind-power plant should be reducing and leveling the demand for base-load power distributed over long distances by providing local, small-scale efficiencies.
The Kenedy Ranch deal does not complment a broad range of economically and environmentally sound technology investments. It compounds decades of financial folly, third-rate engineering, and political corruption.
Second, like the two already obsolete ABWR (”advanced boiling-water reactor”) units, — cancelled in Japan but scheduled to be dumped on the God-foresaken STNP site — these Danish wind-turbines are barter for arms, aircraft, and drilling concessions. They are designed for the North Sea and wildly unsuitable for our Class 3 wind profile.
Of course, this junk does not have to actually work to have the intended effect of directly subsidizing the obsolete domestic plant we are already larded-up with and paying the “stranded costs” of or of indirectly subsidizing the very latest in arms, aircraft, or petroleum engineering exports to foriegn countries. We are not just digging a hole deeper here, we are digging our own graves without regard to fanciful doom-and-gloom scenarios. This is Third World, not Sci-Fi.
Texas does not need horizontal-axis wind-farms in migratory bird corridors. What we need are much more widely dispersed vertical-axis turbines carefully integrated around micro-grids with storage capacity.
How did we get so dumb?
The iconic turn-of-the-century Texas “wind-mill” — save for depletion of our shallow acquifers — is closer to the mark than wind turbines designed for Friesland or Jutland.
Fellow Texans,
This is reverse economic development that has been “engineered” (civil, mechanical, electrical) by bond-lawyers, paper-hangers, land-speculators, and just plain, old movie-grade, Grisham-novel promoter-crooks. That is more archaic but less romantic than the old cattle-ranch wind-mills.
October 16th, 2007 at 12:26 pm
There are also accounts of birds running into the turbines. I support wind energy, but we need to make sure that birds aren’t kamikaze-ing into the turbines. Maybe put some IrriTape (http://www.bird-x.com/products/itape.thml) around?