California Enviro's in a Lather Over Windmills

[BHR]

On the news the other night, a group of enviromentalist were trying to stop an existing windmill project from getting their licenses renewed. The problem, apparently the windmills kill birds. Is there any form of energy that is not exempt from these nitwits scorn?

It would be interesting to shut off the grid for a year, and see how many of these "enviromentalist" would survive. Not many I would bet.

Paul

 

[Washington Hunter]

Paul, that is strange, are these the windmills that generate electricity? From the little I have read on the subject, environmentalists are all for wind farms.

Here is something from the Sierra Club website: (doesn't sound like they are anti-wind farm)

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Wind energy has come of age as a source of electricity.

From the mountain passes of California to the shores of the North Sea, wind turbines are now producing commercial quantities of electricity without the emission of global warming gases.

Wind energy is actually an indirect form of solar energy -- the wind is mainly driven by temperature differences on the earth's surface caused by sunlight. Uneven warming of the atmosphere results in rising and circulating air currents which can be used to generate electricity. Wind turbines, usually with just two or three blades, collect kinetic energy from the wind, which drives a generator and produces electricity. Wind turbines are placed on towers where the wind blows harder and more steadily. The longer the blades -- up to 82 feet -- and the faster and more constant the wind speed, the more electricity the turbines generate.

According to the US Department of Energy, the world's winds could provide as much as 5,800 quadrillion British Thermal Units (BTUs) of energy each year, or more than 15 times the world's total energy consumption in 1992. Wind power is now one of the fastest growing sources of new electricity generation -- capacity is increasing by more than 1,000 mega-watts per year. By the year 2000 wind turbines are estimated to produce enough electricity to offset 20 to 40 billion pounds of carbon dioxide.

Wind energy is cheap and clean. Unfortunately, it faces an American, and world, energy market heavily slanted towards fossil fuel technology through subsidies and tax incentives. If we are to curb pollution from electricity generation, this must change. There is enormous potential for greater use of wind energy in the US, especially in the Midwest, and using that potential would mean an economic boon. States such as Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota hold the potential of becoming the Saudi Arabia of wind power.
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

 

[Ithaca 37]

BHR, That's kinda misleading, don'tcha think? How about a link? Maybe it's only two environmentalists!

 

[Washington Hunter]

I found an article...here's a link:

www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=36016

Sounds like they have a legitimate concern...Golden Eagles (and other raptors)are getting killed, although the article doesn't go into much detail, so it's not really clear how many are dying.

 

[dgibson]

He he...they ought to stop by a TV or radio station tower site in the spring sometime. Apparently migratory birds have a habit of running into them and killing themselves. The gubmint even recently did a study to determine why they have such a problem with it, but came up empty-handed. It's a mystery!

Perhaps we should ban TV and radio stations, as well!

 

[Ten Bears]

We see eagles and other raptors getting wacked by trucks on the interstate (90) all winter long. Tie to close the interstate down I guess.

 

[BHR]

D. G.,

I think you are on to something. All radio stations (other than those that play conservative talk radio) should have their towers removed. NPR and hard rock stations should be the first to go.

 

[Oak]

I'd take the benefits of wind power over the death of the birds, I believe. Now, about your communications towers...

Towers are a pretty big problem in many areas of the country. I think much of the problem lies in where the towers are located. Location is probably the main reason the windmills in CA are a problem. North-south coastlines are major migration routes. We could make a lot of improvements to towers without getting rid of them. You've all seen hilltops covered with 10-15 towers. Why can't the communications companies work together and reduce those to 3 or 4 towers? There's a lot of potential research that hasn't been done on how to reduce tower strikes. It sounds like the windmills in CA are relatively easy on the birds compared to towers in other areas. Here's an example:

Lit towers, those exceeding 199 feet (61 m) above the ground, currently number about 46,000 in the United States (not including lit "poles"), with the total number of towers registered in the Federal Communications Commission database listed at some 75,000. The first long-term study of the impact of a television tower on birds was begun in 1955 by the Tall Timbers Research Station in northern Florida. With the ground conditions and the number of scavengers controlled as much as possible, daily searches for dead birds were made under this tower. Kills were plotted on maps, weather records were maintained, and dead birds were speciated. After the first 25 years, 42,384 birds representing 189 species were tallied (Crawford and Engstrom 1999). The longest study yet conducted was by physician Charles Kemper over a 38-year period, beginning in 1957 (Kemper 1964, 1996). He collected 121,560 birds representing 123 species. On one night in 1963, he collected and speciated over 12,000 birds, the largest single-night kill yet documented, not accounting for the almost certain scavenging by wild and domestic predators..."

Manville, A. M. II. 2000. The ABCs of avoiding bird collisions at communication towers: the next steps. Proceedings of the Avian Interactions Workshop, December 2, 1999, Charleston, SC. Electric Power Research Institute
http://migratorybirds.fws.gov/issues/towers/abcs.html

Oak

 

[dgibson]

Thanks for the further info, Oak...that's very interesting. As for the combining of towers, it depends a lot on the service provided, but more so it depends on politics.

There are considerations regarding wind loads, maximum physical load, etc., etc. that all have to be dealt with. Then there's technical issues like co-channel interference, intermodulation, receive antenna desensing, maximum legal RF emission levels....There's some combined TV towers going up now due to HDTV...but they are massive sumbitches that cost a huge amount of money.

Then you get into politics...whose antennas get to go on top (better gain)? Who's responsible for tower maintenance, or how does the charge get divided up? If there's a problem, whose fault is it? All kinds of arbitration issues to straighten out. All of that, of course, can be worked out, but it would be a can of worms to force something like that in the thousands of tower locations across the US. I doubt you'd find many politicians that'd touch it with a 10-foot pole.

In our case, the current tower has been in place since the 60's...the station has been there for 50 years. We own our property, and the station & tower were built when there was nothing around it but corn fields. So the first thing, I'm sure, out of the owner's mouth would be "why should WE move?"

Mooooving back to the windmills... <BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>But the wind-farm industry report puts the bird deaths into perspective, contending more birds get killed every year in collisions with vehicles (60 million) and window panes (98 million) than windmills.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>I think that says a lot.

 

[1_pointer]

I wonder if there is some relatively cheap thing to just elleviate some of the problem? Here in UT, they've installed a few plastics 'roofs' on some poles to help cut down on the kills.

 

[JoseCuervo]

There is a new one in Wyoming, just about ready to go on line. They have 200+ foot diamater mill. And they turn them slow, about 17rpm, in order to lessen the Ground Duck. But I think they have to be designed that way, from beginning.

 

[BuzzH]

Heres some info I just found relevant to this topic, the article that Gunner read...

Wyoming’s largest wind farm almost complete
Associated Press

CHEYENNE – Wyoming’s largest wind farm – a $150 million, 144-megawatt project in Uinta County – is nearly complete and slated to go online by the end of the year.


Construction on the 80-wind turbine facility along the Bear River Divide northeast of Evanston wrapped up recently on time and under budget. Crews were busy testing the facility this week, said Steve Stengel, spokesman for FPL Energy, a Florida-based utility that built the farm and will operate it.


“We’re making sure the turbine operates as it was designed,” he said. “They’ll put each individual turbine through a series of tests to make sure that they operate as designed.”


Two years in the works, the wind farm is the third and largest in Wyoming. Its turbines are capable of powering 43,000 homes.


Their blades encompass an area 262 feet in diameter and spin 17 times per minute, slower than most wind turbines but safer for birds and more efficient. The technology has been used in Europe and California.


“The actual construction process was about 112 days and, given some of the weather conditions up there with the snow, the construction team did a really outstanding job getting the facility ready to go,” Stengel said.


The project, on state and private grazing land, was made possible by the Legislature’s approval of a measure that provides a tax break on equipment purchased to produce electricity from renewable energy.


Portland, Ore.-based PPM Energy, a division of ScottishPower, will purchase the power from the Uinta County site and market it to customers in Wyoming, Utah and Colorado.


PPM spokeswoman Jan Johnson said interest in wind energy is increasing, partly due to advances in technology, larger wind farms and the volatility of other energy markets, such as natural gas.


“One thing about wind power is there’s no fuel cost, so there’s no volatility,” she said. “That’s been a big factor.”


Uinta County was chosen because of its relatively high wind speeds and distance from bottlenecks in the electricity transmission system.


nullFPL worked closely with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Wyoming Game and Fish Department to determine best placement of the turbines to reduce danger to birds.

<FONT COLOR="#800080" SIZE="1">[ 12-30-2003 09:41: Message edited by: BuzzH ]</font>