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The New Independent Home
by Michael Potts
from chapter 3 :
1999 update from Paul Gipe |
I've been lecturing around the world about how to design wind turbines and wind power projects that are aesthetically pleasing. We should respect all landscapes, arid lands as well as forests. One bad example is the Altamont Pass, the first big development in California. It could and should have been done better, but it probably shouldn't have been done at all. I've come to the conclusion that when the developers sense a tax break or a subsidy, they stop listening, reading books, or using their heads. Altamont Pass was part of the first great wind rush, when wind energy was a very lucrative investment. Technically, the winds at Altamont aren't as good as elsewhere. Altamont is also a very visible location. Lots of people drive by on I-580. The first windmills went in near the freeway, and of course the first ones were the ones that failed first -- they were junk, and they broke. It's taken the industry years to explain why the turbines everyone sees near the freeway don't work much of the time. And it will take a decade to get those junkers off Altamont's hillsides.
Then there's the golden eagle problem. Altamont may have one of the greatest concentrations of golden eagles in the United States. Golden eagles and wind turbines don't mix. They're a protected species. We have a moral and legal obligation to protect them. Most of us were unaware that this might become a problem when development started, but there were biologists who warned us to be careful. The developers didn't listen . . . until after installing 7,000 turbines. Today, in a calmer frame of mind, Altamont Pass would be one of the last places we'd think of putting turbines, after we had put wind turbines elsewhere, and had figured out how to build wind turbines that worked and how to install and operate them without killing golden eagles.
In the best of all possible worlds, I'd suggest we start in the upper midwest, in Minnesota, the Dakotas, and Iowa. You bet! Let's start at Buffalo Ridge, in southwestern Minnesota. We can easily fit more wind power capacity there than in all of California. One of the advantages of going to Minnesota is that the terrain isn't steeply rolling. We wouldn't gouge the mountainsides like we've done here in California, so we wouldn't have the erosion and visual scarring either. Secondly, the planning authorities in Minnesota are stricter than in California. Even after fifteen years of abusive wind development in California, operators can still get away with murder on the landscape. Minnesotans, for example, might require a wind farm to contain wind turbines that all look alike. They don't have to be alike, but they should look alike. That's the single most important factor in making a wind farm visually appealing. The beauty of the landscape in Minnesota is that you can do a lot there without making mistakes, because the terrain is more forgiving than in California. Now that we know how not to make wind turbines, and how not to develop wind farms, we can go to places like Minnesota and do it right.
When I talk about how much energy wind turbines can provide and how many people they can serve, I use two comparisons. I say, "These wind turbines can meet the needs of so many Californians, or twice that number of Europeans, or one-third that many Texans, because Europeans are twice as energy efficient (in terms of electrical usage) as Californians. And Californians are the most efficient users of electricity in the U.S." Texans consume two and a half times as much as Californians.
One reason we consume so much in the United States is that electricity is too cheap. It's heresy to say that in America, but electricity should be 10 cents per kilowatt-hour at the minimum . . . I think I hear the lynch mob coming now. We're told that Americans won't stand for expensive electricity. "It'll ruin the economy," they whine. But it's not uncommon at all for northern Europeans to pay 10 cents or more for a kilowatt-hour, and they have dynamic economies, and a higher quality of life than we do.
Deregulation is a disaster for decentralized energy and will set back the possibility of Danish-style clusters of owner cooperatives, which seem to me the best form of organization for wind plants. In California, I see very little positive value in deregulation either for ratepayers or for developers of renewable energy. It's an enormous bailout for California utilities, including $28 billion for stranded costs in bad energy projects, mostly nuclear. There are some thirty million people in California. You can figure it out. This is serious money!
Deregulation has been sold to the public as a way to reduce electric utility costs, but that's just the come-on. To make the sale, the legislature perpetrated a subterfuge, promising us all a 10% rate cut, but floating in the same law a bond to finance the 10% rate cut. We not only have to pay off the rate cut, We have to pay for the interest as well. What a deal! To top it off, now we're getting phone calls from companies claiming to sell green resources, and offering us the 10% discount as if it was something only they could offer! This is so despicable that words escape me.
What effect will deregulation have on the development of renewable energy? Some people say we'll see green resources. Maybe. But so far all I've seen is greenwashing! The green hype is so thick that some sensible organizations like the Sierra Club are planning to form their own green utilities. Unless they do, this is shaping up to be a disaster for the rate payers and the environmental community.
I've become increasingly outspoken about wind energy politics. Worldwide, wind energy is booming, with new capacity worth two billion dollars installed in 1997, including 1,000 new megawatts in Europe alone. Last year (1997) Germany and Denmark installed one billion dollars worth of new wind turbines. Germany now has more than 2,000 megawatts of wind energy in place, more than in all of North America, which has something like forty times the land area and six times the people. In 1997 Germany surpassed the U.S., and Denmark will surpass California by 2000 unless something major happens. In 1997 U.S. wind capacity declined by more than 20 megawatts, a continuation of a steady decline in U.S. wind generation, particularly in California, for several years. Either the Europeans know something we don't know, or they're all fools.
Unfortunately, the U.S. appears to be on the brink of another wind rush, with all the attendant ills. A lot of energy companies are trying to position themselves to take advantage of the newly deregulated industry. Wind energy production tax credits expire in 1999 and developers are tripping over themselves trying to get their hands on the money in time. When they do, there will be rush-rush slap-it-up development like we saw in California in the 1980s.
But these tax credits have obviously done nothing to spur wind energy development until now. The industry wants the tax credits renewed because in that game, only the big boys can play. I favor a solution that doesn't respond to market maneuvering and changing political winds, but instead is directly related to energy costs.
There is a much simpler, better way to develop renewable energy. I continue to travel extensively in northern Europe. Last year I spent four months studying wind energy in Denmark. We stayed in the township of Syd Thy where they are net exporters of electricity due to their wind turbines. From where I lived I could see thirty-eight wind turbines. Every one was owned by a farmer or cooperative of local people and every one was working -- something you don't see in California. I concluded from that experience that the American wind industry's lobbying for tax credits goes in exactly the wrong direction. What we need is something simple and direct, an arrangement like they have in Denmark and Germany. And we'll only get it if we ask for it.
We need an "electricity feed law" like that of Germany: a Public Utility Regulatory Policy Act (PURPA) for the new millennium. The German electricity feed law says, like PURPA, that you have the right to connect to the grid and sell power. Unlike PURPA, the German law spells out what you get paid: 90% of the utility's retail rate. No endless meetings, no paper shuffling, no lawyers! It's as simple as that.
Net metering won't do it. Every state that has net metering limits it to either solar or small-scale wind generation. In Germany, there's no limit on the size of your wind turbine. You use what makes the most economic sense. That's the way it should be.
I'm for taking a radical step, adopting an electricity feed law. The electricity feed law in Germany is startingly simple, it's only two paragraphs. Let the lawyers, utility apologists, greenwashing con-artists, and beltway bandits getting fat on deregulation and tax credits designed for only rich corporations stew in their own juices!
This is a controversial stand. The wind industry says I'm being unrealistic, we're Americans, and it doesn't fit within our political and economic environment. I disagree. It fits with a Jeffersonian vision of the kind of America we want.
My vision of energy development in the best of all possible worlds would combine a healthy mix of wind farm development and distributed, decentralized ownership. Every farmer in Iowa, Minnesota, and the Dakotas ought to have his own turbine, just like they do in Denmark.
Of course developing wind energy makes no sense without a comparable commitment to conservation. They have to be undertaken side by side so we maximize the benefits of wind and other renewables. We have to remember that renewables have an environmental impact, too. We can justify wind development only when we engage in a major conservation program, and only when we design our wind turbines and our wind power plants "as if people matter."
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