To paraphrase Daniel Patrick Moynihan, those who support the commercial aspirations of limited liability wind companies are entitled to their own opinions. But not their own facts. The Mid-Atlantic region needs more ecologically threatening wind projects like a prom queen needs acne.
The energy flow from wind projects fluctuates erratically, requiring vast power from the grid to make it work. Wind technology is a highly variable, non-controllable source of electricity. In most places throughout the United States, massive wind facilities will produce little or nothing at times of peak demand (amply documented in California, Texas, and New York); the anti-cyclonic nature of weather typically produces low winds at times of peak demand—in summer and winter. More disturbing, such facilities, each costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars) would generate no effective capacity--that is, specified levels of power at key demand times.
Because supply must continuously match demand at all times, wind projects require up to 90% compensation from reliable generators, the amount of wind energy persistently goes up and down, back and forth at unpredictable levels that vary from nothing to 100% of their rated capacity. Conventional generators—coal, natural gas, nuclear, and hydro—are effective because grid operators can specify prescribed levels of energy from them at particular times, allowing them to match demand fluctuations immediately in real time, as well as create an economic storage of supply to attend reserve margins. Wind is completely inimical to this process. Wind projects may be producing energy over 90% of the time, but no one can be sure what the energy level will be.
This is why, with any size windplant, conventional generators, likely natural gas and small coal units because of their rapid flexibility, will actually produce most of the windplant's energy, in terms of its rated capacity, over the course of time. Wind projects cannot be considered stand-alone facilities: they can only be considered a minor part of other fuel mixes. Building wind projects in most areas of the country will really involve building a raft of natural gas or coal facilities, supplemented by wind energy--but at great cost in operational efficiency. The financial and thermal costs of wind integration throughout most grid systems have grave implications for carbon emissions offsets, which are wind's raison d'être. The massive public subsidies enabling this industry (the most for any power source on a per kilowatt basis) are not indexed to actual measured CO2 reductions throughout any grid system. Moreover, as a producer of sporadic electricity, wind can do nothing to dampen our “addiction” to oil, since virtually no oil is used to produce electricity (our grid, the PJM, presently uses less than .3 of one percent).
The ultimately futile effort to reconcile the square peg of wind's relentless unreliability with the wide and deepening round hole of modern expectations for reliable, secure, affordable performance, is spurred by scientifically specious arguments from corporate interests and the wishful thinking bilked by corporate advertising. Wind and coal are not inversely related to one another, as most people have come to believe: all other things being equal—and given continued increases in demand—the more wind projects there are, the more need for reliable conventional generators like coal. No coal plants have been closed anywhere due to wind technology, despite the presence of more than 50,000 wind machines throughout the world.
The history of environmentalism is largely the chronicle of how adverse consequences flowed from the uninformed opinions of the well intentioned. Good citizenship in these troubled times requires informed stewardship of the land and its wildlife, especially in areas near rare mountain habitat featuring many highly vulnerable species. No one in Pennsylvania should welcome 42-story wind turbines in their community, especially when they produce little power relative to demand, save miniscule carbon emissions, and are little more than Enronesque tax shelter generators allowing snake-oil salesmen like T. Boone Pickens to make even more money at public expense.
At its demise, Enron owned the nation’s largest stock of wind projects, which General Electric bought at a fire sale in the bankruptcy proceedings. Today, GE, which owns NBC, features multi-million dollar product placement commercials for its wind projects during the Olympic coverage on that network, no doubt hoping to daze and dizzy people with razzle dazzle, rather than invoke reality. Pennsylvanians should abjure shuck and jive, even if it’s seen on TV and cloaked in sanctimony.
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