Windswept_ The Story of Wind and Weather - Marq de Villiers [127]
Utility-scale turbines are almost all 50 kilowatts or larger, up to four megawatts. Single small turbines below 50 kilowatts, often in association with photovoltaic systems, are used for homes, telecommunications dishes, or water pumping. And this is the green Utopian dream: for every building a small wind plant and solar panel system, generating a supply of site-specific hydrogen that will run pretty well everything now run electrically. No more grid. No more massive power stations. No more nuclear. No more transmission lines to go down in storms. No more being beholden to OPEC. No more carbon-based pollutants. No more terrorist threats against infrastructure . . . A convert' to the dream in 2004 was the mayor of Chicago, Richard Daley, who vowed to turn Chicago into the greenest city in America by 2006. Half of that green power would come from "super modern windmills" whirring silently inside cages encrusted with solar panels, installed atop the city's buildings.19 This distributed-model dream is also shared by the nuclear industry. Why not a tiny reactor in every building? The two sides don't talk to each other very much.
The oil shock had several other consequences. The most obvious was to push government research grants radically upward. In the late 1960s, U.S. subsidies were a paltry $60,000 a year; six years later they had reached $20 million. Then subsidies were awarded to those who actually produced electricity that could be fed into the grid, subsidies that basically guaranteed producers a profit and allowed the utilities to offset a portion of their costs. The result was a proliferation of wind power companies, and the springing up of wind farms everywhere. The first, and one of the largest, has been part of the landscape on the Altamont Pass, on Interstate 580 east of San Francisco, for thirty years. Another is in Texas; Texans on I-10 heading west to El Paso will see a huge array of turbines stretching endlessly across the plain. In American fashion, entrepreneurship was to be unfettered by overzealous regulation, with consequences that horrified the tidy Danes. The wind farms that sprang up in California, particularly, were, not to put too fine a point on it, ugly. The turbines were of random sizes and random designs; they were often sited on skylines within view of residential areas. In at least one case, the desert community of Palm Springs, the residences they were in sight of were those of the megarich, like Bob Hope, and the squawking was loud and unremitting. Worse, the Palm Springs turbines used a lattice design for their towers, which made them resemble the pylons used to carry power lines across the country. To make things still worse, it seemed that half of them weren't working at any one time. It was a curiosity that all the opinion polls taken at the time were more negative about idled turbines than about working ones.
The Altamont Pass is a dispiriting place for anyone who wants to believe that wind generation of electricity can exist in harmony with nature. I was last there in the spring of 2004; it was a golden California day and I could see apparently forever, wave after wave of silky, golden brown folds in the landscape, dotted here and there with acacia and live oak. In the far distance the air was smoky, a blue haze melting into the golden grass. But in the near distance . . . A passing security patrol let me through a gate; he was bored and pleased to have something, anything, to do, and tramping a complete stranger through the six thousand or so turbines was better than nothing. It was not a pretty sight. A steady wind was blowing, but at least a third of the turbines were idle. Of those that did turn, many were scraping and squeaking and clanking, badly in need of maintenance. Others had toppled altogether. The ground was littered with debris, twisted struts,