Windswept_ The Story of Wind and Weather - Marq de Villiers [128]
If you were really careful, you could angle yourself to screen out the worst of the vistas. If you walk along the hiking trail that traverses the site for about a mile, you can see a ridge with a graceful line of new turbines soaring over it, as elegant as the flight path of a gull, a sight that lifted the heart, but the overall impression was overwhelmingly depressing. "There are some good people with good machines here," said the security guard, squatting on his heels, staring down into a gully. He sounded glum. "But lots of them don't care. I guess they took their money and ran. Too bad they don't make them clear up after themselves." He himself lived down in the valley, within sight of a few hundred turbines. "They don't look too bad," he said, "from a distance."
Altamont is everyone's worst-case scenario. Even on the Sussex Downs in England, wind farm opponents trot out pictures of Altamont to scare the locals.
But the turbines that are being built now almost all follow the Danish model. They are tall, solid towers, no longer made of iron lattice but white painted steel, soaring into the sky, their three-bladed rotors as graceful as storks, as I had seen for myself at Lower West Pubnico. And they are springing up everywhere. The wind rush, indeed, is on.
As an industry, wind energy didn't really exist twenty years ago, but there was a fivefold increase (487 percent) in wind-delivered electricity between 1995 and 2001. Wind power is now growing by 30 percent a year. Windswept Scotland has come to consider itself the future Saudi Arabia of the wind business. Wind farms have been constructed in France, Germany, Holland, Poland, and well into Russia. Offshore wind farms can now be found off virtually every available European coast; Ireland has announced plans to become an offshore power generating megapower. Britain will have four thousand turbines by 2006. In Germany, there were already seven thousand installed by 2004, and the number was increasing rapidly. By Lester Brown's calculations at his WorldWatch Institute, by 2004 enough power was already being extracted from the wind to meet the needs of 23 million people, or the combined populations of the Scandinavian countries. Denmark gets more than a quarter of its energy from wind, a target only dreamed of in North America. Meanwhile coal generation has dropped 9 percent. Wind energy has come of age, to quote the title of the best-known book on wind generation,20 and has far outstripped its rivals in the renewable energy department, photovoltaic solar power, tidal power generation, and the like. It is the first renewable other than hydroelectric power to achieve commercial viability; modern turbines approaching two megawatts are competitive with coal and nuclear power, and better yet, wind power is not vulnerable to a cartel—winds blow everywhere. In the last decade production costs for wind power have dropped from about thirty cents per kilowatt hour to less than six, and some companies have reached three cents, which compares increasingly favorably to the standard two to five cents for conventional fuels. Wind potential is about five times the current global consumption of energy, and can be produced from areas that are not environmentally sensitive.21
And some of the heaviest of corporate hitters are rapidly getting into the picture. These include Shell, Scottish Power/PPM Energy, and AES Corp. In the United States, American Electric Power (AEP), the largest United States generator of electricity and a leading coal miner, has gone into wind power in a big way. AEP's Trent Mesa wind farm near Abilene, Texas, has one hundred turbines generating 1.5 megawatts each. Early turbines in Texas were built by Zond Energy Systems, which later became Enron Wind; when Enron went spectacularly belly up, AEP snapped