Windswept_ The Story of Wind and Weather - Marq de Villiers [129]
A total of ten offshore wind farms were operating in 2004, in Denmark, Sweden, the U.K., and Holland, including the world's largest, Horns Rev in Denmark, at 160 megawatts. The Irish government, not to be outdone, approved plans for an even bigger offshore wind farm, to be built on a sandbank in the Irish sea off Dublin. It would produce 520 megawatts. By early 2005, plans had been announced for twenty-six more, in the U.K., Ireland again, Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands, and possibly the United States. Britain alone was planning fifteen giant offshore farms, in the Thames estuary, the Wash, and off the northwest and Welsh coasts. Each could have up to five hundred of the biggest turbines available, each turbine generating 4.75 megawatts. Offshore is favored by developers despite the hazards and difficulties of engineering structures to withstand ocean gales, partly because wind shear is low at sea, and less turbulent, and so turbines can be built less tall for the same gain, and are likely to have a longer life. Utility companies had announced investments of some $17.5 billion in British wind projects.23 Estimates were that about 5 gigawatts of the projected worldwide total of 60 gigawatts by 2010 would come from offshore farms.
Global capacity of wind power was 23,300 megawatts in 2002, and increased by 30 percent each of the following years.
Heady days, then, full of promise but with just a hint, a faint whiff, of economic bubble and hype.
Everywhere, in the United States, or Britain, or anywhere in Europe, wind power is being pushed by government subsidies. Whether this is a good thing depends on which side you have chosen to believe. Opponents come very close to implying the whole thing is a scam; among them the nuclear industry, which has a vested interest in seeing wind power fail—many a nuclear plant is lying around with nothing to do. Wind proponents point to the massive subsidies that oil and gas exploration companies have received over the decades, never mind the nuclear industry, and are aghast at the hypocrisy that now opposes subsidies for a competing technology. That the subsidies do make a difference, no one doubts. Katherine Seelye reported in the New York Times that U.S. federal subsidies allow wind power companies to deduct 1.8 cents tax liability for every kilowatt hour they produce for ten years. Jerome Niessen, president of NedPower, which has received West Virginia permission for a two hundred-turbine wind farm in Grant County, said he expected to generate 800 million kilowatt hours a year, for a tax savings of $16 million a year for 10 years, or $160 million on a wind farm that will cost $300 million to build.24
Wind power has generated huge controversy in the environmental movement. Sometimes the opposition verges on hysteria, and the picture painted of wind farms is that of some alien monster marching across the countryside, ruining the landscape, killing the wildlife, making life a misery for everyone. It sometimes sounds as though the worst excesses of the industrial revolution are threatening to overwhelm the pristine countryside, as if windmills brought with them belching smokestacks, miles of concrete and asphalt, awful noises, and visual pollution. The perpetrators are portrayed as typical capitalist rapists, representatives of massive multinationals, unconcerned with ordinary people, prepared to blight the world for corporate profit.
The reality, as I have seen for myself, is rather different.