Windswept_ The Story of Wind and Weather - Marq de Villiers [132]
In all the places where wind power is opposed, the arguments are similar. They are ugly. They despoil pristine places and beautiful landscapes. They are being built in the wrong places ("here"). They destroy property values and drive away tourists. They are land hungry. They are noisy and dangerous. They put wildlife at risk. They are too expensive anyway and we should be looking for other technologies. They are intermittent and can't be relied on, and therefore ensure that fossil-fuel or nuclear plants would have to be retained as the main generators.
It can be difficult, at times, to pick a valid argument out of the white noise that contaminates the debate, with its wild claims that whales will crash into offshore turbines, that fishing grounds will be destroyed, that dead birds will litter the beaches, that bats die in great numbers near them, even that horses bolt when they hear them, a curiously nineteenth-century argument. Bird kill is a major issue—the turbines are called pole-mounted Cuisinarts by the antis (this claim was started by a California group, which called one of the Altamont turbines a "Condor Cuisinart"). Some of these reports are doubtless true, if exaggerated. It's also true that more birds are killed by guyed towers, which are much less visible to avian eyes but much more prevalent in the landscape, and more than six times as many are killed by domestic cats every week as are killed in a year by all the wind farms put together. (For the record, the actual kill rate for a turbine is 0.2 birds per turbine per year.) Ordinary high-rises kill more birds than that.
The only argument against wind power that has any real merit is that it is, by definition, intermittent and can't be relied on, and therefore we have to keep a substantial investment in fossil-fuel or nuclear-generating plants as backups when the wind fails. Wind power's proponents answer that wind power is not intended to be a stand-alone technology. Allan Moore, chairman of the British Wind Energy Association and head of renewables at a company called National Wind Power, agrees that a mix of technologies will be necessary. Still, he told The Guardian, wind is far more advanced than the others. "If in 30 years time someone comes up with something better, we'll take the turbines away." This is not very difficult. A decommissioned turbine can be taken away, and will leave behind only a very small sign of its former presence. Wind power, then, is part of a basket of solutions that include solar power, biomass fuels, tidal and current harnessing, as well as conservation. (The idea of harnessing the awesome power of the moving water of the ocean's currents, especially the mighty Gulf Stream, has been seriously proposed. It has some advantages over tidal power, since it is constant and not intermittent; the Gulf Stream is only a few miles off the Florida shore, where it is moving at a rapid 2.4 miles an hour. Surveys have shown that 400 to 850 gigawatts of energy are plausible from this source, enough to cover the needs of several states. Indirectly, this is wind power too, since ocean currents are wind-driven.) 29
The argument about wind's intermittent nature also ignores the interesting possibility of hydrogen technology. As Vijay Vaitheeswaran puts it, "In the long term, the world will get its hydrogen directly from renewable energy, whether from the wind or the sun, by electrolysis of water. Once produced, hydrogen would also be used as a form of energy storage. Power generated whenever the wind blows can be stored as hydrogen and sold into the power grid when needed, which would revolutionize the way electricity trading is done, since electricity is one of the few commodities