There are precious few places in the world where wind turbines work. Appalachia happens to be one of these places in the world.
…and unfortunately, they are sitting on 400 years of coal reserves that the Obama administration has successfully waged war against. America being the Saudi Arabia of coal, it remains preposterous to declare such resources as verboten in the face of opportunities to recapture and reuse carbon.
Nevertheless, wind power marches forward… and Jenna Portnoy over at the WaPo has a great story about its ill-reception in southwest Virginia:
A deep mistrust of the federal government is ingrained in parts of this region, as are a fiercely guarded independence and pride in the heritage of coal mining. Yet Stacy and others insist that this battle is about more than any of that.
They agree that Appalachia must rebuild its sagging economy. But they believe that tourism is the answer — which is why, in their minds, marring East River Mountain with turbines they say would be 400 feet high is a terrible idea.
And so the Tazewell County Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance banning “tall structures” — of which a wind turbine is one.
The article is worth reading in its entirety, as it captures a great deal of the angst (and some of the opportunity) regarding wind power.
Of course, the assholish-ness of Lowell Feld is… well, deplorable:
“Gotta love people who claim wind turbines are unsightly, but never objected to blowing up mountains!” wrote Lowell Feld, the author of the liberal blog Blue Virginia.
Gotta love northern Virginians telling other people how to live and what to do with their regional economies, eh?
My introduction to wind power was in northern Israel, specifically along the Golan Heights in the late 1990s. It is a beautiful stretch of land north of the Sea of Galilee, and yes — you can see the massive wind turbines turning in the sun:
To help reach its renewables target of 10% power generation by 2020, equating to around 1GW of wind, the governmentintroduced a feed-in tariff (FIT) in 2011 up to a limit of 800MW for turbines over 50kW.
. . .
Not that it is all plain sailing. The government last year reduced the allocation to 730MW, after several attempts at deeper cuts, arguing that progress was too slow. The FIT is also likely to be cut this year, probably to somewhere around NIS 0.43/kWh (€0.096/kWh) Hareli believes. In 2014 it stood at NIS 0.54/kWh (€0.12/kWh) for the first 400MW, then NIS 0.49/kWh (€0.109/kWh) for the next 400MW.
Back then, the wind turbine project was scaled to provide almost 40% of the power for northern Israel, at somewhere close to 1200MW. The handful that are there currently? Generate about 6MW — about one megawatt per windmill.
Much of the angst in Bluefield and Tazewell is directed against a federal government committed to destroying communities — simple as that. The problem for many is that most people don’t see the wind turbines as a co-operator alongside a revitalized coal industry in say, five to ten years. Most view it as the Obama administration (and Lowell Feld) view it, as a tombstone planted on the graves of a way of life that has sustained many Virginians for generations.
Still, where there’s life there’s hope:
About 45 minutes west of Bluefield, Seth White tucks into a sandwich at the Bearded Moose, where a message on the door says, “Guns are permitted on the premises.” Through the window, he points to power lines and a cell tower — signs of progress that he says haven’t ruined the scenery one bit.
“Windmills make strange bedfellows,” he said. “I think protecting the environment is important. But I don’t see how building windmills is destroying the environment.”
Tucking into a sandwich? What a great line…
Here’s the other thing. Wind power isn’t exactly efficient. There’s a reason why people use fossil fuels. For starters, chemistry. Hydrocarbons are intensely packed molecules containing a great deal of energy. The more complex the molecule, the more energy you release when you break it (so goes your average physics and chemistry class). That’s why gasoline and coal are so incredible; lots of bang for little buck.
Another piece to the puzzle? Carbon capture isn’t exactly a hard science. Environments are closed systems at the end of the day, which means that which is released into the atmosphere is absorbed into the environment. One might point towards increased CO2 levels as a refutation of this, but there is little evidence that the dire predictions of some — increased hurricanes, the melting of the Arctic ice sheet, for example — have come true.
There are other advantages as well to increased CO2 levels in small environments. Right now, you are breathing something on the order of 300-350 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide. Increase that to 500ppm, and you have the conditions of many major greenhouses, increasing farm yields and food production. If revolutions in food are part of the equation, just imagine if there was a convenient way to increase carbon yields over an acre of land? Or an efficient way of putting CO2 into the ground for plants to absorb? Or even better — a means of converting CO2 into energy much the same as H2O is being explored?
Truthfully, we are really only scratching the surface of what carbon can do. Coal isn’t dead by any stretch, apart from the religious fanatics who deem all organic fuels as the Great Satan, but merrily pay $8.00 for a cabbage at a supermarket that sells organic foods (distinct from the fake foods, I assume). What is required is technology and time…
Wind turbines are no grand solution for our energy problems, but they can play a role. Defenders of coal should rest easy on the fact that science and public opinion are on their side. As technology catches up, the coalfields will power America again.
It is merely a question as to what form it will take, and who the partners will be.
