Good Intentions Lead to Bad Wind Energy Policy

As Americans, most of us want to live in a clean environment, breath clean air and drink clean water. In the United States, conservatives as well as liberals share these aspirations. What we sometimes differ on his how best to accomplish these goals. Our citizens are great about changing their ways to strive to be more conscious about our safety, the safety of others and the healthiness of our environment. However, we also demand a balance between the health of our environment, the health of our economy and the safety of ourselves and our families. In our zeal to feel that we’ve done a good thing to protect the environment, sometimes we tend to ignore basic flaws in the fixes we employ. This blog series will explore different environmental fixes that may need to be rethought.

Windmills Make Us Feel Good

As children, a lot of us played with shiny plastic pinwheels in the springtime. They were cheap toys parents used to keep us quiet when shopping yet really fun on a windy day. Our mothers may have had a couple of bigger ones spinning in the garden. If we lived in the country, we may have driven past (or lived on) farms that had a lonesome windmill that actually harnessed the wind for power to pull water from the well for the farmhouse or for the livestock. These are homey and probably pleasant memories.

Today, gigantic windmills have taken over many acres of once beautiful landscape. Some people might not find these windmills ugly, and the good feelings they get knowing they are “better” for the environment makes the changed landscape worthwhile to them. Usually these same people don’t live close to these structures that are between 328 and 410 feet tall. Sometimes these people haven’t even driven through an area that have multiple windmills.

These modern marvels weigh between 164 and 334 tons. The “nacelle,” the “bus-sized” container housing all the machinery necessary to operate the windmill, sits at the top. “Some nacelles include a helicopter landing pad.” “The steel tower is anchored in a platform of more than a thousand tons of concrete and steel rebar, 30 to 50 feet across and anywhere from 6 to 30 feet deep. Shafts are sometimes driven down farther to help anchor it. Mountain tops must be blasted to create a level area of at least 3 acres. The platform is critical to stabilizing the immense weight of the turbine assembly.” – https://www.wind-watch.org/faq-size.php.

Farming or any other activities close to these windmills can be dangerous. One blade per 100 to 1,000 turbines per year will break off. Windpowermonthly.com estimates the failure rate to be 3,800 per year worldwide.  These blades range between 116 and 143 feet long. Windmill setbacks vary from county to county and state to state. Data for measurements of length of throws is scarce, but it seems to be between about 191 to 218 yards, or over twice the length of a football field. Accident statistics in the U.K. claim that there is a documented case of a blade traveling a mile before landing.

Fires on windmills have happened recently too. One in early August 2018 caused a wildfire to breakout burning 2,000 acres, and catching fire is not uncommon – 2016 windmill fire in Pennsylvania, in the Netherlands two workers died on top of a burning windmill about four years ago, and the Department of Labor explains that you need people trained in fire suppression to work on wind turbines.

Birds and bats are definitely in harm’s way when it comes to these gigantic windmills. Precisely the reason the windmill is placed in certain locations, the amount of wind the location receives, is precisely the reason why large birds of prey, including the Bald Eagle, like these windmill locations. These sometimes already endangered birds are seriously being endangered by windmills. Smithsonian.com puts the number of bird deaths each year at between 140,000 and 328,000. BirdWatchingDaily.com puts that number at 573,000. You can read the American Wind Wildlife Institute’s full report regarding bird and bat fatalities here: Wind turbine interactions with wildlife and their habitats. In 2013, Forbes.com documented how the Obama administration was giving a pass to Wind Turbine companies for killing endangered species.

“Construction of a wind power facility costs between $1 million and $2 million per megawatt of capacity.” And, subsides “[a]t the federal level, the production or investment tax credit and double-declining accelerated depreciation can pay for two-thirds of a wind power project. Additional state incentives, such as guaranteed markets and exemption from property taxes, can pay for another 10%.” – https://www.wind-watch.org/faq-economics.php. Costs of erecting these structures seem very high. Windpowerengineering.com applies a fairly straight-forward calculation to find that one wind turbine unit with a 20 year life-cycle will need to operate for 22 years before it pays for itself.

The economics of wind turbines aside, they also aren’t as clean as some people would believe. Several municipalities/counties, including ones in Michigan and Wisconsin have ruled with the citizens that the wind turbines were surpassing noise pollution laws and causing harm to the residents. As with any operating turbine and electricity generating machine, wind turbines require “lubricating oils and hydraulic and insulating fluids” to function, so fossil fuels still must be generated in order to run a windmill, and they also “produce electric and magnetic fields,” as other types of generators do. To produce the batteries wind turbines utilize in order to store energy, rare earth minerals are used. Many of these mining operations are in China, where mining regulations are notoriously nearly non-existent. Village agriculture business which once thrived now cannot grow crops due to toxic waste, sometimes radioactive waste, that contaminates the water surrounding these sites.

Rather than weighing all the costs, whether financial, environmental, or animal and human costs, the former administrations seemed to direct money into energy that felt good, like the preschool pinwheel, instead of energy that was good. Rather than putting our money where our hearts are in the future, let’s put our money where are brains are.