Wind Power Is Energy for Optimists

By Charles Komanoff, Orion Magazine. Posted September 9, 2006.

It was a place I had often visited in memory but feared might no longer exist. Orange slabs of calcified sandstone teetered overhead, while before me, purple buttes and burnt mesas stretched over the desert floor. In the distance I could make out southeast Utah's three snowcapped ranges -- the Henrys, the Abajos, and, eighty miles to the east, the La Sals, shimmering into the blue horizon.

No cars, no roads, no buildings. Two crows floating on the late-winter thermals. Otherwise, stillness.

Abbey's country. But my country, too. Almost forty years after Desert Solitaire, 35 since I first came to love this Colorado River plateau, I was back with my two sons, eleven and eight. We had spent four sun-filled days clambering across slickrock in Arches National Park and crawling through the slot canyons of the San Rafael Reef. Now, perched on a precipice above Goblin Valley, stoked on endorphins and elated by the beauty before me, I had what might seem a strange, irrelevant thought: I didn't want windmills here.

Not that any windmills are planned for this Connecticut-sized expanse -- the winds are too fickle. But wind energy is never far from my mind these days. As Earth's climate begins to warp under the accumulating effluent from fossil fuels, the increasing viability of commercial-scale wind power is one of the few encouraging developments.

Encouraging to me, at least. As it turns out, there is much disagreement over where big windmills belong, and whether they belong at all.

Fighting fossil fuels and machines powered by them, has been my life's work. In 1971, shortly after getting my first taste of canyon country, I took a job crunching numbers for what was then a landmark exposé of U.S. power plant pollution, The Price of Power. The subject matter was drier than dust -- emissions data, reams of it, printed out on endless strips of paper by a mainframe computer. Dull stuff, but nightmarish visions of coal-fired smokestacks smudging the crystal skies of the Four Corners kept me working 'round the clock, month after month.

A decade later, as a New York City bicycle commuter fed up with the oil-fueled mayhem on the streets, I began working with the local bicycle advocacy group, Transportation Alternatives, and we soon made our city a hotbed of urban American anti-car activism. The '90s and now the '00s have brought other battles -- "greening" Manhattan tenement buildings through energy efficiency and documenting the infernal "noise costs" of Jet Skis, to name two -- but I'm still fighting the same fight.

Why? Partly it's knowing the damage caused by the mining and burning of fossil fuels. And there's also the sheer awfulness of machines gone wild, their groaning, stinking combustion engines invading every corner of life. But now the stakes are immeasurably higher. As an energy analyst, I can tell you that the science on global warming is terrifyingly clear: to have even a shot at fending off climate catastrophe, the world must reduce carbon dioxide emissions from fuel burning by at least 50 percent within the next few decades. If poor countries are to have any room to develop, the United States, the biggest emitter by far, needs to cut back by 75 percent.

Although automobiles, with their appetite for petroleum, may seem like the main culprit, the number one climate change agent in the U.S. is actually electricity. The most recent inventory of U.S. greenhouse gases found that power generation was responsible for a whopping 38 percent of carbon dioxide emissions. Yet the electricity sector may also be the least complicated to make carbon free. Approximately three-fourths of U.S. electricity is generated by burning coal, oil, or natural gas. Accordingly, switching that same portion of U.S. electricity generation to nonpolluting sources such as wind turbines, while simultaneously ensuring that our ever-expanding arrays of lights, computers, and appliances are increasingly energy efficient, would eliminate 38 percent of the country's CO2 emissions and bring us halfway to the goal of cutting emissions by 75 percent.

To achieve that power switch entirely through wind power, I calculate, would require 400,000 windmills rated at 2.5 megawatts each. To be sure, this is a hypothetical figure, since it ignores such real-world issues as limits on power transmission and the intermittency of wind, but it's a useful benchmark just the same.

What would that entail?

To begin, I want to be clear that the turbines I'm talking about are huge, with blades up to 165 feet long mounted on towers rising several hundred feet. Household wind machines like the 100-foot-high Bergey 10-kilowatt BWC Excel with 11-foot blades, the mainstay of the residential and small business wind turbine market, may embody democratic self-reliance and other "small is beautiful" virtues, but we can't look to them to make a real dent in the big energy picture. What dictates the supersizing of windmills are two basic laws of wind physics: a wind turbine's energy potential is proportional to the square of the length of the blades, and to the cube of the speed at which the blades spin. I'll spare you the math, but the difference in blade lengths, the greater wind speeds higher off the ground, and the sophisticated controls available on industrial-scale turbines all add up to a market-clinching five-hundred-fold advantage in electricity output for a giant General Electric or Vestas wind machine.

Charles Komanoff, an economic policy analyst and environmental activist, is the author of Power Plant Cost Escalation. He lives in New York City and advocates for energy efficiency, bicycle transportation, and urban revitalization.

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