Wind and Community

Perhaps you have read (those of you who live in Vermont) about the wind power project proposed for Ira, West Rutland, and surrounding towns. A company called Community Wind, headed by a man named Per White-Hansen, wants to develop a wind farm approaching 80 megawatts in capacity on the ridgelines in the area. It has generated intense controversy. Here is a clip from one of the public meetings attended by Mr. White Hansen and his public relations man Jeff Wennberg, former Commissioner of the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation. A local resident asks about a device he found on his land:



I know some folks from that area who have attended a number of these meetings. The developers have done just about everything wrong. One could catalog their process into a book: "How to Alienate Local Communities and Botch a Wind Development Project." They started with secret lease agreements with gag orders attached. Then, as noted in the video clip, they (or their consultants) trespassed on people's land and put up monitoring devices without the landowner's permission. They changed their story depending on their audience. And so on.

I relayed this info to a friend of mine who is involved with Renewable Energy Vermont, our state's renewable energy organization. He said that he had already gotten a dozen calls about it from within the organization. The consensus was "These idiots are making us all look bad." Of course, hiring Jeff Wennberg, Governor Douglas’s slap in the face to the Vermont environmental community, was not a brilliant strategic move either. Mr. White-Hansen recently announced that he was scaling back his plans, eliminating turbines around Suzie’s Peak in Tinmouth. He explained it as an enlightened response to public opinion, but the word on the dirt roads is that he couldn’t get key landowners to sign necessary leases.

So these particular developers are making a bollocks of the job. What about the subject in general?

Non-renewable energy is non-renewable, so we are going to be running on renewable at some point. That is a definite end state. Fewer, larger energy systems are more cost effective than many small ones, in general. If we want relatively low cost energy we are going to have to install fewer, larger generators, which will have concentrated impact on particular communities. In the case of wind, these will be communities with specific topography such as the high ridgelines in Ira, Middletown Springs, Tinmouth, and Danby.

It raises questions of local vs. state balance. We could say "Fine, citizens of Ira (or any other town with a good wind site), you want a few small wind turbines for yourselves, so you and the rest of Vermont will endure dramatically higher electricity prices in the future." We could, with appropriate attention to local concerns and reasonable mitigation of effects, ask them to host a megawatt-scale wind farm. The locals would experience a mix of benefits and problems.

We experience this question of balance and localized impact with our power system as it is today. Some people live near large, ugly, dirty conventional power plants. Some people live near large, ugly transmission lines and substations. Not everybody who lives near a power plant or transmission line benefits from it in what they would consider a fair proportion to what they sacrifice. Many of us live nowhere near a power plant or high voltage transmission line but enjoy the benefits thereof.

People sometimes ask me, "Why not just solar? Why do we have to have these huge wind turbines?" I ask them if they are willing to pay five times as much for electricity in the winter, when sun-hours are scarce and wind is plentiful. That's the decision we have to make. We are used to an unending and cheap supply of electricity from far off power plants brought in over huge power lines. We can’t assume that this will be the pattern in the future. In fact, we can safely assume that the paradigm will be exactly the opposite – smaller, decentralized power systems with distributed generation sources, making electricity for sub-regional markets.

That said, we do have to put in place some kind of rational guidelines for wind development so that developers like those presented above don't bulldoze in and screw people around. Conversely, so that one occasional summer resident can't throw a wrench in the works and deny us renewable electricity.

I don’t buy the aesthetics argument against wind power. What is beautiful in a landscape is entirely subjective and changes with time. I happen to dislike the appearance of farm silos. Nevertheless, they appear repeatedly in picturesque photos of Vermont in our premiere tourism magazine, Vermont Life. Why are multi-story unadorned concrete cylinders capped with galvanized steel domes considered picturesque? I like the dark blue Harvestore silos a bit better, but they were considered an aesthetic abomination when they were first introduced. Now they show up in those Vermont Life photos as well. I also dislike the appearance of gas stations, fast food outlets, big box stores, and pseudo-colonial McMansions, but each has its advocates touting economic utility, property rights, and consumer choice. We put up with a huge number of blights on our landscape that don’t actually need to be ugly or imposing simply because some real estate developers or corporate-backed franchisees had their way with us.

The key difference is that a fast food franchise does not technically have to be ugly but a wind turbine has to be tall. The farther the turbine blades get from the ground the faster and smoother the airflow they encounter. Faster and smoother wind means more power and longer turbine life, which means cheaper power. The power available in wind increases by the cube of the wind speed. Double the speed means eight times the power. Even the small increment of speed and smoothness offered by another ten feet of tower makes a noticeable difference. That also means that a wind turbine has to be located where there is decent wind. In Vermont that is a ridgeline between 1600 and 2400 feet high. At greater altitudes than 2400 feet the turbine blades tend to ice up in the winter. Tall and high up means visible, and there’s the rub.

Another constraint is transmission. Put some tens of megawatts of generation somewhere and you need sufficiently large power lines to get that electricity to market. There happens to be a high voltage line going west from Rutland along the Route 4 corridor, right at the northern end of the Ira/West Rutland ridgelines. Not every ridgeline in Vermont has a high voltage line running nearby, so that cuts down the possible locations dramatically.

There is an intellectual dishonesty to saying reflexively “Yes, wind power is important, just don’t put it here.” Not every location where wind is technically and economically possible is also environmentally and socially appropriate. Each citizen has the right and duty to question a developer and hold a wind development company to appropriate standards. But if everyone says, “Not here,” then are we all willing to accept the consequences?

Coal, natural gas, and uranium are getting scarcer by the hour. Someday we will have far less power available to us at a far greater price. In order to have a stable utility grid we will have to base our generation portfolio on the most stable renewable source, hydroelectric power. Wind, solar, wave power (on the coasts), and to a lesser extent, biomass, will make up the rest. In a best case scenario I can see us generating about a quarter of the electrical energy we now enjoy. We will need every kind of renewable energy source available to us. We can’t wait for the economics of scarcity to drive renewable energy development unless we want to endure a desperate interregnum, an electrical Dark Age, while we scramble to develop renewable generation.

That means that we need to start making hard decisions about the location of wind generation right now. The residents of towns with ridgelines and nearby transmission capacity need to realize that their little patch of Vermont was chosen by geologic and human history as one of a handful of viable sites for something we all need. I don’t expect or desire the residents of these towns to roll over and say “Do what you want.” I do expect them to formulate a positive, proactive vision of how they would like to see wind developed. I expect them to pressure the state government to create realistic and workable guidelines for wind development. Otherwise the eventual answer to the question “Got any electricity?” will be “Not here.”

Afghanistan: Corruption is the subject

I just read a post at the always-interesting site Registan about corruption in the Afghan National Police. It is sordid and depressing. It would be shocking if I hadn’t long ago ceased being surprised by what people do with guns and without supervision. I’ll quote the original article from Al-Aribiyah about what British troops found when they fought their way into Helmand Province.

As the troops advance, they are learning uncomfortable facts about their local allies: villagers say the government's police force was so brutal and corrupt that they welcomed the Taliban as liberators.

"The police would stop people driving on motorcycles, beat them and take their money," said Mohammad Gul, an elder in the village of Pankela, which British troops have been securing for the past three days after flying in by helicopter.

He pointed to two compounds of neighbors where pre-teen children had been abducted by police to be used for the local practice of "bachabazi," or sex with pre-pubescent boys.

"If the boys were out in the fields, the police would come and rape them," he said. "You can go to any police base and you will see these boys. They hold them until they are finished with them and then let the child go."

The Interior Ministry in Kabul said it would contact police commanders in the area before responding in detail.

When the Taliban arrived in the village 10 months ago and drove the police out, local people rejoiced, said Mohammad Rasul, a toothless elderly farmer who keeps a few cows and chickens in a neatly tended orchard of pomegranate trees, figs and grape vines.


Although his own son was killed by a Taliban roadside bomb five years ago, Rasul said the Taliban earned their welcome in the village by treating people with respect.

So, we have the ANP shaking people down like the local branch of the Mafia, and then engaging in brutal sexual abuse. Note that the farmer lost his son to the Taliban and yet prefers them to the ANP.

This is history repeating itself. Why, one might ask, were the Taliban able to take over and hold Afghanistan against all the other warlords? Were they better fighters? Were they better equipped? Better generaled? Nope.

They were honest. Damn them for a bunch of medieval, superstitious, woman-hating sadists, but they were, and are, a very legalistic bunch. Sharia law is a throwback to centuries ago, but it is law, and they rule by it.

After the Soviets were driven out Afghanistan had a not-very-charming civil war among the various warlord factions. From that time until the Taliban took over in 1996, a regular Afghan civilian could expect to be stopped on the road and robbed at gunpoint every few miles by the local militiamen. Businesses paid protection money. It was essentially a country ruled by organized crime, only less organized than Chicago in the 1920’s.

The Taliban, backed by factions within the Pakistani government, made headway in their successful fight for power by simply leaving people alone. If you grew your beard, kept your radio quiet and your women under wraps, you could go about your business in relative safety. Anybody who stole lost a hand, and unlike the previous non-administration, bribes and connections didn’t do the crook any good. Overall the Taliban were bureaucratic sticklers for procedure. It says something about the abysmal level that things had gotten to that Afghans preferred living in the legal equivalent of Europe in the year 1214. It says something about the failure of our efforts today that many still prefer it.

Corruption in Afghanistan is endemic partly because of the general chaos, partly because of our influence (more on that later) and partly because the country is tribal. Tribal societies work on the basis of familial and personal relationships, patronage, and nepotism. Afghanistan seems to have the worst of all worlds – the tradition of favoring relatives and rewarding followers without the original firm social structure that made it work. Endless war, the imposition of alien political structures, and huge flows of foreign cash have broken down the traditional safeguards. I’m not saying that Afghanistan ever had a golden age of lawfulness, just a set of traditions that were coherent enough to organize a society. The key to power in Afghanistan is eliminating corruption, or at least minimizing and regulating it.

How do we eliminate corruption in a country where loyalty is rented?

We could start by not underestimating the Afghans. The primary Afghan values are hospitality and practicality. They may not have progressive values about the role of women but they know how to adapt and survive. I have read accounts of local Afghan judges setting up mock “fair trials” for visiting UN representatives to show how well the reform efforts are going. Then, with the foreigners out of the way, the Potemkin courts get shut down and it is back to bribery and favoritism. They will get away with whatever we let them.

We could also start by cleaning up our own act. Our whole semi-privatized effort over there is riddled with corruption. Contractors are doling out bribes and protection money, which sustains and reinforces the present way of doing things.


Ultimately, we have to be willing to step away from our allies. Afghanistan has held greater importance in the minds of western governments than it really deserves. Great Britain and Russia played “The Great Game” of influence and espionage for decades in Central Asia, to no real advantage for either. We went in, ostensibly after Osama bin Laden, when with a bit more pressure we could have had him for a few diplomatic concessions. Now he is almost certainly in the tribal areas of Pakistan, so there goes that reasoning. Some see our interest in Afghanistan as relating to a non-Russian pipeline route for oil and gas out of the ‘stans. That is one pipeline that won’t get built for a while. The whole deal is such a loser that we could safely threaten Hamid Karzai and the whole wretched crew with abandonment if they don’t clean up their acts. That includes prosecuting the rapist policemen.

The two valuable things that we could offer the people of Afghanistan would be personal security and some kind of consistent justice. Until they see western presence as a source for these things they will find it in the religious fanaticism of the Taliban.

On Dealing With Uncertainty, and a Threshold

My crystal ball is out being repaired. It’s been in the shop for most of my life – starter problems, I think, or maybe the bearings. I share this problem with most of the people who analyze the fossil fuel industry. There are so many factors, so many hands on the steering wheel, that it is essentially impossible to predict price and supply except in long term generalities. Nobody can time the market.

We have been on an undulating production plateau for oil since roughly 2005. World production for all oil-like liquids has been hovering around 84 million barrels a day. Price volatility has stalled the development of new oil fields, resulting in what some commentators refer to as the “practical peak” in oil production. What they mean is that while the world economy wallows in depression, the production of our aging oil fields will continue to decline. This won’t affect prices because of lowered demand, so the new, more expensive to develop oil fields won’t get tapped. When the world economy starts to crawl out of its present collapse, oil demand will increase, bumping up against declining supply. Steeply increasing oil prices will kill the recovery, oil demand, and oil development. Repeat until Amish.

Similar problems afflict natural gas production. Coal energy production has been flat since 2001.

There is a similar problem with global heating due to the combustion of these same fossil fuels. The scientific consensus is that it is upon us and that it is dangerous, but nobody can say with absolute certainty how soon or how abruptly it will happen. Will it be a slow evolution or will it hit a threshold and accelerate wildly? Experts differ.

I have been pondering these dual and balancing uncertainties, fossil fuel depletion and global heating, and I’d like to advocate for immediate, accelerated action.

I like skydiving as an analogy. It has both the elements of risk and inevitability. Imagine that you are a careless skydiver. You jump out of a plane at some undetermined altitude, right into a bank of clouds. You have neglected to wear your altimeter, so you have no way of knowing your distance to the ground. You haven’t checked the weather, so you don’t know how close to the ground the cloud cover goes. There you are, falling blindly through the gray mist. You know the ground is down there, and that you will inevitably be making contact with it at some speed at some time. When do you pull your ripcord? You can’t wait till you break out of the clouds and see the ground. The clouds might be too low, and your chute wouldn’t have time to open. When faced with utter uncertainty and when delay may result in death, the only answer is immediate action. You may spend some time inconveniently floating down through the clouds, but no matter.

Some, especially those who work for fossil fuel companies, advocate a go-slow approach on energy and climate issues. Further study is needed before we act, they say. When you are falling and have no idea when you might go splat, that is no time to convene a committee to study the issue. It is time to pull the ripcord.

There is one strand of that ripcord I’d like to discuss. As a renewable energy consultant and installer, I am always doing calculations, including calculations about the economics of renewable energy installations. This morning I was working up a price quote for a potential customer. I subtracted the Vermont incentive and the federal tax credit, did an idle mental rule of thumb calculation, and had a sudden start.

Due to the economic slump and increased production there is a worldwide glut of photovoltaic (solar electric) modules. The price has dropped by about two dollars per watt over the past couple of years. $8.50 per installed watt used to be the off-the-cuff number for a residential scale solar. Now it is down to around $6.50 per installed watt. Subtract the Vermont incentive of $1.75/watt and the 30% federal tax credit and it comes to $3.33/watt. Now, consider that in Vermont this watt of solar will generate about 1.2 kilowatt-hours per year, or about 30 kilowatt-hours in its module’s 25 year warranted life span. $3.33 divided by 30 equals a levelized cost of 11 cents per kilowatt-hour, almost exactly what I would pay today. (What I would pay, but I don’t, because my solar array feeds more back to the utility than I use.) The economics are more complicated than that, but as of now, in Vermont, residential solar electricity is roughly at parity with the electrons we buy at retail. We have reached a long sought threshold.

25 years may seem like a long payback, but that is a 4% return, rising with the cost of electricity, guaranteed as long as the sun rises, and covered under your homeowners insurance. It is a half a percent better for business owners, who can depreciate their solar assets.

H.446, now called Act 45, offers even more with a feed-in tariff that will probably land between 25 and 30 cents per kilowatt-hour. The Public Service Board, the utility lawyers, and the renewable energy and consumer advocates are still making the sausage on how that will play out. Still, the absolute baseline cost for net-metered customers is viable. It can only get better as retail electricity costs go up.

Solar hot water offers a better return than solar electricity, and energy efficiency better than that. Interest rates are low. So what are you waiting for? Pull the fossil fuel ripcord.

Orbits

I was in Philadelphia recently and saw a couple of remarkable things. A philosophical juxtaposition between them occurred to me.

The first was an exhibit at the Franklin Institute, a science museum, on Galileo. It was a traveling exhibit that included artifacts from museums in Italy, artifacts contemporary with Galileo. These included books about mathematics and astronomy, paintings, and scientific instruments. The instruments were made in a time when practical items were made to be beautiful as well as functional, so there was a lot of engraving and gilding to be seen. The premiere artifact, however, was Galileo’s telescope.  It is one of two attributed to him, a copper tube about four feet long, covered in paper and capped on either end with painstakingly hand ground lenses. It is with this instrument that he observed the heavens and exploded the earth-centered theory of the universe.

Before Galileo the dominant theory of the heavens places the earth at the center, motionless, with the sun, planets, and the fixed, crystalline sphere of stars rotating around it. It was called the Ptolemaic system, after the astronomer Ptolemy. There was a problem with this system in its primitive state, however, aside from being patently wrong. It didn’t explain what people observed. Because of the different orbital diameters and speeds of the various planets around the sun, other planets appeared to stop in their tracks, go backwards for a time, then reverse again and go forward. This is known as retrograde motion. Ptolemy worked up a complex system of cycles and epicycles to account for this, and managed to cob together a theory that described the actual motions. Imagine walking in a large circle (the cycle) while whirling a ball on a string (the planet) in a small circle (the epicycle) over your head.

Galileo supported the Copernican, or heliocentric (sun-centered) system. When I write that Galileo exploded the earth-centered system, I mean that there was a loud noise and a stink. We have all read in school about how the church came down on him and forced his public recantation. His crime was one of heresy, contradicting church dogma of an immobile earth. It was a symbolic heresy as well. The power structures of the time were all central and hierarchical, with one man at the pivot. All people orbited the central figure, whether pope or monarch, and theology justified this unequal relationship.

This brings me to the second extraordinary thing I saw in Philadelphia. I visited the old section of the city and toured Congress Hall, where our legislators met from 1790 to 1800. On March 4, 1797, it hosted an epochal event – the inauguration of John Adams, the second president of the United States. It was an unprecedented transfer of power. Prior to that date, all major transfers of political power had involved blood. This blood was either literal, in cases of military force and assassination, or figurative, in the case of inheritance.

The inauguration was, as with Galileo, the explosion of a theory. In this case it was a literal expression of Galileo’s figurative heresy. Political power no longer revolved around one man, fixed at the center of lesser beings. The government of a country had become relativistic rather than absolute. However imperfect the new political structure, it didn’t need a complex and arbitrary theory to justify it.

One thing that concerns me about the evolution of our country is the continued focus on that man at the center. I have noticed a tendency in all political institutions to mimic the family. With small groups, committees and the like, I often notice someone trying to make the group into a version of his or her particular dysfunctional family. In the case of our nation, I notice people looking for a father figure, focusing on an individual personality rather than the relationship between the office and the people. People wish that we could get someone out of office or someone else in. That is Ptolemaic thinking. We should be thinking about the process by which an office holder such as the president gets into the position and our relationship with the office once he (so far) gets there. It is that process and relationship that determines the personality and capability of the person in office. The peaceful transfer of power between Washington and Adams was not dependent upon the personality of either man, but the political structure that surrounded them.

Political structure is less interesting to most people than personality and personal narrative, but it is infinitely more important. We have been granted a respite from the worst excesses of the Bush era with the inauguration of Barack Obama, but the president is still beholden to the financial powers that bankrolled his campaign and the campaigns of members of Congress. His presence in office is partially due to the structure of election laws across the country, which favor the partisan over the independent, the established over the new, and those with wealthy friends over those with many friends. We need to be Galilean in our thinking, and focus our efforts on those structures.

Hemp – a good idea, but not a great one

I just read yet another article about how industrial hemp could be a replacement for crude oil.  If you read non-mainstream media enough you will run into such articles. The author touted hemp’s benefits as a replacement fiber for wood pulp, cotton, and petrochemical fibers. Fine. Our ancestors wrote on hemp paper and wore hemp clothes as they raised hemp sails with hemp ropes. The U.S. government promoted the domestic growth of hemp for rope fiber during WWII, when we lost our source of so-called Manila hemp in the Phillipines.

Then I read this paragraph:

"If all the diesel engines today were converted to use hemp biodiesel, you could wipe out world hunger while providing a natural balance to global warming" says Paul Stanford of the Hemp and Cannabis Foundation, which has worked to end marijuana prohibition and restore industrial hemp.”

This kind of hyperbole drives me nuts. Here’s the blanket statement from the Minor Heretic on biofuels. If it involves…

• Growing something
• Converting that something to a fuel
• Pouring that fuel into a fleet of 230 million vehicles
• Each vehicle weighs over a ton and carries an average of 1.2 passengers at highway speeds for an average of 13,000 miles a year

…then it is not going to work. There is just not enough land, water, or nutrients to do the job. That’s not hyperbole; it is an acknowledgment of the limitations of natural systems.

Let’s just do the math on biodiesel from hemp seed. I am going to wave my magic wand and turn all 230 million registered vehicles in the U.S. into 40 mpg diesels, all converted to run on straight vegetable oil. That is a big wave of the wand, but I don’t want anyone claiming that I didn’t give hemp oil biodiesel every chance. I am also going to assume, as was suggested by one comment on the article, that the best variety of hemp will produce 8,000 pounds of seed an acre, a stunning 13 times the productivity of standard industrial hemp. According to that miracle-hemp comment this would translate into 300 gallons of hemp oil per acre.

At an average of about 13,000 miles per year, our fleet racks up 2,990,000,000,000 miles annually. That’s almost 3 trillion. At 40 mpg, that would require 74,750,000,000 gallons of hemp oil. At 300 gallons an acre, that would require 249, 166,666 acres of arable land. Call it an even 250 million acres.

There are 400 million acres of land under cultivation in the U.S. right now. Even under this bizarrely optimistic, “magic” scenario we would have to transfer over half of that to hemp fuel production. Either that, or we would have to find 250 million new acres of arable land when we are already growing crops on heavily irrigated semi-desert. Also consider that this is unrelenting cultivation, without fallowing or rotation, year after year. When one does the basic math, the ridiculous nature of biofuel-as-panacea claims becomes obvious.

By all means, let’s legalize and promote industrial hemp. It could be a much more benign fiber crop than cotton. (I like the feel of the cloth. It has great “hand”, as the tailors say.) It could even displace some petrochemical use. Give it a few years and the “petro” in petrochemicals could be launching past $140 a barrel, so I’d welcome a few alternatives.

Let us not, however, jolly ourselves into thinking we can continue driving behemoths as usual, except with bio-whatever in the tanks. I myself drive a vehicle that is converted to run on both petro-diesel and used vegetable oil. Nevertheless, I don’t con myself into thinking that it is a solution for the mass of Americans. I don’t even see it as a long-term niche solution.

The answer that will be forced upon us by the hard dictates of geology and physics is a life of limited mobility. What long distance mobility we will have will be slower, more expensive, and much less convenient than what we have today. We’ll do a lot of walking, bicycling, and just plain staying home. We need to stop fantasizing about some green magic bullet and start the long and difficult transition to life without the private automobile.