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.”

Comments

[JMB, Calais]

Excellent perspective.

I think we will need a mix of small decentralized renewable systems, and some larger concentrated systems. Now, many people do not understand the importance of making our communities and regions resilient to climate change shocks, and energy crises shocks that will start occuring over the next 2 decades. So, a lot of CR edu. (consciousness raising education) is needed. The Transition Town movement is trying to get started raising consciousness on these subjects, as are many groups. It is baffling beyond measure some of the expressed resistance to larger wind, but there it is. I'm sure there are many people in these communities who support wind but right now their voices are not being heard. With more dialogue that might change.

Thanks MH for this contribution to the dialogue.

[Jeffrey Wennberg]

While I wince at MH’s characterization of the Vermont Community Wind Farm’s early efforts and the personal shot taken at me, I applaud the central message of this piece and the reasoning behind it. The opponents of utility scale wind cast the argument as a choice between the landscape, with or without the turbines. But as long as we consume electricity or the goods and services that depend upon it, the real choice is between a clean, affordable and perpetually renewable resource and the environmental, national security, human health and economic consequences imposed by the alternatives.

VCWF has admittedly made mistakes, but you should not assume ‘community alienation’ is widespread. The opponents are well organized, well funded and have done a good job of leveraging both the truth and misinformation (such as the myth about gag orders) in support of their cause. But this did not prevent the Town of West Rutland Selectboard from supporting the project with signed leases, nor has it prevented many others from stepping forward in support, nor did it cause the PSB to deny Certificates of Public Good for the testing towers.

Please keep this in mind before assuming you have all the facts. Remember, there are precious few people who are willing to put substantial sums of their own (not taxpayer) money at risk and stand before a barrage of misinformation, personal attacks and malicious rumors in an attempt to put into practice the principles so eloquently expressed in this blog.

[Minor Heretic]

Mr. Wennberg,

You may be a nice guy - I get that impression from talking with those who have been dealing with this issue. Nevertheless, looking back to your appointment by Douglas, people in the Vermont environmental community did regard it as an extremely negative signal from the administration. It wasn't a reflection on you as a good or bad person, but about your history, or lack thereof, on environmental issues.

As for the characterization of your efforts in promoting the wind farm, you have good reason to wince. Perhaps Per White Hansen has double the reason. You and he lost the trust of even the people who support commercial scale wind power. There will always be naysayers, NIMBYs, BANANAs (Build Absolutely Nothing ANywhere At all), and the perpetually disgruntled. Opposition from these people means little about your policies. However, complaints about your actions from wind supporters and even from within the professional renewable energy community means that you are doing something wrong. When bringing change to a community, the first task is to establish trust - real mutual trust - *before* acting. Mr. Hansen acted first and tried to repair the damage later. That never quite works.