Is Your Industry "Cool" Enough To Kill Birds And Get Away With It?
@mattwridley tweeted:
Double standard -- US govt prosecutes oil industry for killing birds, but not wind industry.
Robert Bryce writes the piece Ridley linked to, "Windmills vs. Birds," originally in the WSJ:
For years, the wind energy industry has had a license to kill golden eagles and lots of other migratory birds. It's not an official license, mind you.But as the bird carcasses pile up--two more dead golden eagles were recently found at the Pine Tree wind project in Southern California's Kern County, bringing the number of eagle carcasses at that site to eight--the wind industry's unofficial license to kill wildlife is finally getting some serious scrutiny.
Some 77 organizations--led by the American Bird Conservancy, Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, Endangered Species Coalition and numerous chapters of the Audubon Society--are petitioning the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to toughen the rules for the siting, permitting and operation of large-scale wind projects.
It's about time. Over the past two decades, the federal government has prosecuted hundreds of cases against oil and gas producers and electricity producers for violating some of America's oldest wildlife-protection laws: the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and Eagle Protection Act.
But the Obama administration--like the Bush administration before it--has never prosecuted the wind industry despite myriad examples of widespread, unpermitted bird kills by turbines. A violation of either law can result in a fine of up to $250,000 and imprisonment for two years.
Matt Ridley writes in the Spectator on the "wind-farm scam":
To the nearest whole number, the percentage of the world's energy that comes from wind turbines today is: zero. Despite the regressive subsidy (pushing pensioners into fuel poverty while improving the wine cellars of grand estates), despite tearing rural communities apart, killing jobs, despoiling views, erecting pylons, felling forests, killing bats and eagles, causing industrial accidents, clogging motorways, polluting lakes in Inner Mongolia with the toxic and radioactive tailings from refining neodymium, a ton of which is in the average turbine -- despite all this, the total energy generated each day by wind has yet to reach half a per cent worldwide....Putting the things offshore may avoid objections from the neighbours, but (Chancellor, beware!) it makes even less sense, because it costs you and me -- the taxpayers -- double. I have it on good authority from a marine engineer that keeping wind turbines upright in the gravel, tides and storms of the North Sea for 25 years is a near hopeless quest, so the repair bill is going to be horrific and the output disappointing. Already the grouting in the foundations of hundreds of turbines off Kent, Denmark and the Dogger Bank has failed, necessitating costly repairs.
In Britain the percentage of total energy that comes from wind is only 0.6 per cent. According to the Renewable Energy Foundation, 'policies intended to meet the EU Renewables Directive in 2020 will impose extra consumer costs of approximately £15 billion per annum' or £670 per household. It is difficult to see what value will be got for this money. The total carbon emissions saved by the great wind rush is probably below 1 per cent, because of the need to keep fossil fuels burning as back-up when the wind does not blow. It may even be a negative number.
If wind power was going to work, it would have done so by now.
"If wind power was going to work..."
I miss the subjunctive. That ought to be (and 30 years ago would have been):
"If wind power were going to work..."
Ok, I'm a geezer, but it seems to me that language has lost something...
a_random_guy at March 9, 2012 1:27 AM
"If wind power was going to work, it would have done so by now."
This is the most asinine statement this week.
I guess you could say that about anything you think is a waste of money.
If electric cars were going to work...
If nuclear power was going to be safe...
Wind farms kill birds. OK.
Fracking for natural gas is poisoning the aquifer.
The oil industry poisons the whole environment.
BUT WIND FARMS KILL BIRDS.
But what the hell, if any form of clean energy was going to work, it would have done so by now.
DrCos at March 9, 2012 3:58 AM
These emerging technologies are too expensive to be generally practical. That isn't about to change anytime soon, so the zealots try to cripple the competition. I wouldn't care if this weren't costing me money - on a scale that makes the bridge to nowhere a real bargain.
I've nothing but admiration for a guy like Ed Begley, Jr. He's an environmental zealot, and he lives his beliefs backed by his own money. The rest of the movement, starting with Al Gore, are all hypocrites. None of them live the lifestyle they are trying to force on me.
MarkD at March 9, 2012 4:46 AM
We have wind farms here on the coast. I'd say they're ugly, but they're right next to refineries. It's all ugly. So what I care about is what's cost effective for me. If some brilliant start up figures out a way to make wind efficient large-scale, great. The government needs to get entirely out of the energy business (and I mean out of oil too).
On a small scale, wind does work. There are plenty of outlying houses and small ranches here near us that use windmills for their electricity. Round Rock is windy. If our HOA allowed it we'd have one.
momof4 at March 9, 2012 5:55 AM
All of this hysteria is just symptomatic of panic. People are being caught with their hand in the cookie jar, having been engaged in poorly-thought programs which do not at all engage the real problem: energy consumption.
If you have a home on the coast or on the Great Plains, you can install a wind generator of your own and do quite nicely. In all cases, the real solution is to turn the light switch off.
Because of this.
We don't really live in a stable situation. When oil is exhausted, billions will starve. Period.
And as they die, they will take others with them.
Radwaste at March 9, 2012 6:07 AM
> We don't really live in a stable situation. When oil is exhausted, billions will starve. Period.
Markets work.
When oil starts running low, prices will rise, people will respond to incentives.
This means two things:
1) new sources of energy will come online (proven options like nuclear, coal, and natural gas)
2) people will economize on their less important energy consumption because of price signals, leaving more energy for the critical needs of others.
As much fun as it is to pretend that you're smarter than everyone else on the planet and are the only one who sees the apocalypse ahead (and those FOOLS are too dumb to listen to you), the truth is that the end of crude oil will be exactly as disrupting as the end of whale oil.
People are much smarter than you think.
TJIC at March 9, 2012 7:40 AM
We won't know in my life time if wind power will work. Wind and Solar are now just excuses for the government to channel tax money into the pockets of Barry's Friends. (No, i do not think it will be an improvement if/when government uses solar power grants to channel money to the Friends of Mitt.)
Storm Saxon's Gall Bladder at March 9, 2012 8:06 AM
I took a tour of a wind-farm on someone's property last year and I thought they were beautiful devices. This particular farm was part of a study that wanted to determine the effect on wildlife, so they were not allowed to remove any dead birds around the base (around which the grass had been mowed down for a considerable radius).
In a year of study they had not found a single dead bird. Now, all this really proves is that the particular location of this windmill is not detrimental to birds. But it also proves that there are locations for windmills that do not affect wildlife.
And that last statement in the quote is pretty ignorant. People have said the same sort of thing about every successful technology since the beginning of time. It takes a bit of cultural and technological momentum to get something of that scale off the ground. We shouldn't dismiss it just because it isn't successful yet. That's just silly.
wojo at March 9, 2012 8:18 AM
Unfortunately this is what you get when you have political idealists calling the shots, instead of practical people. I've known too many environmentalists who would nt survive 1 day in the woods on their own, but they claim to know everything about it.
There are problems with all kinds of power generation. but some are better, more cost effective than others. Unfortunately idealism and retoric get in the way. So some truth.
One thing that gets ignored in most energy talks is transmission losses. They have gotten better but are still a major and unfortunately ignored part of the equation. currently you lose about .6% of the power per mile it has to travel from the generator to your home. It doesn't sound like much but, currently most power needs are within 18-20 miles of the source. giving about a 10% energy loss, for transmission.
When people talk about wind farms, especially at sea ones or mountain top or Dakota ones. you will be dramatically increasing the distance.
At sea wind farms, would add in an extra 30 + miles, also undersea transmission has greater transmission loss. So instead of a 10% loss you are looking at more of a 50% loss of energy from the quoted design specks. The original quoted specs already have wind at costing tripple what coal does. So it will not and should not be used. Birds or no birds.
Solar, in the NE corridor, where most power needs are, doesn't have the most sunny days. Solar under best conditions costs about double what coal does per energy. If the price comes down maybe, but it would have to drop a lot more than double because prime location and area of need are not near each other.
Hydroelectric- of the green is the only one cost effective, it has the benifit of major rivers being co located with most major energy demand locations-cities.
Unfortuantely, the green movement has an unreasonable hatered of hydroelectric, so it is often not even mentioned.
So please if you hear someone talking about widfarms in the Dakotas supplying energy for the US or solar power in Arizona please smack them, and tell them with transmission loss, you neeed to generate 50 kw of electicity for a single kw to actually arrive in the east cost
Joe J at March 9, 2012 8:59 AM
The problem with wind is that it is repurposed solar power. And it blows or doesn't when it wants. And you have to have backup sources of power to cover the times when it isn't blowing enough.
Then you have the ridiculous situation in the Pacific Northwest: wind farmers are being subsidized to build their farms, but if there's too much run off and the marvelous hydro-electric system is generating more than enough electricity, they're paid to turn off the wind turbines.
Awesome.
I R A Darth Aggie at March 9, 2012 9:20 AM
People are much smarter than you think
No they arent, of they were more than half the problems we currently face never would have existed. People are generally dumb, short sighted, self centered and incapable of rational discussion on anything
lujlp at March 9, 2012 10:34 AM
"People have said the same sort of thing about every successful technology since the beginning of time. "
That's true as far as it goes, but you also have to recognize when the laws of physics make some things impractical. Wind power, in the literal sense of the world "power", predates the advent of electricity by a good bit. So saying "if wind power was going to work, it would have by now" is not an unreasonable statement. No technology (or its supporters) has any right to demand centuries' worth of subsidy.
The big problem with wind is, when you get right down to it, there just isn't that much energy there. And what energy is available is almost totally unreliable; there are few sites anywhere in the world that have reliable, constant wind. I'm not sure that a current windmill ever generates enough electricity to make up for the energy it took to build, ship, and assemble it. Even if the mills were 100% efficient it would be dicey. We've all seen the study from Spain that shows that subsidizing wind power has killed more jobs than it has created.
The one thing that might make wind practical would be the invention of a ultra-high-density method of energy storage. At that point, some other possibilities might open up. You might not even need transmission lines extended to the wind farm. Just have one of these ultra-batteries at the site, being charged by the mill. When it's fully charged, send a truck out to fetch it and haul it to the power plant, and send a discharged one back to the farm.
As for solar, the widespread adoption of terrestrial solar would almost certainly face widespread opposition from environmentalists once they realized how much land area would be needed, so much so that it's almost pointless to discuss. If solar has a future, it's in space-based solar.
Cousin Dave at March 9, 2012 1:24 PM
Our civilization used to use wind power quite a bit until we had an alternative.
You may have noticed that, for example, we no longer use wind power for moving ships across the ocean; there's a reason for that. Once the high-ressure steam engine was invented, we rapidly adapted the technology for use in all sorts of places.
These days we tend to rely more on diesel engines to do big jobs--like moving ships and trains--but a good turbodiesel engine is more efficient than steam power could ever be, and requires less manpower to operate.
These folks that want us to return to the days of wind power don't quite understand that when you rely on the wind for power, you can only do things that require power when the wind is blowing.
Electricity does not magically appear.
Ed Hering at March 9, 2012 6:27 PM
"...the truth is that the end of crude oil will be exactly as disrupting as the end of whale oil."
You haven't demonstrated this at all, and the more I think about it, the more I think your medication is affecting your judgment. Food distribution now demands transportation energy only providable by oil. You cannot wait for solar or wind charging to harvest crops, and I can tell you've never calculated the horsepower-hours necessary to get just an acre of potatoes out of the ground.
Oil sows our crops, reaps what we sow, and even is the raw material for fertilizers, all before we put processed food on trucks, aircraft and ships to send it to hungry people - across hundreds or thousands of miles.
Coal? Natural gas? You've just cited two more substances of finite quantity (that means they'll be burned until they are gone). Nuclear? My field, actually, see the handle? Are you proposing a fleet of PWR John Deere harvesters?
I'm not pretending anything. That you would attempt that denigration merely indicates you are in denial.
Meanwhile, we can't use whale oil again because we are out of whales due to demand. Take the lesson!
Radwaste at March 9, 2012 11:22 PM
We're not really out of whale oil, nor was the increase in the cost of harvesting it all that disruptive. See TJIC above. The transition from whale oil and other products (they got harder to get) to other sources was pretty smooth.
Depending on who you believe - let's round it off to nearest order of magnitude - there are about a million minke whales in the world. At the moment the global hunt is a few thousand. Big deal.
My point is no one provided a subsidy for that to happen. Wind power definitely fails that test.
Ltw at March 10, 2012 4:23 AM
Criminy.
Ltw, kill every whale now on the planet and turn ALL of their body to oil, and you will fuel one US state for a few days, that's all.
And not the biggest state. In 2004, SC burned over 728 million gallons of diesel fuel on the highway. Yep, about 2 million a day.
That's all gone now, too.
-----
See, there's this big thing nobody wants to think about because it doesn't affect them now.
The Earth's energy reserves were all deposited here by the Sun or in processes occurring as the Sun formed. Sunlight worked on elements to make plant life and hydrocarbon deposits by two major paths...
The quickest analogy is that it takes years to grow a tree, and seconds to cut it down.
So there should be a better purpose for energy consumption than driving a big truck to WalMart to alleviate boredom.
With great power comes great responsibility. I hear Easter Island used to be a nice place to live. Take their lesson.
Radwaste at March 10, 2012 10:26 AM
For crying out loud, I wasn't suggesting that whale oil was a viable alternative. But it's incorrect to say we ran out of it. It got harder to get - and we found replacements. Maybe that will happen will oil, maybe it won't.
Easter Island was an unusual case (very slow growing species of tree, too isolated for effective trade), and doesn't make an especially good lesson.
Ltw at March 10, 2012 7:31 PM
Easter Island isnt a good example becasue their trees took longer to grow the the average pine in NAmerica?
Not sure if you know this or not but it take millions of years to make oil, and for nuclear power it take billions/trillions of years for super massive stars to create, explode, and be reborn into a solar system.
But Easter Island isnt a good exanmple beacuse the trees took longr than 50yrs to grow?
lujlp at March 11, 2012 6:32 AM
"Easter Island was an unusual case (very slow growing species of tree, too isolated for effective trade), and doesn't make an especially good lesson."
Earth, though, is only one of a dozen worlds easily accessible to us today.
Radwaste at March 11, 2012 2:00 PM
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