A Big Victory For Wind Power
 

Over enviro-wackos.

Altamont Pass, America’s premier wind site finally wins out in court in a lawsuit brought by enviro-wackos.

Appeals court dismisses lawsuit over bird deaths at Altamont Pass - Topix

This took years of legal wrangling. If you have to have a three year legal struggle at every site (remember there is no financial downside beyond your own counsel for bringing a bogus lawsuit) we’ll never have any appreciable wind energy in the US even if they do manage to whip the energy storage thing.

Why would anybody invest a dime in energy infrastructure in the US?

I'm glad this was a victory for large facilities.

Unfortunately, this lawsuit spurred a lot of local laws in various places prohibiting a homeowner from raising their own wind turbine. Kinda screwy and yet quite another victory... for some electric companies anyway.

Looks to me like such court cases have to be fought again and again. It will continue until legislation puts a stop to it.

Add in the fact that lots of dumb people still think high voltage T&D causes cancer.

I'm sure rants about "enviro-wackos" will win you lots of friends on this forum.

When wind power is tangled up in litigation again and again, how do you expect the effect change. In a lot of respects the "save the birdy" crowd is the oil companies' best friend.

Sooner or later society will have to grapple with the question: "Are a few birds more important than wind energy?"

If the answer is "Yes" then wind power is as dead as OJ's acting career.

If the answer is "No" then the litigation needs to be squelched by statute.

It's a bogus question on several levels. First and foremost, wind power and the well being of birds are not mutually exclusive. An easy way to prevent bird death due to wind turbines is to redesign the turbines, which is already in practice. All that needs to be done is to make the turbines A: higher off the ground, and B: larger and thus slower rotating, and easier for birds to see. But let's say for the sake of argument that there was no way to prevent wind turbines from killing birds. How would you respond to your own question with one small change...
"Are a few children more important than wind energy?"

If you have relative motion in the air you have a bird-mincing machine. Actually, you don't even need relative motion. Radio and TV towers, with their guy wires, are murder on birds.

Even a big,slow-moving prop will have tip speeds nearing the Mach. That's where the sound comes from.

You go resigning the wind turbune in a futile effort to save a few birds and you poison the whole idea

There may be lessons to learn at altamont. i.e. don't put your windfarms in a significant migratory path or where there is a high concentration of raptors. There's a bigger picture than just immediate energy demands.

Dave,

This could have easily been a non-threatening, newsworthy article:

Replace "enviro-wackos" with "opposition" and present the article for consideration. If you start throwing opinion/insult into article-based thread starts, you're simply asking to start a fight -- especially since many of us here are highly concerned for the environment.

My recommendation is to allow people post and follow up later with your own viewpoint.

Let's keep EcoModder an enjoyable place to have an intelligent discussion.

Rick/RH77
Moderator

Re: Post #10

So much for Pickins' idea of lots of wind turbines in the Great Plains.
So much for wind turbines along either coast.

Birds are rather ubiquitous. Saying no wind turbines where there are birds pretty much kills wind energy.

I don't have facts or figures... But I'd like to point out that large windows kill a lot of birds as well. I've seen numerous dead birds underneath clear glass windows, but I'm sure your house has a few.

Wouldn't it be beneficial to the coal producers who are making billions to spit out and make a scene about anything that could grab the hearts of the very people who support the ecofriendly competition?

I personally believe it is easier to ignore the problems and oppress change than to accept it as a society. It will take a strong leader or a disaster to get out of the fossil fuel era.

Any volunteers?

I'm all for wind power, but you gotta realize it is not a free lunch. Wind turbines will kill birds and for some reason birds are ubiquitous in prime wind resource areas. Also somebody has to come up with a storage technology to allow intermittent wind power to be dispatchable on demand.

Until somebody comes up with a good portable energy storage wind generated electricity won't displace oil for transportation fuel.

He's talking about the serious bat-**** crowd. PETA and it's ilk.

And for the record, if a few birds die from the already very slowly-moving blades of a wind generator, I really could not care less.

I love the way non-issues get pushed forward, this reminds me of when I was on a campus board and they were considering banning dangerous bicycles from within the campus because they might hit a pedestrian.

I then asked
"How many people have been hit or injured by bicycles on campus since formation?"

To their knowledge no one ever did get hurt by a bicycle riding through campus.

This issue is EXACTLY the same, try finding the so called studies that say these devices cause large numbers of bird deaths, of the few there are none that are done by anyone of sigificance under decent controls. It seems to me they should state, what, when, where, how high and how many as that is rather important. Also its important to compare, for example far more birds die a year crashing into nuclear and into coal power plants and other high buildings, perhaps we need to ban all high buildings and all coal and nuclear plants with high towers because they kill millions of birds a year as compared to maybe 28 birds a year on a turbine? Heck millions of birds a year die on highways, perhaps we need to ban cars?
Most who complain are the it might do that and we can't risk it.

Why not ask some of the larger operators how many dead birds they find around their turbines when doing maintenance? In the case of the Fennimore installation the caretaker said he couldn't remember any dead birds around their turbines. Perhaps birds aren't as dumb or as plentiful as we think around turbines?

You know it isn't that hard to stake one out and count. I know at least 4 birds a year die on our front picture window, we find them in the flower bed below, not rocket science.

Perhaps these people need to stop worrying and look before they *****. Things aren't as bad as they think, at least in regard to wind turbines.

I've heard anecdotal accounts of dead birds near wind generators, but i'm sure that the local Coyotes remove them ASAP.

Yeah, that's me.

At least 5 birds a year die in my dad's attic. They get in, and are too bird-brained (pun) to find their way back out.

He just waits until he doesn't hear them fluttering anymore, and finds where they finally died at.

God has an attic?

What, you didn't know that Heaven isn't as high as you get?

Consequently, yes, my Father has an attic... and I'm Agnostic. How's that for irony?

If I knew what Agnostic meant, I might be better off.

Agnostic: a person who claims that they cannot have true knowledge about the existence of God (but does not deny that God might exist).

Not to be confused with

Atheist: someone who denies the existence of god wholly.

Anyway, the point of Irony is that being named "Christ" (which is actually short for Christopher), you'd think that I'm "Christian"... but I'm not.

Back on topic, please? We can discuss my name and religious preferences in PM, if you please.

I just got my name changed on another site to "Christ" since it's the same name I use for all the others.

Oh I see.

The bird thing is total malarkey. Everything kills birds, it seems. The guy wires of radio/TV antennae are murder on birds. Check out the base of such tower. You'll see lots of dead birds and some might fat cats.

Other people think they are just plain ugly. The engineer in me sees wind turbines as elegant, but then, I think hyperbolic cooling towers are elegant, too.

It is the same thing with any sort of energy. Somebody has a beef. Nuke plant, coal plants, oil refineries, even solar. Somebody squawks.

At some point (and soon) we, as a people have to make an overarching value judgment. Is (name your objection) more important than energy? At the rate our energy infrastructure is being overwhelmed we will be living in a technological level familiar to George Washington.

Either we smack down the PETA types and NIMBYs or we get used to living at the technological level of "The Last of the Mohicans" or "The Patriot."

The world I live in is not comprised of stark dichotomies where the only choice is to "smack someone down" or "the world ends."

Wow, yours too? What a coincidence. :cool:

Ducks lay about ten eggs per clutch. They are clearly incapable of practicing contraception or sustainable population management, and the only alternative is for almost every duck ever born to die before reaching reproductive age. Starvation and disease kill the ones that predators and windmills don't.

The death of a small number of birds is a non-issue if it doesn't threaten the wellbeing of whole bird populations.

There are indeed lots of birds. We would do well to not sweat the birds and build the wind turbines. Likewise we should ignore the NIMBYs and build the wind turbines. Or whatever energy infrastructure.

I see the comment: “The world I live in is not comprised of stark dichotomies where the only choice is to "smack someone down" or "the world ends."

If so, then you have no hope whatsoever of updating America’s energy infrastructure. If you cannot reduce policy to a matter of routine, then every single item requires a multi-year court case before it moves forward.

To reduce America’s emissions from just generation of electricity, you are talking hundreds of nukes and hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of wind turbines. If every single one of them requires a court case to allow it to go forward, then the problem is insurmountable.

The problem is you really do have to “smack somebody down” or the status quo hangs on forever.

I’m not huge admirer of the French, but in 1974 they held a binding national referendum on nuclear power. In a single stroke, the “smacked down” all those who would block construction and licensing of nukes before the fact. Then they borrowed Hyman Rickover and emulated the most successful nuclear power program in the world – that of the US Navy. Result: No court cases, and in a matter of two decades they became a 80% nuclear country with very low emissions from the electric power generating sector.

Sooner or later, you gotta quit talking about it and do it. If that requires a stark dichotomy, then I say “Bring it on.”

I have to wonder if the spinning blade is really the most efficient use of the real estate though. I mean if you had some large venitian blind looking thing that could store energy by being pushed in one direction with the "shades close", then open up and quickly move back to the starting position? Klunky? Sure, but it could react to every square inch of wind hitting it.

But it would take energy to move the "blinds" to the open position, and you'd be losing efficiency for the time that it was resetting, versus wind turbines, which are spinning constantly, and some of the better (read: more expensive) ones can actually change the pitch of their blades, to account for varying wind density and speed.

There is probably a better (read: more efficient) solution for the real estate, but I'm sure "fluid motion" is the key, rather than reciprocation. To make the system as loss-free as possible, it would need to be generating at all times, extracting the most energy per unit of wind as could be extracted, and with as little frictional loss as possible. I'd imagine that moving in one direction is more efficient, in this sense.

What about a wheel with "flaps" the the wind acts upon, and 3/4 of the "wheel" is underground? as one flap is leaving the optimal area, the next flap is entering, etc... security might be a problem with a giant flywheel rotating in the ground, though, since some idiot might try to climb on it, considering the height it would need to be to get any real powerful winds.

My only question is this: If we're using wind to power a turbine, doesn't the wind lose some of it's energy in doing that? So it must slow down, then, right? If that's the case, and wind-energy is deployed on a large enough scale, could that in itself not alter the global climate by not allowing "normal" airflow? It's a stretch, but it's plausible, I think.

Same with tidal turbines... they DO extract energy from the tides, which (even if a miniscule amount) affects tidal velocity... which in turn affects...?

... that makes the moon go farther away :)

So we'll put it on a tether. Problem solved. :thumbup:

So... this tether... carbon chain??