by Robert Bryce
PART II
THE MYTHS OF “GREEN” ENERGY
CHAPTER 8
Wind and Solar Are “Green”
Density is green.
WITOLD RYBCZYNSKI1
THE ESSENCE OF PROTECTING the environment can be distilled to a single phrase: Small is beautiful.
That phrase gained widespread traction in the early 1970s when British economist E. F. Schumacher published a collection of essays in a book that carried that title. As Schumacher made clear, when it comes to environmental protection, manmade disturbances of the natural world should be kept to a minimum. His maxim applies most particularly to energy production: The best energy sources have the highest power densities, that is, they generate lots of power from small pieces of real estate. 2 From a “deep green” perspective, that’s ideal: small footprints and big power outputs.
Of course, every source of energy production takes a toll on the environment. The goal should be to minimize those costs, which, for hydrocarbons and nuclear power, include, but are not limited to, air pollutants, long-lived waste issues, oil spills, carbon dioxide emissions, the effects of drilling operations and pipelines, and the potential for catastrophic accidents. Those downsides are well known and have been accepted as a cost of doing business for many decades. And though these costs are significant, hydrocarbons and nuclear power are prevailing in the modern energy diet because they satisfy the Four Imperatives.
The essential problem with renewables is that they fail the first test of the Four Imperatives: power density. The weak power density of renewables has become so apparent that the Nature Conservancy, one of the biggest and most conservative of the U.S. environmental groups, recently coined the term “energy sprawl,” a reference to the vast stretches of land that are needed for the production and transportation of energy from wind and solar installations.
The energy sprawl of renewables can easily be illustrated by comparing the footprint of a typical U.S. nuclear power plant, in this case, the South Texas Project, with that of wind and solar. Using conservative calculations—which means counting all 12,000 acres of the South Texas Project’s land area as part of the two-reactor plant’s footprint—yields a power density of about 300 horsepower per acre (56 watts per square meter). Compare that with wind power, which produces about 6.4 horsepower per acre (1.2 watts per square meter).3 Or look at solar photovoltaic, which produces about 36 horsepower per acre (6.7 watts per square meter).4 The results: Wind power requires about 45 times as much land to produce a comparable amount of power as nuclear, and solar photovoltaic power requires about 8 times as much land as nuclear. The corn ethanol scam is even worse, requiring about 1,150 times as much land as nuclear.5
Of course, estimates of power density vary. The numbers in the previous paragraph come from a variety of sources, including my own calculations. But those numbers are quite similar to the ones used by the Nature Conservancy in a 2009 study called “Energy Sprawl or Energy Efficiency.” That study estimates that when considering all land-use impacts, corn ethanol requires about 144 times as much land as nuclear, wind power requires about 30 times as much, and solar photovoltaic requires about 15 times as much. The same study found that wind power generation requires nearly 4 times as much land as natural gas and about 7 times as much as coal.6
“Deep green” means—or at least, should mean—not paving any land unless it is essential to do so. Renewables such as wind and solar power require huge swaths of land—which often becomes unusable for other purposes. Humans cannot live close to wind farms because of the low-level noise caused by the massive blades. That noise, say neighbors and critics, disturbs sleep patterns and can cause headaches, dizziness, and other health problems.
In January 2010, I interviewed Charlie Porter, a successful horse trainer who lives in northwestern Missouri. Porter said that in 2007, shortly after a wind farm was completed within a half mile of his twenty-acre farm, he, his wife, and daughter began having trouble sleeping due to the rumbling from the turbines. Porter compared the noise to having “a hat on that’s way too small. It just makes your world tiny.” In late 2009, exhausted by the turbine noise, the Porters purchased a house in nearby King City and moved off of their farm. The turbines, Porter told me, “drove us out of our home. They just ruined life out in the country.”7
Porter’s story is not unique. Dr. Nina Pierpont, a pediatrician who lives and works in rural upstate New York, has documented dozens of cases of what she calls “wind turbine syndrome,” and in late 2009, she published her findings in a book.8 Pierpont recommends that wind turbines have setbacks of at least 1.25 miles from any human habitation. Pierpont’s work clearly worries the American Wind Energy Association (2007 budget: $14 million) which published a report in December 2009 which claimed that “there is no evidence that the audible or sub-audible sounds emitted by wind turbines have any direct adverse physiological effects” and that the vibrations from the turbines are “too weak to be detected by, or to affect, humans.”9 But the scientific literature shows that the problems associated with low-level turbine noise have been known for years. And people living near wind farms in Texas, Oregon, New York, and Minnesota, as well as in numerous foreign countries, including England, New Zealand, Canada, France, and Australia, have complained about the noise and cited some of the same problems that Porter named, including sleep deprivation.10
Solar farms require huge arrays of panels or mirrors that cover nearly every square meter of their property. In addition to the land used by the actual wind and solar farms, those same sources usually require the construction of many miles of new high-voltage transmission lines, and those lines will zig-zag across huge swaths of the United States.
The need for more high-voltage transmission lines is perhaps the most controversial aspect of renewable energy. Across the country, citizen and environmental groups are fighting the construction of new power lines—many of which are needed to transport electricity from new wind and solar facilities to distant towns and cities. Some 40,000 miles of new lines will be needed by the wind sector alone.11 If we assume that each of these transmission lines requires a 100-foot-wide swath of right-of-way (this is a conservative estimate, the actual right-of-way may be much wider, particularly for high-voltage lines), then those 40,000 miles of transmission lines will cover about 750 square miles of territory, which is about half the size of the state of Rhode Island.12
FIGURE 11 The 2,700-Megawatt Challenge: Comparing the Power Densities of Various Fuels
The two fission reactors at the South Texas Project produce 2,700 megawatts of power. How many acres of corn ethanol would it take to produce that much power? What about wind turbines? Here are the power densities of those sources as well as the footprints they would require to produce 2,700 megawatts.
Sources: The calculations for the energy densities of the renewable sources are from Jesse Ausubel, “The Future Environment for the Energy Business,” APPEA Journal (2007), http://phe.rockefeller.edu/docs/ausubelappea.pdf, 8. Other sources include Energy Information Administration data. For the wind calculation, the math is as follows: 2.7 billion watts /1.2 watts per square meter = 2.25 billion square meters.
The prolonged fight over the Sunrise Powerlink project provides a good example of the controversy over transmission lines. In 2005, San Diego Gas and Electric announced plans for a new high-voltage transmission line that would carry electricity from the Imperial Valley to customers in and around San Diego. The line would help bring solar power from the desert to consumers in the San Diego area. The utility claims the line is essential if it is to meet California’s mandates on renewable energy. But the 123-mile, $1.9 billion transmission project is opposed by several environmental groups, including the San Diego–based Desert Protective Council and the Sierra Club.13
The Desert Protective Council opposes “big solar” and says the “land rush” of solar companies could “potentially cover over 600,000 acres in California alone.” “While these projects are touted as solving th
e global warming crisis,” the council website says, “they also have serious environmental impacts that need to be carefully considered.”14 In late 2008, despite the opposition, the project was approved for construction by the California Public Utility Commission, but it may yet face a legal battle in the courts.15
While the battle over Sunrise Powerlink may be the best known of the transmission-line skirmishes, many other projects are being developed across the United States, and just as with Sunrise Powerlink, nearly all of them are generating controversy and opposition.
To be certain, battles between landowners and the electric utilities over transmission lines are nothing new. Consider the case of former U.S. senator Phil Gramm, the man who did more to enable Enron and the Wall Street pirates than perhaps any other member of the U.S. Congress. You remember Gramm. He was the senator who got more campaign contributions from the now-defunct accounting firm Arthur Andersen than any other. As head of the Senate Banking Committee, he engineered the 1999 financial services bill that repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, the Depression-era set of rules that helped to slow the trend toward gigantism in the banking, insurance, and securities business. Gramm led congressional efforts to put a leash on both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. He was also the author of the “Enron exemption,” the provision that he slipped into a bill that furthered Enron’s ability to escape federal regulation of EnronOnline, the company’s massive trading operation. Gramm declared that his legislation would “protect financial institutions from overregulation.” He went on, saying that it guaranteed that the United States would “maintain its global dominance of financial markets.”16
A decade later, a grateful nation may look to Gramm as not only a key enabler and architect of the worst financial collapse in modern history, but also a true American NIMBY. In 2003, just a few months after Gramm quit the Senate (before his term expired), he and his wife, former Enron board member Wendy Gramm, joined a group of landowners opposing a high-voltage transmission line that was to be installed close to their ranch northwest of San Antonio.17 Instead of going across their property, the Gramms wanted San Antonio’s City Public Service to route the transmission lines across Government Canyon State Natural Area, a park that had recently been established by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.18 The Gramms failed to get the power lines moved onto the park. But their efforts illustrate that NIMBY is alive and well, and living, well, just about everywhere.
NIMBY issues are not unique to transmission lines. Landowners and neighborhood groups all across the United States are always lining up to fight proposals for various development projects, whether they are shopping malls, confined animal feeding operations, slaughterhouses, landfills, nuclear reactors, or coal-fired power plants. Those types of projects have always faced opposition and likely always will. But the emergence of transmission lines as a pivotal land-use issue for wind and solar power has been one of the biggest surprises of the push for more “green” energy. And it has created an entirely new set of opponents.
In upstate New York, a privately held investment group called New York Regional Interconnect has been trying for years to build some 200 miles of transmission lines, with towers thirteen stories high, that would carry electricity from the northern part of the state, where the wind resources are, to customers further south. But the line is opposed by a number of local groups who don’t want the lines to cross through their communities.19
In July 2009, a coalition of environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Wilderness Society, filed a lawsuit against several federal agencies in an effort to force them to change the routes of a number of planned transmission lines. The suit, which names the Departments of Interior, Energy, and Agriculture, as well as the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service, as defendants, claims that the federal government has created 6,000 miles of rights-of-way in the western states without considering all of the environmental impacts of the transmission corridors.20 The suit invokes a variety of federal laws, including the Endangered Species Act, and asks the court to “declare unlawful and set aside” the power transmission corridors laid out by the federal government.21
In mid-2009, the Lower Colorado River Authority announced plans for 600 miles of transmission lines to carry wind power from western Texas to customers in the central part of the state.22 The project quickly garnered opposition from landowners and local citizens who said the lines would damage their property values. In a story on the controversy, Asher Price, a reporter for the Austin American-Statesman, discussed one property owner, Bill Neiman, the owner of a seed farm near Junction, who claimed that “his property and livelihood would be ruined by transmission lines.” A spokesperson for the river authority neatly summed up the situation by saying that most people understand the need for more transmission lines, “they just don’t want them on their property or within view.”23
While transmission lines are a key limiter for renewable energy schemes, the environmental impact of renewables extends beyond the problem of energy sprawl. As discussed above, the low power density of wind and solar means that they need lots of land. But that same low power density also requires large resource inputs, specifically, huge quantities of steel and concrete.
Of course, every method of large-scale electricity production requires significant quantities of such materials. But the resource requirements of wind are several times higher than those of natural gas and nuclear. And those higher inputs mean higher relative costs per unit of power delivered. Put another way, power-generation systems such as natural gas and nuclear power plants are far more efficient users of steel and concrete than are wind power systems.
Consider the Milford Wind Corridor, a 300-megawatt wind project that was built in Utah in 2009. The project was the first to be approved under the Bureau of Land Management’s new wind program for the western United States.24 To construct the wind farm, which uses 139 turbines spread over 40 square miles, the owners of the project installed a concrete batch plant that ran six days a week, twelve hours per day, for six months. During that time, the plant consumed about 14.3 million gallons of water to produce 44,344 cubic meters of concrete. Thus, each megawatt of installed wind capacity consumed about 319 cubic meters of concrete.25
But those numbers must be adjusted to account for wind’s capacity factor—the percentage of time the generator is running at 100 percent of its designed capacity. Given that wind generally has a capacity factor of 33 percent or less, the deployment of 1 megawatt of reliable electric-generation capacity at Milford actually required about 956 cubic meters of concrete. The concrete numbers on the Milford project are similar to those described in a report delivered by Per Peterson to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology in September 2008. Peterson, a professor in the nuclear engineering department at the University of California at Berkeley, reported that when accounting for capacity factor, each megawatt of wind power capacity requires about 870 cubic meters of concrete and 460 tons of steel.
For comparison, each megawatt of power capacity in a combined-cycle gas turbine power plant (the most efficient type of gas-fired electricity production) requires about 27 cubic meters of concrete and 3.3 tons of steel. In other words, a typical megawatt of reliable wind power capacity requires about 32 times as much concrete and 139 times as much steel as a typical natural gas-fired power plant.
To be fair, the concrete and steel requirements of a gas-fired power plant are only part of the electricity equation. The miles of steel pipelines required to move gas from the wellhead to the turbines, and the steel and concrete used to line each gas well, must also be included in any rigorous materials-intensity analysis of the life cycle of natural gas as it relates to electricity production. That said, the resource intensity of wind is also far higher than that of our other favorite fuel: nuclear.
FIGURE 12 Resource Intensity of Electric Power Generation Capacity: Comparing Wi
nd with Natural Gas, Nuclear, and Coal
Source: Per F. Peterson, “Issues for Nuclear Power Construction Costs and Waste Management,” September 16, 2008, http://www.ostp.gov/galleries/PCAST/PCAST%20Sep.%202008%20Peterson%20slides.pdf, 4.
Peterson’s report shows that the concrete and steel requirements for wind are 9.6 times greater and 11.5 times greater, respectively, than those needed for a nuclear power plant. Each megawatt of power capacity in a nuclear power plant requires about 90 cubic meters of concrete and 40 tons of steel.26
Even though wind power has low power density and a huge appetite for steel and concrete, it appears that it will continue to be pursued in the years ahead, with wind turbines being located across the country. The entire wind industry will nevertheless be dogged by the fundamental problem of power density, because the math makes it unavoidable. And the power-density challenge is fundamentally about ethics and aesthetics.
Energy sources with high power densities have the least deleterious effect on open space. They allow us to enjoy mountains, plains, and deserts without having our views obstructed or disturbed by spinning wind turbines, sprawling solar arrays, towering transmission lines, or miles of monocultured crops. As the architect Witold Rybczynski wrote in Atlantic Monthly in an essay expounding the environmental benefits of cities, “density is green.”27
Rybczynski’s endorsement of cities echoes that of Stewart Brand, who, in his latest book, the Whole Earth Discipline, argues that cities, and even densely populated slums, provide a path out of poverty for millions of people. Brand says that “cities are probably the greenest things that humans do.”28
Embracing the density of cities make sense. And to properly fuel them, we need energy sources with the highest possible densities. Energy projects with small footprints are not only green, they reduce the potential for NIMBY objections. And that not-in-my-backyard attitude is particularly virulent among people like Phil and Wendy Gramm, who can afford to fight power lines and other infrastructure projects. In fact, NIMBYism even occurs among the most ardent supporters of wind power. T. Boone Pickens wants to carpet the Great Plains with thousands upon thousands of wind turbines and endless rivers of transmission lines. But the Dallas-based billionaire wants those turbines and transmission lines on other people’s land, not his. In May 2008, Pickens declared that his 68,000-acre ranch, located in the Texas Panhandle, one of America’s windiest regions, will not sport a single turbine.