by Robert Bryce
Big Wind has become so concerned about the backlash that it has taken to suing opponents. In Ontario, NextEra Energy, the Florida-based electricity provider, filed a SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation) suit against Esther Wrightman, a resident of tiny Kerwood, Ontario. The suit, filed on May 1, 2013, is a blatant effort to shut Wrightman up. NextEra, which has a market capitalization of $35 billion, claims that Wrightman, a thirty-two-year-old married mother of two young children, who has effectively no assets, misused its logo and libeled it by calling the company “NexTerror.” Wrightman is now having to defend herself in court (she can’t afford to hire a lawyer of her own) against some of Toronto’s biggest law firms.14 Of course, you won’t read about the backlash against Big Wind in the New York Times or leftist publications like Mother Jones. But the backlash is strong and it’s growing.
The bird-and-bat kills, noise problems, and growing backlash are all products of wind energy’s low power density. Over the past seven years or so, I’ve been collecting power-density estimates from a variety of energy analysts, including Jesse Ausubel, David J. C. MacKay, Vaclav Smil, Todd A. Kiefer, and David Keith. In addition, I have collected my own data on wind projects around the world. The result: the power density of wind energy is 1 watt per square meter. Period. End of story. Elvis has left the building.
Let’s start by looking at Ausubel, the director of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University. Ausubel has been writing about energy for decades. In 2007, he published “Renewable and Nuclear Heresies,” a paper in which he put wind energy’s power density at 1.2 watts per square meter.15
Wind energy was considered modern back in 1872, in East Hampton, Suffolk County, New York. Source: Library of Congress, HAER NY, 52-HAMTE, 2—34.
In 2009, MacKay, an engineering professor at the University of Cambridge, published Sustainable Energy—Without the Hot Air, in which he debunked many of the myths about wind energy and other renewable sources. MacKay put the areal power density of onshore wind at 2 watts per square meter and offshore wind at about 3 watts per square meter.16 But that latter figure is of little importance, as very little offshore wind capacity has been (or will be) built. The reason: offshore wind-energy projects cost three to four times as much as onshore ones.17
Now consider Smil, a geographer at the University of Manitoba and author of more than three dozen books. In 2010, he wrote what he calls a “power density primer” in which he laid out the energy flows that could be harnessed from various sources. His finding: wind energy’s power density ranges 0.5 to 1.5 watts per square meter.18
T. A. “Ike” Kiefer, a recently retired Navy captain, aviator, and lecturer at the US Air Force Air War College, has done an exhaustive analysis of various renewable-energy sources with a special emphasis on biofuels. Kiefer studied wind energy data collected by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory on projects located across the United States from 2000 to 2009. In January 2013, Kiefer published “Twenty-First Century Snake Oil: Why the United States Should Reject Biofuels as Part of a Rational National Security Energy Strategy.” Kiefer’s finding: US wind energy has an areal power density of 1.13 watts per square meter.19
In February 2013, Amanda S. Adams, a geoscientist who studies mesoscale atmospheric modeling at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and David W. Keith, an applied physicist at Harvard, published a paper in Environmental Research Letters titled “Are Global Wind Power Resource Estimates Overstated?” Adams and Keith wrote that several estimates “have assumed that wind power production of 2 to 4 watts per square meter can be sustained over large areas.” But in their analysis, Adams and Keith found that “wind shadow” occurs when wind turbines are put in large arrays.20 The shadowing effect reduces the output of the turbines and, in doing so, requires them to be spread farther apart. The conclusion of their study: “It will be difficult to attain large-scale wind power production with a power density of much greater than 1.2 watts per square meter contradicting the assumptions in common estimates of global wind power capacity.” And for very large wind projects, those larger than about 100 square kilometers, the power density of wind energy “is limited to about 1 watt per square meter.”21
Finally, in my own research, I collected data on sixteen different projects that ranged in size from 40 megawatts to more than 2,000 megawatts. The projects were geographically diverse—Texas, Pennsylvania, Wyoming, Kansas, Ontario, and Australia—and totaled more than 5,000 megawatts of capacity. (See Appendix F.) My finding: the average power density was 2.29 watts per square meter.22 However, that number must be adjusted because the wind doesn’t blow all the time. Wind projects generally have capacity factors of anywhere from 20 to 40 percent.23 “Capacity factor” is the term used for the amount of time that an electric generator produces at full power. Thus, if we assume a (generous) 39 percent capacity factor for wind projects and multiply that by my sixteen-project average of 2.3 watts per square meter (0.39 x 2.3), then the areal power density of wind energy is 0.9 watts per square meter.
In summary, the power-density calculations of wind energy are as follows:
Jesse Ausubel: 1.2
David J. C. MacKay: 2
Vaclav Smil: 1
Todd Kiefer: 1.13
Adams/Keith: 1
Robert Bryce: 0.9
Add those figures together and divide by six, and you get an average power density for wind energy of 1.2 watts per square meter—exactly what I reported in Power Hungry. If we toss out the high and low estimates (MacKay’s 2 watts per square meter, and my 0.9 watts per square meter), then the average areal power density is 1.05 watts per square meter.
The simple, undeniable truth is that wind energy cannot, will not, become a major supplier of energy in the United States or other countries because it requires too much land. Proving that point requires only that we use our 1 watt per square meter metric and apply it to the domestic coal industry. In 2011, the United States had about 300 gigawatts (300 billion watts) of coal-fired generation capacity.24 If policy makers wanted to replace all that coal-fired capacity with wind turbines—at 1 watt per square meter—they would need to set aside a land area of 300 billion square meters, or 300,000 square kilometers, or roughly 116,000 square miles. That’s a land area the size of Italy.
If You Want to Replace US Coal-fired Capacity with Wind, Then Find a Land Area the Size of Italy
With an areal power density of 1 watt per square meter, wind energy requires vast tracts of land. Replacing America’s coal-fired electricity-generation capacity, which is roughly 300 billion watts, would require some 300 billion square meters, a land area the size of Italy. Source: Author calculations, based on power density calculations for wind published by Jesse Ausubel, Vaclav Smil, David J. C. MacKay, Todd Kiefer, Amanda S. Adams, and David W. Keith.
If that concept isn’t silly enough, here’s the kicker: because of the noise produced by the turbines, no one could live on that land. You are unlikely to hear about the problem with wind-turbine noise in the mainstream media. The wind industry’s many apologists are eager to dismiss the noise complaints. But the problem is real. Residents who’ve been forced to flee from their homes after wind turbines were built near them—and I’ve personally interviewed many of these people—are consistent in their complaints of headaches, nausea, sleeplessness, and other symptoms caused by the turbines.
Regardless of whether the issue is human impacts or wildlife impacts, the energy sprawl that comes with wind-energy projects makes it unsustainable. Dieter Helm neatly summed up that point in his book The Carbon Crunch. “Even if we devoted all our resources to current wind and solar technologies, they would not be anything like enough to solve the problem of climate change. There simply is not enough land.”25 Exactly right. There simply is not enough land to make wind energy viable on a global basis, or in many cases, even on a regional basis.
In 2011, James Hansen, one of the world’s most famous climate scientists, delivered a similar rebuke to the e
nvironmentalists who’ve been touting wind and solar as the solutions to our energy needs. In a posting on his blog, Hansen wrote that “suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.” He went on to say that politicians and environmental groups “pay homage to the Easter Bunny fantasy, because it is the easy thing to do . . . They are reluctant to explain what is actually needed to phase out our need for fossil fuels.”26
In late 2013, Hansen and three other climate scientists wrote an open letter to environmentalists encouraging them to support nuclear. They stated: “Continued opposition to nuclear power threatens humanity’s ability to avoid dangerous climate change.” They further stated, “Renewables like wind and solar and biomass will certainly play roles in a future energy economy, but those energy sources cannot scale up fast enough to deliver cheap and reliable power at the scale the global economy requires.”27
Even if renewable sources like wind and solar were subsidized to the point where they were providing significant amounts of our energy needs, we would still need to back up those sources with conventional generation units fired by coal or natural gas.
Like them or not, hydrocarbons and nuclear are Denser sources than renewables. They allow us to produce large amounts of energy from relatively small pieces of land. Density is green. We humans should be striving for density in nearly everything we do—from energy production and food production to computers and buildings. Wind energy is not dense. Therefore it is not green.
Debunking the Big Fibs About Wind and Solar
For decades, major environmental groups have been making many false claims that renewable energy can meet all of humankind’s needs and provide big cuts in global carbon dioxide emissions. For example, Greenpeace (which has an annual operating budget of about $300 million) claims that renewable energy, “smartly used, can and will meet our demands. No oil spills, no climate change, no radiation danger, no nuclear waste.”28
The Sierra Club (2012 budget: $100 million), shares Greenpeace’s disgust with hydrocarbons and nuclear. The club has a “beyond oil” campaign, a “beyond coal” campaign, and a “beyond natural gas” campaign. The group says, “we have the means to reverse global warming and create a clean, renewable energy future.”29
In June 2012, the New York Times ran an op-ed written by a Swedish academic, Christian Azar, and two economists from the Environmental Defense Fund (2012 revenue: $116.5 million), Thomas Sterner and Gernot Wagner, which said the world needs to “kick its addiction to fossil fuels” and that “the solar and wind revolution is just beginning.”30
In 2013, Bob Deans, the associate director of communications for the Natural Resources Defense Council (2012 revenue: $103 million), declared that “we need to turn away from the fossil fuels of the past, invest in efficiency and renewables and build a twenty-first century economy on new fuels . . .”31
In 2013, Josh Fox, the activist and director of the anti–natural gas film GasLand, said, “renewable energy solutions exist, right now. We are facing a real choice here and we must move towards non-fossil-fuel sources . . . the future is renewable energy.” Fox went on, “Renewables can do the job, we don’t need nuclear to solve the problem.”32
Those claims are easy to make. But they are even easier to debunk. We can do so by ignoring the need for oil (which is used primarily for transportation) and focusing solely on global electricity demand.
Between 1985 and 2012, global electricity production increased by about 450 terawatt-hours per year.33 That’s the equivalent of adding about one Brazil (which used 554 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2012) to the global electricity sector every year.34 And the International Energy Agency expects global electricity use to continue growing by about one Brazil per year through 2035.35
What would it take to just keep up with the growth in global electricity demand—450 terawatt-hours per year—by using solar? We can answer that question by looking at Germany, which has more installed solar-energy capacity than any other country, about 33,000 megawatts.36 In 2012, Germany’s solar facilities produced 28 terawatt-hours of electricity.37 Thus, just to keep pace with the growth in global electricity demand, the world would have to install 16 times as much photovoltaic capacity as Germany’s entire installed base, and it would have to do so every year.
Prefer to use wind? Fine. In 2012, the world’s wind turbines—some 284,000 megawatts of capacity—produced 521 terawatt hours of electricity. The United States has more wind capacity than any other country, about 60,000 megawatts at the end of 2012.38 Thus, just to keep pace with electricity demand growth, the world would have to install about four times as much wind-energy capacity as the United States has right now, and it would have to do so annually. That is simply not going to happen. Gritty activists like Esther Wrightman and other rural residents who value their homes and communities won’t let it happen.
The point here is so obvious that even Ray Charles could have seen it: solar energy and wind energy cannot even keep pace with the growth in global electricity demand, much less displace significant quantities of hydrocarbons.
Now let’s look at carbon dioxide emissions. The American Wind Energy Association claims that wind energy reduced US carbon dioxide emissions by 80 million tons in 2012.39 That sounds significant. But consider this: global emissions of that gas totaled 34.5 billion tons in 2012. Thus, the 60,000 megawatts of installed wind-generation capacity in the United States reduced global carbon dioxide emissions by about two-tenths of 1 percent. That’s a fart in a hurricane.
To make the point even clearer, let’s look at the history of global carbon dioxide emissions. Since 1982, carbon dioxide emissions have been increasing by an average of about 500 million tons per year.40 If we take the American Wind Energy Association’s claim that 60,000 megawatts of wind-energy capacity can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 80 million tons per year, then simple math shows that if we wanted to stop the growth in global carbon dioxide emissions by using wind energy alone—and remember doing so won’t reduce any of the existing demand for coal, oil, and natural gas—we would have to install about 375,000 megawatts of new wind-energy capacity every year.
How much land would all those wind turbines require? Recall that the power density of wind energy is 1 watt per square meter. Therefore, merely halting the rate of growth in carbon dioxide emissions with wind energy—and remember this would not displace any of our existing need for coal, oil, and natural gas—would require covering a land area of about 375 billion square meters or 375,000 square kilometers. That’s an area the size of Germany. And we would have to keep covering that Germany-sized piece of territory with wind turbines every year.
What would that mean on a daily basis? Using wind to stop the growth in carbon dioxide emissions would require us to cover about 1,000 square kilometers with wind turbines—a land area about 17 times the size of Manhattan Island—and we would have to do so every day.41 Given the ongoing backlash against the wind, the silliness of such a proposal is obvious.
The hard reality is that wind turbines are nothing more than climate-change scarecrows.
Over the past few years, the United States and other countries have been subsidizing the paving of vast areas of the countryside with 500-foot-high bird-and-bat-killing whirligigs that are nothing more than climate talismans.42 Wind turbines are not going to stop changes in the Earth’s climate. Instead, they are token gestures—giant steel scarecrows—that are deceiving the public into thinking that we as a society are doing something to avert the possibility of catastrophic climate change.
BIOFUELS ARE “A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY”
Many critiques have been written about the foolishness of America’s mandates and subsidies for biofuels. But the most savage was almost certainly published in March 2013 by Ike Kiefer, who launched this barrage:
Imagine if the US military developed a weapon that could threaten
millions around the world with hunger, accelerate global warming, incite widespread instability and revolution, provide our competitors and enemies with cheaper energy, and reduce America’s economy to a permanent state of recession. What would be the sense and the morality of employing such a weapon? We are already building that weapon—it is our biofuels program.43
Ouch.
Remember, this guy’s on our side. Kiefer represents the finest intellectual tradition in the US military. He has a bachelor’s degree in physics from the US Naval Academy and a master’s in strategy from the US Army Command and General Staff College. He’s also a warrior. Kiefer was deployed seven times and spent twenty-one months in Iraq. In his scathing indictment of the biofuels sector, which was published in Strategic Studies Quarterly, the US Air Force’s most prestigious journal, Kiefer declares, “For the sake of our national energy strategy and global security, we must face the sober facts and reject biofuels while advocating an overall national energy strategy compatible with the laws of chemistry, physics, biology, and economics.”44
To all of that, I say Amen, Hallelujah, and Pass the Biscuits. What makes Kiefer’s massively footnoted takedown of biofuels so effective is that he doesn’t frame his argument against biofuels with moral cries about higher food prices, even though that’s one of his key points. Instead, he hammers the physics and math. And in particular, he focuses on density.