By H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., KERA 90.1 commentator
Dallas, TX – Some environmentalists are becoming disenchanted with wind power as wildlife groups are suing to stop the expansion of the largest wind farm in the U.S. and Robert Kennedy, counsel for the Natural Resources Defense Council, is working with local groups to stop wind farms from being built off the coasts of Massachusetts. They are learning that wind power's environmental benefits are overstated, while environmental harms associated with wind power are glossed over.
Wind power fails to substantially reduce air pollution. Wind farms generate power only when the wind is blowing within a certain range of speeds. When there is too little wind, wind towers don't generate power. Conversely, when the wind is too strong, they must be shut down for fear of being blown down.
Accordingly, wind farms need conventional power plants to supplement the power they do supply, and to replace a wind farms expected supply to the grid when the towers are not turning. After all, the power grid requires a regulated constant flow of energy to function properly.
Yet bringing a conventional power plant on line to supply power is not as simple as flipping a switch. "Backup" fossil fuel power stations must run, even if at reduced levels, continuously. As a result, very little air quality improvements actually result from wind power.
Wind farms are also area-intensive and unsightly. The most favorable locations for wind farms are usually areas with particularly spectacular views in relatively wild places. And, wind farms produce only a fraction of the energy of conventional power plants but require hundreds of times the acreage. For instance, two of the biggest wind farms in Europe have 159 turbines and cover thousands of acres between them but together they take a year to produce less than four days' output from a single conventional power station - which takes up 100 times fewer acres. And in the U.S., a proposed wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts would require 130 towers and more than 24 square miles of ocean.
Because wind farms must be located where the wind blows fairly constantly, migratory birds, including protected species like Bald and Golden Eagles, often suffer. This motivated the Sierra Club to label wind towers "the Cuisinarts of the air."
Indeed, scientists estimate as many as 44,000 birds, including protected species like Golden and Bald Eagles, have been killed over the past twenty years by wind turbines in the Altamont Pass, east of San Francisco. It seems that wind farms act as both bait and executioner - prey animals taking shelter at the base of turbines multiply with the protection from raptors, while in turn their greater numbers attract more raptors to the wind towers.
Deaths are not limited to the United States or to birds. As evidence, at Tarifa in Spain thousands of birds from more than 13 species protected under European Union law have been killed by the site's 269 wind turbines. And during last fall's migration at least 400 bats, including red bats, eastern pipistrelles, hoary bats, and possible endangered Indiana bats, were killed at a 44 turbine wind farm in West Virginia.
Wind power doesn't merit continued government promotion or funding. It is expensive, doesn't deliver the environmental benefits that it promises and has substantial environmental costs. In short, wind power blows!
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D. is a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis.