June 17, 2007
 
LETTER TO THE EDITOR: Another Reader Supports Mollohan on Wind Energy
 
Let me add to Rep. Alan Mollohan’s comments (June 14) about the ill-informed, wrong-headed nature of your June 8, 2007 editorial endorsing industrial wind technology. As an intervenor in two Maryland Public Service Commission wind hearings, and as someone with no personal financial stake in this issue, I have discovered that the volatile nature of the industry’s power source—the wind-- makes the technology inimical to the way electricity is produced to provide reliable, secure, cost-effective supply.
 
Modern power grid systems maintain a minute-by-minute equilibrium between supply and demand. Unreliable wind generators provide virtually no capacity (available energy when needed) at any time, especially peak demand times, unlike all other conventional power units. Moreover, the wind’s high variability, which rapidly changes the energy level contributed to the grid at frequent intervals, requires that it be followed and balanced by conventional generators, working extremely inefficiently in the process. The fluctuations of wind energy are significantly greater than the fluctuations made by shifting demand, which can be predicted and planned for within +/-percent.
 
If wind energy could magically be made to displace the dirtiest burning flexible coal generators and be followed and balanced solely by hydropower, it might abate some levels of carbon dioxide emissions within the grid system. However, hydro contributes only 1% of the grid’s generation; what little exists is used to balance demand fluctuations. Given that grid operators typically employ the practice of “economic dispatch,” choosing the lowest cost power to meet the various levels of demand, it is more than likely that wind energy might sporadically displace relatively clean burning load-following natural gas units (which constitute only 5% of the grid’s generation but are very expensive) and be followed and balanced by flexible, inexpensive but inefficiently operating coal generators—contributing as much or more carbon emissions system-wide than would be the case without the addition of wind energy. Generally, a 2% increase in inefficiency in the operation of fossil fueled plants results in a 16% increase in carbon emissions.
 
Given this circumstance, it is not at all clear that hundreds of wind plants in the region will result in a carbon emissions decrease in the production of electricity. In fact, there has been no independent scientific substantiation of system-wide carbon emissions abatement due to wind technology anywhere in the world. Germany, with nearly 20,000 installed wind turbines, last year increased its annual carbon emissions by .6%. California’s nearly 14,000 turbines provided virtually no energy to the grid during last summer’s torrid heat wave, while that state’s carbon emission’s yield continues to expand 2% annually.
 
Volatile wind energy cannot be loosed on the grid by itself; it must be accompanied by reliable conventional generation. As such, it can only be considered one ingredient in a fuel mix. If the other ingredient is hydro, wind can indeed be considered clean. But since hydro plants are so environmentally threatening, it cannot be considered “green.” If wind is accompanied by fossil fueled generation, which is overwhelmingly likely, it can neither be considered clean nor green.
 
Three massive wind plants (374 turbines) with a combined rated capacity of 600 MW may contribute about 150 MW of fluctuating energy annually to a grid system with an installed generating capacity of 165,000MW—a piffle in the scheme of things, equivalent to the extreme fluctuations at everyday peak demand periods. In light of your recent editorial, a special irony will obtain if wind energy approaches, say, 5% of the grid’s installed capacity, in which case additional conventional generators must be added to back it up at 90% of the rated wind capacity. Most of this new generation would be in the form of coal, since there is so little hydro, and natural gas is so expensive, much of it diverted for heating purposes, while nuclear does not seem to be an option anywhere in this country.
 
Support for industrial wind technology is not really about energy. Rather, it’s about substantial tax sheltering, which is why Enron, at the time of its demise, had the nation's largest stock of wind facilities, which it unloaded to General Electric. It was Enron that lead the campaign for state and federal RPS standards, knowing that the only energy-effective "renewable" was hydro, and no one outside of third world countries is building hydro plants these days.
 
Wind is the perfect vehicle for tax shelter generation. Its unearned environmental credit brings a public relations cachet while trading in wind's renewable energy credits allows outfits like GE, Florida Power & Lights, AES, BP, et al to avoid cleaning up their dirtiest burning plants. And the politicians who support all this give the appearance of challenging the status quo when in reality they're reinforcing it, especially since more wind facilities very likely will result in more coal plants.
 
Sincerely,
 
Jon Boone
 
Oakland, MD 21550