Wind Power: Let’s Do The Numbers (Part 3 of 3)

Based on estimates from the Joint Committee on Taxation and the Congressional Budget Office, taxpayers will pay wind developers $29 billion in federal subsidies over the next 10 years to increase wind power production from 1.5 to 4% of our total electricity production.

Wind turbines might not be very efficient producers of electricity, but thanks to production and investment tax credits, cash grants, and bonus depreciation schedules, they have been proven outrageously efficient at making a handful of developers and their suppliers very wealthy.

Direct and indirect subsidies to a 38 megawatt wind utility valued at $80 million are expected to provide the developer a 49% return on investment in year one, 33% in year two, and 49% thereafter. By the most conservative estimates, net cash proceeds after expenses are expected to exceed $5.5 million annually.

Meanwhile, ratepayers foot the bill for required upgrades to the grid, including the addition of transmission lines and substations.

When a wind utility moves to town, the first thing that happens (after the shock and awe) is your electric bill goes up. Once the upgrade costs have been recouped, your bill might well return to where it was; however, it is likely (at least for the foreseeable future) only to go down in response to the price of coal and natural gas.

I recognize that this statement is counter-intuitive. It seems only reasonable that when a “free” source of energy moves to town, the locals should reap the immediate benefit in lower energy costs.

This would certainly be true if you put a small windmill in your own backyard and hooked it up to a bank of batteries. As long as the wind blew enough to keep your batteries charged, you could run your house off the stored energy. With the batteries serving as a buffer between your household appliances and the constantly fluctuating wind, you would have no cause to worry about brownouts when the wind lulls or power surges when it gusts. And when the wind stopped blowing altogether, and the batteries ran down, you could flip a switch and run your house off the grid, or a back-up generator. Every day you ran your house off your windmill-powered batteries would be a day you weren’t paying for electricity from another source. As a result, yes, of course, your bill would shrink.

But this is not how it works with industrial scale wind utilities created to supply the grid.

Our grid is designed, not to store excess energy, but to respond to demand.

Regional Transmission Organizations such as PJM in the eastern U.S., including Virginia, West Virginia and 11 other states, coordinate the movement of wholesale electricity through the high-voltage electric grid. They are constantly monitoring the various suppliers to match demand.

For a Regional Transmission Organization, reliability of delivery is everything. Wind is notoriously unreliable.

For this reason, PJM can only count on a fraction of a wind utility’s possible electric output as a “Capacity Resource.” In the case of Highland New Wind, PJM has agreed to purchase 7.6 megawatts out of a total 38 megawatts of nameplate capacity, or 20%.

Twenty percent is the wind company's “capacity factor”, which can be imagined as the percentage of useful energy output. Although capacity factors for wind utilities have reached as high as almost 40% in the Great Plains, history has proven capacity factors to be in the low twenties on the ridgetops of the eastern United States.

According to their agreement with PJM, the remaining 30.4 megawatts of their nameplate capacity, Highland New Wind is free to sell on the lucrative Renewable Energy Credit (REC) market, most likely in New Jersey. (The REC market is a subject for another article.)

The 69kv transmission line that Highland New Wind will tie-into runs from Monterey, Virginia to Durbin, West Virginia, where it connects to a 138kv substation, before continuing over Cheat Mountain to Randolph County and on across the state of West Virginia, ultimately ending at a 1300 megawatt coal-fired plant on the Ohio River. (If you’ve noticed that this is nowhere near New Jersey, I have, too.)

And how many homes does 7.6 megawatts power?

Highland New Wind representatives have been quoted over and over again as stating that their “wind farm” will “power 12,000 homes.”

This is a curious claim, given the fact that the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), an industry lobby, claims that one megawatt of wind energy can power 240 to 300 households. As discussed, 7.6 megawatts of capacity represents pretty much an industry gold-standard for a 38 megawatt wind facility in the east. Assuming AWEA’s best case of 300 households served per megawatt X 7.6 megawatts, indicates 2,280 homes served.

Fudging best-case-scenario numbers by a factor of 5 is not an innocent mistake.

Such “fudging” does us all injustice.

How can we, any of us, make good decisions about energy when those who would sell it to us refuse to provide us with the facts?

There is no question that adding 7.6 megawatts to the Durbin-Monterey line costs the taxpayer more than it’s worth.

So, what’s the upside for the taxpayer?

There has to be one, right?

According to a 2007 study conducted by the National Academies of Science, US demand for electricity is expected to increase over the next decade. Despite all the evidence that the road to energy independence is paved with reduced energy demand, neither the National Academies scientists nor the Department of Energy foresee Americans taking that route.

Looking ahead to 2020, wind power is expected to cover 3.5 to 19% of the increased demand for electricity. That sounds OK until you consider that this means that 96.5 to 81% of new generation to meet the increased demand must come from other sources. Thus the National Academies report concludes that wind power will achieve no actual reduction in demand for electricity generation from other sources.

Not unless we drastically reduce our demand.

But still, it’s all worth it if wind utilities reduce our carbon emissions, right?

The National Academies report concludes that between now and 2020, wind power development will offset emissions of carbon dioxide by 1.2 to 4.5% from the levels of emissions that would occur from electricity generation if no wind turbines existed.

These numbers remain so low because of the essential nature of wind, and the near impossibility of totally replacing a conventional fuel that can be increased or decreased on demand (such as coal or natural gas), with one that cannot be controlled (such as wind).

The National Academies report further explains that, as of 2007, electrical generation facilities accounted for 39% of total US carbon dioxide emissions from energy use. If the 39% value does not change, wind power will offset only 0.5 to 1.8% of carbon dioxide emissions from energy use.

Are the costs worth it?

In my last article, I posed this question: When considering the three-legged stool of sustainability, where corporate profits are balanced with minimal environmental impact and maximum societal benefit, how does Appalachian wind power stand up?

It doesn’t.

Those three legs won’t stand.

The corporate profits are too good to be true.

For developers who can pony up the entry fee, wind power is nothing more nor less than an inside track to the Tooth Fairy’s money bag. Our government’s blind largesse to wind power is, without any exaggeration, a tragic case of wishful thinking run amok.

The societal benefits are simply not present.

Electric rates do not decrease. Reliance on fossil fuels does not decrease. Carbon dioxide emissions do not decrease. Jobs are not created. And yet, everything changes. The whole atmosphere and identity of a community is radically altered.

The environment is profoundly impacted.

Pastoral, rural and mountainous landscapes are inescapably changed by the presence of many 40-story, spinning, blinking structures. Common sense would dictate that no natural landscape is enhanced by such an addition. Worse, remote places revered for the absence of human development are transformed by wind turbines into something much less than what they were. The value of such special places is diminished in an incalcuable way.

For places like Highland County, VA and Pocahontas County, WV, where our remoteness is our calling card, where our bird population and clear night skies and connection to the earth and its folkways are the very things that make us special, what does welcoming colonies of skyscrapers onto our mountaintops mean for us? Are one or two permanent jobs per wind utility and, perhaps, as much as $200,000 a year in property taxes worth it?

Is that scant “up-side” worth the total transformation of the character and culture of this region?

I don’t think so. The numbers simply don’t hold up.

And looking beyond the numbers, with wind power, as with many of our American endeavors, we truly know not what we do.

We cannot know the ultimate consequences to our environment, our culture, and our way of life.

But we’ll have to live with them, won’t we?

Yes, we will. Unless we stand up and speak out.

We must tell our leaders, from the County Commission and Board of Supervisors right up the line to the President that wind power is not sustainable.

Not under the current economic incentives program; not constrained by the current technology of our grid; not given the damage done to this nation’s most beautiful landscapes and their human and animal inhabitants.

The benefits don’t justify the costs.

We must find a better way.