Into the Wind - the AWEA Blog

The following letter to the editor appeared in today's edition of the Baltimore Sun.

As wind energy makes increasing headway in reducing America's dependence on fossil fuels and the harmful emissions associated with their use, the fossil fuel industry has launched an increasingly desperate misinformation campaign to muddy the waters about these indisputable benefits of clean energy.

The latest attack comes in a Baltimore Sun op-ed by Mr. Charles Campbell, a retired senior vice ...

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The Los Angeles Times carried a pair of stories on wind this weekend by Tiffany Hsu, purportedly on how wind turbine technology is developing, but along the way showcasing a string of urban legends about wind power.

The stories relied heavily on anti-wind groups and "activists" for information, which is pretty much the quickest path to getting it wrong. The case for wind was given scarcely any room (even though 89% of Americans agree they want more wind energy).

Headlines, captions, and descriptions in the stories were wildly inflammatory — it's irresponsible to call turbines "avian Cuisinarts" for example, when individual losses will never be more than an extremely small fraction of bird deaths caused by human activities, and wind power is virtually the only ...

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I'm pleased to report that "Wind Uprising," a 31-minute documentary about the development of the first wind farm in Utah (and a wind farm described by the film's website as "the most urban ... in the United States," is now available on DVD via the website.  Prices range from $29 up, depending on the intended use.

"Wind Uprising" is a positive, but balanced, recounting of the challenges facing a small developer seeking to install a utility-scale wind project. To its credit:

- It briefly discusses Utah's overall energy supply and where that energy comes from now, instead of implying that the choice between wind and nothing is a real choice.

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Those of us who work in energy communications for a living are always looking for new equivalents--new ways to give an average reader some sense of the size and scale of what we are talking about.

Mark Twain was fond of quoting the saying, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." Another old saw puts the same skepticism this way: "Figures can't lie, but liars can figure."

I have a slightly different take--I think of statistics as something like a telescope.  A telescope doesn't distort the visual information it conveys to the eye, but the scale of that information changes dramatically depending on which end you look into. And of course, that means that you have to be willing to invest at least a modest amount of time in learning about ...

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The Minneapolis Star-Tribune ran a nice positive article and interview by reporter Neal St. Anthony recently about the tenure of Dick Kelly, who is retiring, as CEO of Xcel Energy.

Kelly has been instrumental in propelling Xcel into a national leadership position in wind power during his six years as CEO. The interview includes a quote from him that should be food for thought for utility executives around the country:

"Q: You bet hundreds of millions of ratepayer dollars on improving efficiency and generating 30 percent of your juice from wind and other renewable sources by 2020 in Minnesota, and meeting lower renewable ...

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The Wall Street Journal carried an opinion article recently by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., again attacking the proposed Cape Wind offshore wind farm in Nantucket Sound and recommending purchasing electricity for New England instead from giant Canadian utility Hydro Quebec.

This is reminiscent of how the U.S.--25 years after dominating the world wind energy industry in the early 1980s--finds itself today playing catch-up in the race to attract the factories and jobs needed for a robust domestic supply chain. We temporarily abandoned our wind industry in 1985 because of short-sighted concerns over the cost of competing, while other more far-sighted countries forged ahead. Today uncertain federal policies still threaten U.S. wind developers and manufacturers.

Today, ...

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The fossil fuel lobby continues its misinformation campaign to muddy the waters about one of the indisputable benefits of wind energy--its success in reducing the use of fossil fuels and the harmful emissions associated with their use. The latest attack on clean energy comes from Robert Bryce, a senior fellow at the Exxon-Mobil-funded Manhattan Institute, who in a Forbes piece regurgitates a report written by Bentek, a natural gas consulting firm whose President and CEO happens to be the Chairman and Director of the Natural Gas Committee of the fossil fuel lobby group the Independent Petroleum Association of Mountain States, as well as a member of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association.
 
Unsurprisingly, the Bentek report is directly contradicted by a large body of government ...

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This past week has been notable for a spate of positive news items on U.S. wind power development, although the looming expiration of a key federal incentive is casting an increasing shadow over the wind industry.

First, the good news:

- Despite some local opposition, the Vermilion County (Ill.) Board of Supervisors voted 21-1 to approve a proposal by wind developer Invenergy to install 104 turbines (approximately 160 MW) as part of a 214-MW wind farm (the balance of the project is planned for neighboring ...

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Ah, the frustrations of attempting to trample out anti-wind misinformation. Here's a notable recent example, brought to us by the good folks at Forbes.com's "Energy Source" blog, which ran an article recently warning of potential damage to the earth's climate from wind power. Just for fun, I thought it might be nice to present a chronology of the events leading up to this "revelation."

Timeline:

February 1, 2011: L.M. Miller, F. Gans, and A. Kleidon of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry publish a paper in the open access journal Earth System Dynamics casting doubts on the possibility of harvesting massive amounts of wind energy to meet global electricity needs and suggesting that doing so could have "some" effects similar to doubling atmospheric ...

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A consistent and supportive national energy policy is needed to enable U.S. wind manufacturing to grow, attract investment, and create jobs, according to speakers at a conference currently underway in Cleveland.

Some of the speakers and their comments, as reported by the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

- Terence Stewart, a Washington, D.C.-based attorney, whose law firm complained to the World Trade Organization about Chinese subsidies and preferences for domestic turbines and components as opposed to imports, said it's clear that China is strongly supporting renewable energy.  ...

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