A post on Mikado a few days ago making out that wind power was some form of conspiracy to destroy our countryside and to make money for large faceless corporations without giving us anything in return has spurred me on to put together an organised argument showing why wind power is a good thing for the world in general and for Ireland in particular.

OK, before I get into the bones of this post I think I should explain my involvement in the wind industry. I am not and have never been an employee of any wind energy company but my father works for one and runs a few and has been involved in the wind industry for quite some time now. He started off developing wind farms part-time in the evenings and was so good at it that he was snapped up by a major European wind turbine company and since then he has been with a number of large wind turbine manufacturers. Because dad is so involved in the wind industry I get to tour many of the wind farms in Ireland at various stages of development and building as well as when they are operational. Also, when dad was still doing this stuff part-time and when I was still in school I used to help him with the development work (which usually involved getting very cold and very wet on a mountain somewhere) from time to time so I have some hands-on experience of the industry too. So, now that you know where I’m coming from we can continue!

There are a lot of common arguments against wind power that you often hear and I will go through them one by one later in this post but I’ll just start by giving you my view of ‘the big picture’. At the moment, we as a society, are heavily dependent on energy and the resources we currently get the majority of that energy from are finite and running out. So something has to give. Either we stop using energy or we start developing other sources of energy that will not run out. Wind is not THE answer but it is part of the answer. There is no one source of energy that could power the whole world, a good energy grid is diverse so that a problem with one source does not cripple the grid. A grid powered by all wind would be ludicrous, as would a grid powered by all solar or all biomass or all hydro or all anything. Basically, diversity in the grid is a good thing and since the wind is totally free and always blowing somewhere in the world it should be tapped as part of our overall energy strategy. Ireland is perfectly placed to tap this resource so it should!

So, what are the common arguments against wind power? Well lets start with the most common one:

Wind farms should be stopped because they are a blight on the landscape are are spoiling the countryside.

Firstly, many people actually LIKE the look of wind turbines! Personally I think there is something very elegant and graceful about them and I think they add to the landscape. There are people who disagree with that though and that is their right. However, these people who think wind turbines are ugly will probably agree that they are less ugly than fossil fuel buring power plants or Nuclear power plants. Also, each turn of those blades is reducing the amount of CO2 we are pumping into the air where as the never ending flow of smoke from the chimneys of fossil fuel burning plants increase our damage to the environment each second they are in operation. Another important point to note is that agricultural life just caries on as normal below wind turbines so they just become a part of the land rather than taking it over like a large fossil fuel or Nuclear plant does. Wind turbines are in tune with the country, large power plants are NOT!

It is fair to say that areas of outstanding natural beauty like the Burren or Glendalough should not be used for wind farms no matter how ideal the conditions. No one with any sense could argue with that. Likewise wind turbines should not be placed in the path of migrating birds or in areas where their foundations would cause major damage to the environment. Luckily the planning service in this country is not so inept as to just grant permission for wind farms willy-nilly, they ensure that environmental impact studies are done and that their recommendations are enforced and that wind farms are built in such a way as to minimise their visual impact.

Finally, the future of large scale wind energy in Ireland is probably off-shore. Turbines that are off-shore are out of the way and except in excellent conditions, out of sight too. They also get steady sustained winds and assuming they are built sensibly and bearing in mind the local geology and ecology they will not harm any one or anything but just give us clean power.

I think the best way to illustrate my views on this point is with some pictures! All the images used in this post are of power plants and wind farms in Ireland (including the North). First I’ll show you some images of fossil fuel burning power plants in Ireland and then some images of Irish wind farms.

Moneypoint (coal burning 915MW)

West Offaly Power (peat buring 150MW)

Tarbert Power Station (oil burning 620MW)

Poolbeg (oil & gas burning 1,020MW)

Now, lets compare that to some Irish wind farms.

Kingsmountain (25MW with 10 2.5MW turbines)

Meentycat (75MW with 38 turbines of various sizes)

Tappaghan (19.5MW with 13 1.5MW turbines)

Arklow Bank (25MW with 7 3.6MW turbines)

Wind Turbines generate almost no power

In the very early days of the wind industry there was some truth to this statement, the technology was still very primitive so as well as the turbines having low power ratings they were also very inefficient and hence generally produced very little power so you needed LOADS of them (like you see in California) to make them even remotely worth while. Thing is the wind industry now has some serious capital behind it so the turbines have come on in leaps and bounds in the last 10 years.

The power ratting of the turbines is literally 10 times higher now than it was 10 years ago but more importantly than that the efficiency of the machines has been massively improved by innovations such as variable pitch blades, variable speed rotors and an increase in sheer scale with larger rotors up higher in better air.

Again, looking at Ireland, the largest turbines we have now are the 3.6MW turbines on Arklow bank. Ten years ago we didn’t even have 0.3MW turbines here yet because 0.2MW turbines were considered top of the line back then. 3.6MW is BIG and I will use that for my calculations but I will point out that the large turbine manufacturers are now working on 5MW and even 6MW turbines so just imagine where we will be in 10 years!

So, 3.5MW, what does that really mean? Well, firstly, no machine produces power at it’s rated capacity at all times so assuming your turbines are on a good site (and lets face it why put them anywhere else!) with reliable 10m/s winds a cautious estimate for that machine’s average efficiency over a year would be 80% so in the space of one year that machine would produce a little over 24GW/h (GigaWatt/Hours). To put that into perspective, 24GWh/ is 24,000Units of electricity and according to the ESB the total demand in the Republic of Ireland in 2001 was 24,221 GW/h. In other words, it would only take 1,000 wind turbines to power the whole country! Seems like wind turbines produce PLENTY of power to me!

Wind turbines save very little CO2 emission

The argument goes a long the lines of "wind turbines have to be manufactured and the wind farm built and that results in CO2 emissions so they are not that clean". This is a really stupid argument because ALL power plants have to be built so ALL power plants will result in the emission of CO2 while they are under construction. However, the moment a wind farm is switched on it stops producing any CO2 emissions and each Watt of power it produces results in zero CO2 emissions. Contrast that to any fossil fuel burning plant and even if you assume that the construction of a huge power station results in no more CO2 emission than the building of a wind farm (something I don’t buy for a second) they start off at the same point as a wind farm but each and every single Watt of power produced results in more CO2 being emitted into the atmosphere!

There are some nice statistics on the CO2 emissions savings of wind energy on the Airtricity web site. In case you are not familiar with them Airtricity are an Irish green energy company that produce all their power from wind energy. The quote below is form their front page:

Airtricity has saved the release of 1,988,918 Tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere since 1st January 2003.
This is equivalent to taking 473,552 cars off the road for a year!

This seems like an exceptionally significant saving in CO2 emissions to me and that is just from one company!

Wind farms make money for large corporations

Of course they do! ALL large scale energy production is run by big business because only big business CAN do things at such a large scale! An individual industrial standard wind turbine costs well over a million Euro so when you consider the cost of developing and building an entire wind farm you can see why only big business can take on such projects.

I think the people who go on about this have the twisted view that all large companies are evil and therefore since all large wind projects are done by big business wind farms are evil. This is just rubbish. Give me GE Wind over Exon any day!

Wind turbines could never power the whole country

Yes, this argument DOES seem laughable but I was actually presented with it on a Mikado thread so I figured I’d include it here.

No, wind farms could never provide ALL our power but that does not mean that they cannot provide ANY of our power! Like I said in my intro, a good power grid has lots of variety so my answer to this argument is "so what???".

Links