On January 25, I got an e-mail from Charlie Porter, a Missouribased horse trainer whose farm near King City had been surrounded by a phalanx of giant turbines. His message said “The overwhelming noise, sleep deprivation, constant headaches, anxiety, etc., etc., etc., forced us to abandon our home/horse farm of 15 years. We had to buy a house in town, away from the turbines and move!”
I called Porter immediately. What he told me was like a bolt from the blue. His twenty-acre farm was, he said, “surrounded by lots of acres that nobody lived on.” He was training quarter horses and having good success with it. But the wind turbines, the closest of which was installed 1,800 feet from his home, changed the life his family had grown to love. The noise from the turbines “just ruined life out in the country like we knew it.... We never intended to sell that farm. Now we couldn't sell it if we wanted to.”
I immediately began researching Porter and his background. I doublechecked everything he told me. I talked to the Gentry County tax assessor's office to verify his property records, including his claim that he'd had to buy a house in town to escape the noise. Everything checked out. I also began looking at the health effects that Porter described, symptoms that are now known as “wind turbine syndrome”âa term created by Dr. Nina Pierpont, a Malone, New York, physician who has studied a number of people, like Porter, who are suffering ill health due to the noise from wind turbines.
Since then, I've talked to or corresponded with homeowners who have had wind turbines built near their homes in Wisconsin, Maine, New York, Nova Scotia, Ontario, the U.K., New Zealand, and Australia. All of them used almost identical language in describing the low-frequency noise and problems caused by turbines that were built near their homes. Janet Warren, who was raising sheep on her 500-acre family farm near Makara, New Zealand, told me via e-mail that the turbines put up near her home emit “continuous noise and vibration” which she said was resulting in “genuine sleep deprivation causing loss of concentration, irritability, and short-term memory effects.” The turbines, installed about 2,900 feet from Warren's house, began generating electricity in July 2009, and she says “we started recording formal noise compliance complaints in August.” In February 2010, she and her husband were forced to move out of her home and to another location.
22
In mid-February, I interviewed Tony Moyer, a resident of Empire, Wisconsin, who was now living with the noise created by three turbines that were erected within 1,400 feet of his home in late 2008 “If you get up at night, you can't go back to sleep because you hear those things howling.” Moyer and his wife have tried white noise machines, to no avail. Nor are they able to sell. “The option to sell your home isn't there. I have wind turbines east, west, and north of me. If you talk to realtors, they can't sell homes near a wind farm.”
23
The wind energy industry has tried to dismiss the many complaints about wind turbine noise, sleep disruption, and deleterious health effects caused by the turbines. But there is plenty of evidence that shows that the low-frequency noise emitted by the giant turbines can be problematic. For decades, scientists and audiologists have known that even though
humans cannot hear “infrasound”ânoise that is lower in frequency than 20 Hertzâthat same noise can still cause physiological damage.
24
Noise complaints are a central element of an emerging citizen backlash against the global wind industry. Lawsuits that focus on the noise issue have been filed in Maine, Pennsylvania, and New Zealand.
25
In New Zealand, more than 750 noise complaints were lodged against a large wind project near Makara in the first ten months of its operation.
Indeed, evidence of the growing backlash against wind can even be found in Denmark, a country that boosters of wind energy like to claim as their Valhalla. On September 1, the
Copenhagen Post
carried a story titled “Dong gives up on land-based turbines.” The subhead said “Mass protests mean the energy firm will look offshore.” Here's the lead sentence from the article: “State-owned energy firm Dong Energy has given up building more wind turbines on Danish land, following protests from residents complaining about the noise the turbines make.” The article goes on to quote the Danish company's CEO Anders Eldrup who said “It is very difficult to get the public's acceptance if the turbines are built close to residential buildings, and therefore we are now looking at maritime options.”
26
The opposition to wind energy in Denmark is hardly unique. Europe now has about 400 anti-wind energy groups spread among twenty European countries.
27
Canada has more than two dozen such groups.
28
And the United States has about 100 anti-wind groups.
29
In October, I attended a symposium on wind turbine noise in Picton, Ontario. Presenters at the conference included numerous medical doctors and PhDs. The consensus among the various presenters: wind turbines should have setbacks of at least two kilometers from any residence to avoid adverse health effects due to the noise. Alec Salt, a PhD scientist who works in the Department of Otolaryngology at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, was among the experts who spoke at the conference. Salt, an expert on the workings of the inner ear, said that “A physiologic pathway exists for infrasound to affect the brain at levels that are not heard. The idea that infrasound effects can be dismissed because they are inaudible is absolutely incorrect.” Salt continued, “We need to stop ignoring the infrasound component of wind turbine noise and find out why it bothers people.”
The Canadian symposium occurred about the same time that a new documentary by Laura Israel about the wind industry was appearing at film festivals around the country. Watching the documentary, called
Windfall
, provided a bit of déjà vu, as it puts on the screen nearly all of the issues that I'd been hearing about in my own research since Porter had contacted me in January.
30
Israel's documentary, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September, focused on the wind industry's attempt to build a number of turbines in Meredith, New York. Israel, who owns a cabin in the town, interviewed local residents and let viewers see how the town became bitterly divided over the issue of permitting the turbines. Some large landowners favored the siting of the turbines, in part because they were going to get royalty payments from the wind industry. That faction was led by the town's long-time supervisor Frank Bachler, who is portrayed as a well-intentioned man who, in favoring the wind development, is only trying to help the area's struggling farmers.
But a majority of the townspeople opposed the turbines. The resulting battle for control of the town's board provided a textbook example of democracy in action. After the board voted to approve the siting of turbines, three wind opponents ran for election to the town board with the stated purpose of reversing the existing board's position on wind. In November 2007, the opponents won and quickly passed a measure that effectively banned industrial wind development in the town.
31
Israel's film provides a much-needed view of the anger that rural residents are expressing toward the rapid expansion of the wind industry. One of the best examples of that backlash includes Israel's interview with Carol Spinelli, a resident of Bovina, a small town located a few miles east of Meredith that imposed a ban on industrial wind development. Spinelli led the fight against wind turbines in Bovina, and she declares that the controversy is about “big money, big companies, big politics.” Discussing wind developers, she says “I refer to them as modern day carpetbaggers. And that's what they are.”
Israel also talked to a few homeowners who live near large wind projects. One of them, Eve Kelley, used language much like what I'd heard in my own research into the infrasound problem caused by turbines. The noise from the turbines, says Kelley, led to “dizzy spells, sick
to my stomach ... Sounds like the noise is in the walls. The house is vibrating.”
While the noise issue is bedeviling wind energy developers, the more immediate concern for the industry is low gas prices. Why? Wind competes primarily with natural gasâfired generation.
32
And when gas prices are low, wind energy is at a big disadvantage in the marketplace, even with huge federal subsidies such as the $0.022 per kilowatt-hour federal production tax credit.
In 2008, T. Boone Pickens, one of the wind industry's most reliable boosters, said that gas prices must be at least $9 per million Btu for wind energy to be competitive in the marketplace.
33
In March of this year, Pickens was once again talking up wind energy, and he declared that “the place where it works best is with natural gas at $7.”
34
That same month, a reporter from Dow Jones summarized Pickens's position by writing “Wind power is profitable when natural gas prices are about $7 a million British thermal units, Pickens said.”
The bad news for the wind industry is that, for much of 2010, natural gas on the spot market has been selling for less than $4.
35
In September 2010, Paul Sankey, an energy analyst at Deutsche Bank, wrote that gas is in “fundamental oversupply” and will continue to be in oversupply through 2015.
36
That fundamental oversupply is due to several factors including a surge in natural gas liquefaction capacity in places like Qatar as well as the enormous increases in U. S. gas supplies that are a direct result of the shale gas revolution.
Those low gas prices make offshore wind appear even more uneconomic. The cost of building offshore wind projects is about $5,000 per kilowatt, or about the same as building a new nuclear plant. For comparison, a new gas-fired generation plant costs about $850 per kilowatt.
37
Those high costs are reflected in the prices that the developers of Cape Wind, the controversial offshore wind project near Cape Cod, are seeking for the electricity that could be generated by the turbines to be located in the waters of one of America's most famous vacation spots. The likely cost for electricity from Cape Wind will be between $0.17 and $0.21 per kilowatt-hour. Another offshore project, off the coast of Rhode Island, Deepwater Wind, was recently rejected by that state's public utility commission because the cost of electricity from the project
was expected to be $0.244 per kilowatt-hour with annual increases of 3.5 percent per year.
38
For reference, the average retail price of electricity in the United States is about $0.10.
39
The result from the wind industry's high costs: devastation. In late October 2010, the American Wind Energy Association announced that during the first nine months of the year, just 1,600 megawatts of new wind capacity was installed in the United States,“ down 72 percent versus 2009, and the lowest level since 2006.” In a press release, the lobby group said the solution for its woes wereâwait for itâmore subsidies and mandates. The group's CEO Denise Bode said that “the best way to galvanize the industry now will be continued tax credits and a federal benchmark [read: “mandate”] of 15 percent renewables in the national electricity mix by 2020.” Bode continued, saying that those subsidies and mandates “will send a clear signal to investors that the U. S. is open for business.”
40
Sure. But the business sector has already signaled that it doesn't want what the wind industry is selling. The reason: even with huge subsidies available to wind-energy projects, natural gasâfired generation remains a cheaper, more reliable option.
41
And even worse for the wind industry is that some industry insiders are predicting that the number of new wind generation installations will fall again, by as much as 50 percent, in 2011.
42
Unfortunately, officials in the Obama administration are apparently convinced that wind energy is the way of the future and that opposition to projects based on noise or other concerns is unwarranted. In late October, Energy Secretary Steven Chu dismissed the opponents of wind energy projects by saying, “There's always some group ... that will really be against whatever.”
43
Perhaps that's true. But some hard-core environmentalists are starting to understand that more wind energy projects will mean yet more energy sprawl. On November 8, five people, several of them from Earth First!, were arrested near Lincoln, Maine, after they blocked a road leading to a construction site for a 60-megawatt wind project on Rollins Mountain. According to a story written by Tux Turkel of the
Portland Press Herald
, one of the protesters carried a sign which read “Stop the rape of rural Maine.”
44
I've been writing about the corn ethanol scam for more than five years, but I'm still not cynical enough. That was made obvious in October 2010, when the Environmental Protection Agency approved an increase in the amount of ethanol that can be blended into the U. S. gasoline supply from 10 percent to as much as 15 percent.
45
The Obama administration, the same one that said it was going to follow the science rigorously, made the move even though the EPA's own data shows that adding more ethanol to gasoline makes air quality worse. By granting the bailout, the EPA will allow ethanol producers to blend more of their corrosive, hydrophilic, low-heat-content fuel into our gasoline. And while the agency's ruling limits the use of the higherethanol-content gasoline to model year 2007 and newer cars and trucks, the move further complicates the motor fuel market. America has the most balkanized motor fuel market on earth. Refiners are now producing about four dozen blends of gasoline and multiple blends of diesel fuel.