Power Hungry (15 page)

The energy sprawl of renewables can easily be illustrated by comparing the footprint of a typical U.S. nuclear power plant, in this case, the South Texas Project, with that of wind and solar. Using conservative calculations—which means counting all 12,000 acres of the South Texas Project's land area as part of the two-reactor plant's footprint—yields a power density of about 300 horsepower per acre (56 watts per square meter). Compare that with wind power, which produces about 6.4 horsepower per acre (1.2 watts per square meter).
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Or look at solar photovoltaic, which produces about 36 horsepower per acre (6.7 watts per square meter).
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The results: Wind power requires about 45 times as much land to produce a comparable amount of power as nuclear, and solar photovoltaic power requires about 8 times as much land as nuclear. The corn ethanol scam is even worse, requiring about 1,150 times as much land as nuclear.
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Of course, estimates of power density vary. The numbers in the previous paragraph come from a variety of sources, including my own calculations. But those numbers are quite similar to the ones used by the Nature Conservancy in a 2009 study called “Energy Sprawl or Energy Efficiency.” That study estimates that when considering all land-use impacts, corn ethanol requires about 144 times as much land as nuclear, wind power requires about 30 times as much, and solar photovoltaic requires about 15 times as much. The same study found that wind power generation requires nearly 4 times as much land as natural gas and about 7 times as much as coal.
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“Deep green” means—or at least, should mean—not paving any land unless it is essential to do so. Renewables such as wind and solar power require huge swaths of land—which often becomes unusable for other
purposes. Humans cannot live close to wind farms because of the low-level noise caused by the massive blades. That noise, say neighbors and critics, disturbs sleep patterns and can cause headaches, dizziness, and other health problems.

In January 2010, I interviewed Charlie Porter, a successful horse trainer who lives in northwestern Missouri. Porter said that in 2007, shortly after a wind farm was completed within a half mile of his twenty-acre farm, he, his wife, and daughter began having trouble sleeping due to the rumbling from the turbines. Porter compared the noise to having “a hat on that's way too small. It just makes your world tiny.” In late 2009, exhausted by the turbine noise, the Porters purchased a house in nearby King City and moved off of their farm. The turbines, Porter told me, “drove us out of our home. They just ruined life out in the country.”
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Porter's story is not unique. Dr. Nina Pierpont, a pediatrician who lives and works in rural upstate New York, has documented dozens of cases of what she calls “wind turbine syndrome,” and in late 2009, she published her findings in a book.
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Pierpont recommends that wind turbines have setbacks of at least 1.25 miles from any human habitation. Pierpont's work clearly worries the American Wind Energy Association (2007 budget: $14 million) which published a report in December 2009 which claimed that “there is no evidence that the audible or sub-audible sounds emitted by wind turbines have any direct adverse physiological effects” and that the vibrations from the turbines are “too weak to be detected by, or to affect, humans.”
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But the scientific literature shows that the problems associated with low-level turbine noise have been known for years. And people living near wind farms in Texas, Oregon, New York, and Minnesota, as well as in numerous foreign countries, including England, New Zealand, Canada, France, and Australia, have complained about the noise and cited some of the same problems that Porter named, including sleep deprivation.
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Solar farms require huge arrays of panels or mirrors that cover nearly every square meter of their property. In addition to the land used by the actual wind and solar farms, those same sources usually require the construction of many miles of new high-voltage transmission lines, and those lines will zig-zag across huge swaths of the United States.

The need for more high-voltage transmission lines is perhaps the most controversial aspect of renewable energy. Across the country, citizen and
environmental groups are fighting the construction of new power lines—many of which are needed to transport electricity from new wind and solar facilities to distant towns and cities. Some 40,000 miles of new lines will be needed by the wind sector alone.
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If we assume that each
of these transmission lines requires a 100-foot-wide swath of right-of-way (this is a conservative estimate, the actual right-of-way may be much wider, particularly for high-voltage lines), then those 40,000 miles of transmission lines will cover about 750 square miles of territory, which is about half the size of the state of Rhode Island.
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FIGURE 11
The 2,700-Megawatt Challenge: Comparing the Power Densities of Various Fuels

The two fission reactors at the South Texas Project produce 2,700 megawatts of power. How many acres of corn ethanol would it take to produce that much power? What about wind turbines? Here are the power densities of those sources as well as the footprints they would require to produce 2,700 megawatts.

Sources
: The calculations for the energy densities of the renewable sources are from Jesse Ausubel, “The Future Environment for the Energy Business,”
APPEA Journal
(2007),
http://phe.rockefeller.edu/docs/ausubelappea.pdf
, 8. Other sources include Energy Information Administration data. For the wind calculation, the math is as follows: 2.7 billion watts /1.2 watts per square meter = 2.25 billion square meters.

The prolonged fight over the Sunrise Powerlink project provides a good example of the controversy over transmission lines. In 2005, San Diego Gas and Electric announced plans for a new high-voltage transmission line that would carry electricity from the Imperial Valley to customers in and around San Diego. The line would help bring solar power from the desert to consumers in the San Diego area. The utility claims the line is essential if it is to meet California's mandates on renewable energy. But the 123-mile, $1.9 billion transmission project is opposed by several environmental groups, including the San Diego–based Desert Protective Council and the Sierra Club.
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The Desert Protective Council opposes “big solar” and says the “land rush” of solar companies could “potentially cover over 600,000 acres in California alone.” “While these projects are touted as solving the global warming crisis,” the council website says, “they also have serious environmental impacts that need to be carefully considered.”
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In late 2008, despite the opposition, the project was approved for construction by the California Public Utility Commission, but it may yet face a legal battle in the courts.
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While the battle over Sunrise Powerlink may be the best known of the transmission-line skirmishes, many other projects are being developed across the United States, and just as with Sunrise Powerlink, nearly all of them are generating controversy and opposition.

To be certain, battles between landowners and the electric utilities over transmission lines are nothing new. Consider the case of former U.S. senator Phil Gramm, the man who did more to enable Enron and the Wall Street pirates than perhaps any other member of the U.S. Congress. You remember Gramm. He was the senator who got more campaign contributions from the now-defunct accounting firm Arthur Andersen than any other. As head of the Senate Banking Committee, he engineered the 1999 financial services bill that repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, the Depression-era set of rules that helped to slow the
trend toward gigantism in the banking, insurance, and securities business. Gramm led congressional efforts to put a leash on both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. He was also the author of the “Enron exemption,” the provision that he slipped into a bill that furthered Enron's ability to escape federal regulation of EnronOnline, the company's massive trading operation. Gramm declared that his legislation would “protect financial institutions from overregulation.” He went on, saying that it guaranteed that the United States would “maintain its global dominance of financial markets.”
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A decade later, a grateful nation may look to Gramm as not only a key enabler and architect of the worst financial collapse in modern history, but also a true American NIMBY. In 2003, just a few months after Gramm quit the Senate (before his term expired), he and his wife, former Enron board member Wendy Gramm, joined a group of landowners opposing a high-voltage transmission line that was to be installed close to their ranch northwest of San Antonio.
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Instead of going across their property, the Gramms wanted San Antonio's City Public Service to route the transmission lines across Government Canyon State Natural Area, a park that had recently been established by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.
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The Gramms failed to get the power lines moved onto the park. But their efforts illustrate that NIMBY is alive and well, and living, well, just about everywhere.

NIMBY issues are not unique to transmission lines. Landowners and neighborhood groups all across the United States are always lining up to fight proposals for various development projects, whether they are shopping malls, confined animal feeding operations, slaughterhouses, landfills, nuclear reactors, or coal-fired power plants. Those types of projects have always faced opposition and likely always will. But the emergence of transmission lines as a pivotal land-use issue for wind and solar power has been one of the biggest surprises of the push for more “green” energy. And it has created an entirely new set of opponents.

In upstate New York, a privately held investment group called New York Regional Interconnect has been trying for years to build some 200 miles of transmission lines, with towers thirteen stories high, that would carry electricity from the northern part of the state, where the wind resources
are, to customers further south. But the line is opposed by a number of local groups who don't want the lines to cross through their communities.
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In July 2009, a coalition of environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Wilderness Society, filed a lawsuit against several federal agencies in an effort to force them to change the routes of a number of planned transmission lines. The suit, which names the Departments of Interior, Energy, and Agriculture, as well as the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service, as defendants, claims that the federal government has created 6,000 miles of rights-of-way in the western states without considering all of the environmental impacts of the transmission corridors.
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The suit invokes a variety of federal laws, including the Endangered Species Act, and asks the court to “declare unlawful and set aside” the power transmission corridors laid out by the federal government.
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In mid-2009, the Lower Colorado River Authority announced plans for 600 miles of transmission lines to carry wind power from western Texas to customers in the central part of the state.
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The project quickly garnered opposition from landowners and local citizens who said the lines would damage their property values. In a story on the controversy, Asher Price, a reporter for the
Austin American-Statesman
, discussed one property owner, Bill Neiman, the owner of a seed farm near Junction, who claimed that “his property and livelihood would be ruined by transmission lines.” A spokesperson for the river authority neatly summed up the situation by saying that most people understand the need for more transmission lines, “they just don't want them on their property or within view.”
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While transmission lines are a key limiter for renewable energy schemes, the environmental impact of renewables extends beyond the problem of energy sprawl. As discussed above, the low power density of wind and solar means that they need lots of land. But that same low power density also requires large resource inputs, specifically, huge quantities of steel and concrete.

Of course, every method of large-scale electricity production requires significant quantities of such materials. But the resource requirements of wind are several times higher than those of natural gas and nuclear. And
those higher inputs mean higher relative costs per unit of power delivered. Put another way, power-generation systems such as natural gas and nuclear power plants are far more efficient users of steel and concrete than are wind power systems.

Consider the Milford Wind Corridor, a 300-megawatt wind project that was built in Utah in 2009. The project was the first to be approved under the Bureau of Land Management's new wind program for the western United States.
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To construct the wind farm, which uses 139 turbines spread over 40 square miles, the owners of the project installed a concrete batch plant that ran six days a week, twelve hours per day, for six months. During that time, the plant consumed about 14.3 million gallons of water to produce 44,344 cubic meters of concrete. Thus, each megawatt of installed wind capacity consumed about 319 cubic meters of concrete.
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