Sherry Chandler

Windmills revisited

I said it wasn’t simple. Here’s the view from Pocahontas County:

Here in West Virginia, we get a good close look at surface coal mines (Imagine calling something “mountain top removal” to improve public relations.), natural gas drilling, and under-inspected fly ash containment ponds, as well as the sort of rural poverty that causes communities to welcome these things for the jobs and money they bring in. I keep files of news clippings on these subjects, but I usually get too depressed by the issues to post them. There’s no energy without cost, and weighing those costs is a series of grim tradeoffs.

Chris [Bolgiano] makes a case for community-scale, rather than industrial-scale, wind power, and I can agree wholeheartedly there. I hope someday to afford my own small windmill, along with some solar panels for our ridge top home. I’m sure most of my neighbors would desire these things too if they were not so pricey. Who wouldn’t want to save on electric bills? She’s also spot-on concerning the marginal nature of wind power on Appalachia’s high ridges–it wouldn’t be profitable to build unsubsidized wind farms here.

Still, most natural resource extraction is government subsidized in some way. Chris observes Industrial wind power has a place, and T. Boone Pickens knows exactly where that is: On the plains, where winds are incessant. Other potentially low impact sites are mid-western crop fields, eastern strip mines, and off-shore waters, much closer to the coastal cities that need the power. Unfortunately, the people that live in those places don’t find the wind farms “low impact.” (Except perhaps on those strip mines where everyone has moved away because there is no more safe drinking water.)

Rebecca includes a number of links to articles on this subject if you’re interested and want to follow up. As always, I suggest following the link and reading the original.

Gone with the windmills

Yesterday I said I live in a state where coal is king and I realize that the issues are not completely simple.

Here is one of those complexities explained in Chris Bolgiano’s An Open Letter to President Obama: Gone With The Windmills? A Plea to Save the Appalachian National Forests :

Dear President Obama:

Thanks to you, America is turning green again, nearly forty years after I went �Back to the Land� as part of the first Earth Day generation. You came within twenty miles of my passive-aggressive solar homestead on Cross Mountain last October, when you spoke in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

Surely, as you flew into the Shenandoah Valley airport, you noticed to the west the long, sinuous lines of forest-covered mountains, fall colors blazing in faux fire.

A century ago you would have seen smoke billowing from real fires, caused by a rampage of steam-powered logging. Flooding caused by deforestation of the mountains became so costly by 1911 that Congress passed the Weeks Act, authorizing the U.S. Forest Service to buy land from willing sellers and repair environmental damage. Some of the highest ridges you saw when you looked westward are in national forests that were established then, along the spine of the Southern Appalachian Mountains.

These forests now face their greatest threat in a century.

Reflecting a nearly 50% nationwide increase in wind electricity plants in 2007, developers are arriving in what they themselves called �a gold rush� at a recent industry conference. There, a wind map ranked thin red currents along the highest Appalachian ridges as just possibly strong enough to power turbines for massive industrial wind installations.

Glossy ads for wind power always show turbines in open fields, never in forests. That�s because every turbine requires up to five acres of deforestation. Hundreds of turbines are being built here, burgeoning to tens of thousands if the U.S. Department of Energy indiscriminately pursues its �20% Wind Energy By 2030? program. Do the math, and factor in the forest fragmentation that multiplies the loss of habitat, and the super-wide new roads that destroy the last remote, wild ridges.

wind turbine with powerlinesSlender, rocky ridges are blasted and bulldozed to flatten pads for turbines. Each pad requires hundreds of tons of concrete. After the 25 year life span of the huge machines, the pads remain as dead ground but possibly good tennis courts in a summer camp for giants in the future.

Deforestation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions after fossil fuel burning. The rest of the world agreed at the recent U.N. climate summit to protect maturing forests that sequester huge amounts of carbon dioxide � like those now healing from old abuse in the Southern Appalachians. In Transition to Green, the 400 pages of nature tips sent you by a coalition of environmental organizations, the first recommendation for the U.S. Department of Agriculture is to �manage the national forest system to secure climate benefits.�

Industrial wind will blow this opportunity away.

It�s already blowing away a lot of wildlife. Turbine blades reach 450 feet above ridge crests where songbirds migrate, bats feed, and eagles rise on thermals. Just across the state line in West Virginia, thousands of creatures are being killed every year at new wind plants, the highest kills ever documented worldwide from turbines. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service strongly recommends against turbines on nearby Shenandoah Mountain due to the likelihood of killing endangered species, yet several projects are underway.

Some of the people living near turbines suffer from chronic sleeplessness and other symptoms of Wind Turbine Syndrome (including depression over loss of property values).

Death, destruction and insomnia are marketed to urban consumers as �green� electricity, what little there is of it. Turbines produce only about 30% or less of their maximum rated capacity, and some of that is lost along hundreds of miles of transmission lines. When the wind does blow, the aging lines can hardly handle the surge.

What drives this high-cost/low-benefit gold rush is the federal production tax credit. More tax breaks beckon in national forests, where no local property taxes are levied so local communities wouldn�t share in revenues produced by turbines, plus the Forest Service helps pay for building roads. In the three years that the federal tax credit hasn�t been reauthorized since first enacted in 1992, the skyrocketing wind industry plateaued like a mountaintop-removal coalmine.

The coal mining that has ravaged the land and people in part of Appalachia for a century is our major source of electricity, and is obscenely destructive to forests. But destroying more forests in order to stop destroying forests doesn�t make sense. And building industrial wind plants in Appalachia isn�t change. It�s a 21st-century version of the same old pattern of taking value out and leaving costs behind.

These ancient mountains are well-documented as the biologically richest temperate woodlands in the world, one of North America�s greatest natural treasures, rich in globally rare species and communities, including human ones. So you can�t dismiss my aging hippie protest merely as NIMBY, which in any case is simply love of place. It breaks my heart to see these murdered old mountains assaulted again.

Since 1911, the Forest Service has salvaged the land and regenerated trees in watersheds that, today, supply drinking water to millions of people (not to mention clean air). Tens of millions of people depend on these national forests for access to the outdoors, spending in local economies as they go. Timber from regulated harvests supports local companies.

National forests are the last vestige of the rural commons, where, as you noted in a recent speech, �the proud tradition of hunting is passed on through the generations.� Deer eat my flowers and I eat the deer in an Appalachian adaptation of flower power.

No flowers bloom now; the mountain forests you saw in autumn glory are bark naked and blue with winter cold. Warmed by firewood from my hundred acres of oaks, I�m writing you on a computer plugged into nine solar panels that power my house. I believe in green energy so much that I�ve started a new savings fund to buy one of those million plug-in hybrid cars that you�ve promised to get on the road by 2015.

Industrial wind power has a place, and T. Boone Pickens knows exactly where that is: On the plains, where winds are incessant. Other potentially low impact sites are mid-western cropfields, eastern strip mines, and off-shore waters, much closer to the coastal cities that need the power.

But in forested rural areas like Appalachia, community-scale rather than industrial-scale would better contribute to your goal of 10% of our electricity from renewable sources by 2012. Solar panels and small wind turbines have enormous potential for on-site, small-scale power generation, with hardly a ripple on the grid.

Consider how much stronger our nation would be against disasters both natural and criminal if schools, hospitals, community centers, businesses, nursing homes, farms, houses and apartment buildings across the country made enough electricity to pump drinking water and refrigerate food.

Americans haven�t enjoyed that kind of independence since they drank from dippers and packed pond ice in sawdust for the summer icebox. The decentralization of electricity represents a new perspective on the old rallying cry of democracy, �Power to the People!�

Can�t we make some of that $150 billion you want to invest in �building a clean energy future� available to ordinary people, small businesses and neighborhoods, as well as distant corporations? And can�t we keep our national forests intact for future generations?

My hope for change is that you will answer, �Yes We Can!�

Yours in the Red, White, and Blue Ridge,

Chris Bolgiano

Via Via Negativa, who offers a bibliography of supporting documents you might want to check out.

As I read in Kentucky’s history, I am driven to the conclusion that the entire history of the United States of America is one of exploitation and waste.

The Appalachians seem to be caught between coal and wind in the service of big industry.

Civil disobedience

Join Wendell Berry and Bill McKibben in Civil Disobedience Against Coal-Fired Power Plants :

There are moments in a nation�s � and a planet�s � history when it may be necessary for some to break the law in order to bear witness to an evil, bring it to wider attention, and push for its correction. We think such a time has arrived, and we are writing to say that we hope some of you will join us in Washington D.C. on Monday March 2 in order to take part in a civil act of civil disobedience outside a coal-fired power plant near Capitol Hill.

Follow the link for details.

Via

Read als Blowing away King Coal at Salon.

I live in a state where coal is king and I realize that the issues are not completely simple. However, even if coal is to remain king, mountaintop removal is a stupid way to get at the coal:

After witnessing 470 mountains in central Appalachia get blown to bits by strip mining, the Coal River wind proponents were drawing a line in the sand. The verdict was in on mountaintop removal, which had been launched in 1970 as a quick and dirty option to cheaply procure coal. Thirty-eight years and a million and a half acres of destroyed hardwood forests later, mountaintop removal had run its course in the region with appalling effects. It had not only destroyed the natural heritage, it had ripped out the roots of the Appalachian culture and depopulated the historic mountain communities in the process.

Over 1,200 miles of waterways had been sullied and jammed with mining fill. Blasting and coal dust had made life unbearable for anyone in the strip-mined areas. Wells had been busted and polluted with toxic waste. Given the mechanization of aboveground mountaintop removal, and its shakedown of a diversified economy, coal mining jobs had plummeted as poverty rates rose in strip-mining areas.

In December, West Virginians saw what happened at a Tennessee power plant. A restraining wall burst and a billion gallons of coal ash poured out of a pond and deluged 400 acres of land in 6 feet of sludge. The proposed mountaintop removal site on Coal River Mountain rested beside a 6 billion-gallon toxic coal waste sludge dam above underground mines. If the proposed blasting took place, a fracture along the sludge lake could be catastrophic for the communities downstream.

The residents asked: Why should Coal River Mountain be the last mountain to die for a mistake?