Power corrupts, and wind power corrupts pristine ridgelines. Maybe it doesn't have to.
Wind faces fierce opposition in Vermont; this Searsburg operation is the only existing project.
I've always assumed that opponents of wind power were just displaying a faux-green kind of NIMBYism. If these protestors really cared about the environment, they would be in favor of wind power, right?
A recent encounter forced me to educate myself a bit better about the problems wind power can cause on pristine ridgelines if it's done carelessly. Like all other forms of power generation, wind power comes with an environmental price tag that can sometimes be quite high.
Running against the wind
I felt some anxiety when the subject came up at my very first Green Mountain Club (GMC) meeting the other night. My husband and I asked for the GMC membership for Christmas (thanks, Dad!) so we could have family time in the woods while also performing a public service--helping with Long Trail maintenance alongside other members of the club's Brattleboro Section. Not so we could get involved in the second most volatile energy issue in Vermont. (The most volatile is the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant I mentioned in my last blog post.) But here we were, between the potluck and the election of officers, listening to recent statewide GMC board president Rich Windish talk about a proposed 21-turbine project in Vermont's remote Northeast Kingdom.
While Rich clarified that the GMC does not have an official position on wind, he also explained that the infrastructure needs of wind turbines are pretty extensive, including access roads that break up wildlife corridors. Stunningly, he compared the way towers are sometimes built on ridgelines to mountaintop removal.
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Because this project is being built very close to the Long Trail (Vermont's precursor to the Appalachian Trail), the GMC got legally involved as an intervener in the permitting process to help ensure that the mountaintop-removal type of development did not happen in the Northeast Kingdom.
The view from Stratton Mountain inspired the creation of both the Long Trail and the Appalachian Trail in the early 20th century. Whether wind towers mar or enhance such views is a subjective matter. (Some of us find the cell tower at the adjacent ski area much uglier.) Photo: Matt Larson for The Boston Globe
The club's involvement has apparently resulted in several environmental safeguards, including mitigation after development as well as decommissioning. Obviously a project of this magnitude will not be able to follow the hikers' "leave no trace" guidelines, but hopefully the GMC's involvement will help them get as close as possible. Even the required lights, which alert pilots to the turbines, will employ a new technology that means they only come on when they are needed. While I'd be pretty excited to ogle turbines from a remote backwoods trail, seeing the lights while I'm trying to enjoy my campfire would not excite me quite so much.
Pretty is as pretty does
While people do talk mostly about habitat damage and noise (the latter seems not to be an issue once they're built in these very remote locations), it surprises me how much of the opposition to wind in Vermont appears to be about aesthetics. Although I don't hike up mountains just for the views, I do enjoy the vistas quite a lot: they are the payoff for a tough climb, and there is no sensation that compares with enjoying a view you can only see by wearing yourself out. Some people seem to find wind towers ugly; they compare their opposition to wind on ridgelines to their opposition to billboards (which are illegal in Vermont, an extremely effective way of preserving the "visual resource" that helps keep the tourist money flowing).
To my way of thinking, though, you can't compare outdoor ads for fireworks and 99-cent fast food with renewable power generation. The costs and benefits don't balance out--and besides, surely I'm not the only person who thinks wind towers add to the landscape rather than detracting from it. It's easy to wrinkle your nose at a huge ridgetop development project when it's not your own state's economy and ecosystems that are being strangled out of existence by global climate change.
Of bats and polar bears
Rare species like this lady's slipper flourish along the mostly untouched Long Trail. Trucks and roads damage such habitat, no doubt about it. How do we weigh such damage against devastation we can't see in other parts of the world?
I would love to link to some charts showing the relative effects of bat deaths on Vermont mountaintops and polar bear deaths in the Artic, but I don't think it's possible to run numbers on such things. However, I think it's safe to say that bats are unlikely to become extinct because of a few wind turbines, but polar bears (and thousands of other species around the world) already face extinction, for lack of them. We're attached, though, to the species that populate our everyday world, and we rightly make it our job to protect them. The trouble is that our power consumption habits are killing a lot of species we seem to think are under other people's care. We need to take ownership of the fact that our way of life is endangering other people's.
These turbines are projected to meet the power demands of 20,000 households while displacing more than 75,000 tons of CO2 per year, according to the developer. While I think it's important to understand the costs as well as the benefits, just saying no is too easy. Maybe it's time to take a hike, look beyond our own ridgelines, and think a little harder about what we're willing to sacrifice to make up for the way we choose to live.
Taking a stand against black-and-white thinking
I am very impressed that GMC has accepted the reality that wind is coming to more ridgelines and has gotten deeply involved--without taking a position. This is a hot-button political issue, and I can't think of a group that is less political than the GMC. Members span the political spectrum, and I'm sure they didn't want to wade into the muck, but the other option would have been to allow an inevitable wind project to be built without having a say in how it's done. Instead of looking at the problems wind can cause and standing in opposition, they used the legal tools at hand and got to work to ensure that commonly held resources would be protected. I guess that makes sense, since one of their main activities is using tools (normally saws rather than legal arguments) to keep common resources open to everyone--which in our section usually involves wading in muck.
I can't help but feel deep trepidation about the far-reaching effects of the American lifestyle on the natural world. No way of feeding our apparently bottomless hunger for electricity is perfect, it seems. But I'm awfully glad that at least one group has decided to take a stand--not for or against wind power, but against making the perfect the enemy of the good.
Robert, I did not say and do not believe tourism alone is economically sustainable for Vermont. Skiing and maple syrup are both climate-dependent, and the long-term effects of climate change on these industries is unknown, among other problems. And as for criticizing other people's economic dependence on coal, I'm not sure where you read me doing that. We are all economically dependent on coal, unless we are conducting all our personal lives and business off the grid. I don't know anyone who manages that, not even the Amish.
I agree with you that we need to keep our eyes on the prize—long-term sustainability. The point I was trying to make is that if we callously ignore the short-term consequences, we are going to alienate people whose livelihoods depend on the industries we'd like to transition away from. Thanks for continuing the conversation; the discussion has brought up a lot of central points not directly addressed in the original post.
The target date of the Stanford WWS energy study should be 2030 (not the dyslexic 3020 I posted above).
But I think you (and most Vermonters) are missing one crucial point I brought up. We (sometimes self-righteously) criticize the economic dependency of other regions on clearly unsustainable practices, such as mountaintop coal extraction, but fail to bring the same analysis to Vermont's unsustainable economic dependency on tourism.
If we wish to protect our local environment for its own sake, that's commendable. But let's not continue the argument that it's also necessary to protect it for our tourism industry - a cash cow that's entirely dependent on fossil-fueled travel. And let's not pretend that ridge-top wind turbines are somehow more aesthetically offensive than the hundreds of mountain-side scars and associated infrastructure that we call ski slopes. That we're accustomed to the latter but not the former doesn't make them less obtrusive or ecologically impactful.
While I completely agree with you that in the long term we must protect our ecology in order to protect our economy, it is also important to acknowledge and understand the short-term and close-to-home effects of pushing for the changes we desire.
These effects are real. When people argue that coal mining is crucial to their economy they are right about that—at least for now. Quite a few highly skilled workers would lose their livelihood if coal mining were to suddenly come to an end. This is real, and we need to find ways to buffer these transitions for people.
But if we can't face these real and sometimes quite painful repercussions, there is no way to move forward, because we don't end up solving those problems productively; we just end up in highly politicized screaming matches with people who share our long-term goals.
Paula, I appreciate your unusually balanced perspective on the energy dilemma, but be careful with statements such as "there is a case to be made that our views are crucial to our economy (through tourism)" since that's the same argument that some Appalachians use about the coal industry. What we need to consider is what's crucial to our ecology, because that is the true basis of all economies, and an argument can be made that out-of-state tourism dollars are no more sustainable for a local economy than resource extraction.
While we tend to want to protect our local ecology (and hence the rampant NIMBYism), we now know that our impacts are global and irreversible. In the big picture, the best analysis of a feasible mix of global Wind, Water & Sun energy sources for the year 3020, performed at Stanford and published in 2009, projected only 6% from rooftop PV, another 34% from centralized PV and concentrating solar, 4% each from hydropower and geothermal, 1% each from wave and tidal generation, and 50% from wind turbines which have the smallest footprint per kWhr and will provide electricity at less than half the cost of PV.
The study evaluated both environmental impacts and health effects as well as land use and cost, and the resource impacts of development (they all require some rare earth elements).
Beautiful ridgelines -- or coastal views, on Cape Cod -- are lovely. But what are the tradeoffs? Does no windpower mean more generation from the Mount Tom coal plant down the road from me, probably responsible for some of the lead in my soil? Or more generation from coal plants farther away -- am I asking folks in Indiana to breathe a few more particulates, and take a little more acid in their rain, to preserve my wilderness views?
Environmentalism shouldn't taste of elitism. And since we're never going to get something for nothing, sometimes we should suck it up and pay part of the price in our own backyard.
Carl, that is just the sort of thing I had in mind.
I would not be so quick to call appreciation of a good view elitist, however—although in practice that is the way NIMBYism often plays out. But in the case of Vermont ridgelines, there is a case to be made that our views are crucial to our economy (through tourism); this may be the case in Cape Cod as well. I suspect that many of the sorts of people who come to Vermont on vacation enjoy a windmill here and there in their view, though. I don't have numbers to back that up, but I have heard anecdotally that Searsburg gets tourists who come specifically to see the turbines.
This is a bit of a dilemma for me. I really enjoy those wilderness views untainted by turbines but I am also very concerned about global warming. But, more of a concern is land use and habitat protection as we eat up the acres not only for wind turbines but for large solar farms as well. We use a lot of electricity in this country. How many ridge lines do we need to fill with turbines and how many square miles of desert and plains do we cover with solar collectors to meet those needs? It seems like smaller scale distributed generation at each users location might be less damaging. Along with a lot more conservation of energy use.
Excellent point, Ton, and that is before you get to the effects of burning the coal after you destroy the mountains (not to mention the valleys below). The comparison of wind development to mountaintop removal is likely an exaggeration, especially in a state with Act 250 (a very strict law that protects Vermont's natural resources from excessive development), but I will have to do more research on the details.
Don, thanks for reminding us about conservation. This is a *huge* piece of the puzzle, and something we need to address more aggressively on the manufacturer side instead of just lecturing people about turning off lights (also important, but that's not the whole picture).I've been reading about some innovative things people are doing to address this as our demand for power for electronics starts to exceed our demand caused by lighting. Look for the May issue of EBN for a couple interesting articles around this topic.
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