US wind energy: Is it a sound energy policy or just a lot of hot Air?

“I would promote wind for power, not damming more rivers,” says actor Ed Begley, Jr. It’s low-cost, renewable, inexhaustible, eco-friendly and emits no greenhouse gases. If banks and energy companies financed wind energy projects, they’d help protect wildlife and habitats, “instead of hurting the Earth for oil,” intones the Rainforest Action Network. If America devoted a mere 1% of its land area to wind turbine farms, it could generate 20% of its electricity from wind, asserts the American Wind Energy Association. And if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. Sadly, equine mirages don’t make sound energy policy. They may generate good sound bites, political polemics and fund-raising appeals. But they don’t generate much electricity.

In the United States, wind power accounts for less than 0.1% of the electricity produced by renewable sources. The hydroelectric projects Mr. Begley opposes generate 99% of all US electricity from renewables and 11% of all US electricity. It’s easy to see why. Wind energy is unreliable. Mother Nature does not always cooperate, and electricity produced on windy days cannot be stored for use during calm periods. That means expensive gas-fired power plants must serve as backup, standing idle most of the time, but ready to kick in whenever the wind dies down. Otherwise brownouts and blackouts disrupt whatever depends on the wind-generated electricity: homes, schools, hospitals, assembly lines, offices, shops, traffic lights. Wind can supplement nuclear, hydro, coal, gas or oil power – but it’s not an alternative.

Wind energy is expensive. England’s Royal Academy of Engineering and Scotland’s David Hume Institute found that wind farm electricity costs twice as much as nuclear or fossil fuel power (including facility decommissioning costs). Similar cost imbalances apply in the US, but subsidies, special tax treatment and laws requiring utilities to purchase wind-generated electricity mask its true costs, notes energy consultant Glenn Schleede. Wind power is land-hungry. A single 555-megawatt gas-fired power plant in California generates more electricity in a year than do all 13,000 of the state’s wind turbines, journalist Ron Bailey has calculated. The gas-fired plant requires a mere 15 acres. The turbine forest impacts 105,000 acres.

Generating 20% of America’s electricity with wind (what it currently gets from nuclear power) makes for good PR or barroom banter. But 1% of the United States is the state of Virginia –23,000,000 acres – whereas all the nuclear plants in the USA take up only 73,000 acres. Furthermore, Wind farms ruin habitats and scenic vistas. Because most are located along escarpments and mountaintops, monstrous turbines the height of the Statue of Liberty destroy aesthetic values. Even wind energy advocates like Senator Ted Kennedy morph into vocal opponents when wind farms are proposed for Cape Cod or other sites in their own backyards.