The Problem with Wind Power

Last month, the National Audubon Society launched a campaign to stop the proposed wind farm. Audubon and other environmental groups are upset because the site is only a few miles from one of the last nesting pairs of California condors. Audubon claims the construction of turbines in “condor pass” could decimate the condor population, much as other wind farms have slaughtered golden eagles, American kestrels, red-tailed hawks, and other birds. According to Audubon, “more eagles are killed by wind turbines than were lost in the disastrous Exxon Valdez oil spill.”

“It is hard to imagine a worse idea than putting a condor Cuisinart next door to critical condor habitat,” Audubon’s David Beard told the press on September 13. An Audubon Web site created for the campaign warns of plans by “Enron, the global energy corporation,” to build “a complex web of giant wind turbines” in the heart of condor habitat. “If Enron gets its way,” the Web site warns, “California condors could be sentenced to death.” Despite Enron’s efforts to cultivate an eco-friendly image, the company is now in the environmentalists’ crosshairs for pursuing alternative energy sources. Billboards in Houston (Enron’s headquarters) and Los Angeles repeat Audubon’s anti-wind message.

Enron says it has no immediate plans to erect the wind turbines in Gorman Pass, though it did file the project with the state. Nonetheless, Audubon is making the defense of “condor pass” one of its primary campaigns this fall. One of the organization’s goals is to cut off federal tax subsidies for wind projects in ecologically sensitive areas. The federal government spends over $ 1 million per year on condor conservation, while state and federal tax incentives subsidize projects that could put condors at greater risk. The federal wind energy tax credit, which environmentalists supported for years, expired earlier this year. Several members of Congress have sought to renew it as part of a tax-cut package in the current Congress.

Evidence of bird kills at wind farms isn’t new. In 1994, Wind Power Monthly published a grisly photo of a bird shredded at a wind farm in Tarifa, Spain. The problem for wind power is that the same currents that power wind turbines help keep condors, eagles, and other soaring species aloft. Thus the best sites for wind power generation are also the most likely to present bird problems. Experts have sought to develop bird-friendly wind turbines for years, with little success. Bird mortality at wind power sites, such as Altamont Pass in northern California, remains substantial. At the same time, wind power’s cost is above that of fossil fuels for most applications.

Not all environmentalists, however, view the bird problem as a deal-breaker in the effort to promote alternative energy resources. The Sierra Club calls for turning much of the midwest into the “Saudi Arabia of wind power.” The Union of Concerned Scientists Web site contains an extensive discussion of wind power and other renewable energy sources, and yet there is no discussion of the bird kill problem. Likewise at the National Environment Trust’s new “hot earth” Web site, which promotes wind as a “solution” to global warming.

Wind energy is now inching toward economic viability — production costs have dropped approximately 70 percent since the early 1980s. Political support is also reaching a tipping point: Most electricity reform proposals circulating in Congress require utilities to generate a minimum percentage of power from “green” sources, including wind. With these breakthroughs in sight, green complaints start to rise.

This is a recurring pattern in the environmental establishment’s approach to energy. In the 1970s, hydropower was hailed as a clean, renewable source of power. Although environmental groups opposed many large dam projects, hydropower was praised as the wave of the future. No longer. Today hydropower is conspicuously absent from most lists of “green” power. The “hot earth” site makes no mention of hydro in its discussion of renewable energy sources. At the same time that the Sierra Club and other groups claim America needs to develop alternatives to fossil fuels, they are calling for the removal of dams from coast to coast. Talk of new hydro projects, whether here or abroad, is verboten in environmental circles.

Take the example of China. The Asian giant has tremendous coal reserves, which it is likely to burn as it seeks entrance to the club of developed nations. Coal is the most carbon-intensive fuel around, and China already emits several times as much carbon dioxide per unit of economic output as the United States. One would think environmentalists might prefer some alternative. Yet green groups have been steadfast in their opposition to China’s Three gorges Dam, the largest hydropower project ever proposed. Burning coal is bad in their eyes, but not bad enough to justify building a giant dam.

Environmental activists claim the reduction of industrial emissions of carbon dioxide and other green-house gases must be the nation’s foremost environmental priority. What, then, explains environmentalist opposition to efforts to develop sources of energy that don’t emit greenhouse gases? In their more frank moments, it seems to be an opposition to energy use in general. As then senator Tim Wirth, who later oversaw international environmental policy for the Clinton administration, told the National Journal in 1988, “We’ve got to . . . try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, to have approached global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we will be doing the right thing anyway.”

Fears of global warming may be sufficient to limit continued use of fossil fuels, if the Kyoto Protocol is adopted, but they cannot justify limits on wind, nuclear, hydro, or — next up on the block — solar energy sources. Hence new environmental concerns are hyped to keep additional energy supplies out of reach.

Allowing humanity a cheap, inexhaustible source of energy, in the words of Paul Ehrlich, is “like giving a machine gun to an idiot child.” “It’s the worst thing that could happen to our planet,” Luddite activist Jeremy Rifkin told the Los Angeles Times. It appears that the only “alternative” energy sources the environmental establishment will support are those alternatives we haven’t got.