Where does clean energy come from? Dirty places. Some of the cleanest energy sources — wind turbines, for example — come from some of the dirtiest places. Take those basic three-megawatt wind turbines — the gleaming white towers that march in majestic phalanx over hill and dale, gracefully etching three-bladed Mercedes-Benz emblems against the azure sky (or those ugly, noisy, bird-killing scythes that desecrate land and water, take your pick). Where do we get one of those?
The bank, first. Or the U.S. Department of Energy, for a subsidy from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. You’ll pay about $4 million to $4.5 million to install a three-megawatt wind turbine (more for all the bells and whistles, like a taller tower, de-icing for cold weather operation, and self-adjusting blades to catch the wind better). Figure another $1 million for incidentals such as Big Green lawsuits.
Now, to work: We start at the limestone quarry that feeds the cement plant, and the crusher that feeds blast furnace slag and crushed gravel aggregate into the cement-mixing trucks — running on fossil fuels — that pour 1,200 tons of concrete into an exquisitely engineered hole in the ground to anchor the huge tubular steel tower.
Now comes some 335 tons of steel for the 300-foot tower, manufactured in sections of about 75 feet, with flanges at either end, and bolted together on the site. The steel starts as iron, perhaps gouged from the open-pit mines of Minnesota. The ore is processed, usually in a blast furnace, to remove impurities such as sulfur, phosphorus and excess carbon, and finally, alloying elements are added, such as manganese, nickel, chromium and vanadium, to produce the exact steel required.
Since the turbine on top of this stick generates electricity, you’d correctly expect copper wire to show up somewhere in the rig — there are about 4.7 tons of it, actually. The copper starts as ore from an open-pit mine, which is blasted, loaded and transported to crushers by fossil-fuel-powered machinery.
The crushed ore is screened, and then things get a little complicated. Fine ore goes one way and coarser ore goes another, where it gets a bath in dilute sulfuric acid solution to dissolve the copper, which is extracted by an electrical process with another chemical, and — well, you get the picture. It’s industrial.
Up on top, the generator’s covering nacelle and the blades contain about three tons of aluminum, which is dug out of the ground as the mineral bauxite, soaked in a solution of hot sodium hydroxide, then treated by bubbling carbon dioxide into the solution, and then goes through a lot of other stuff only a chemical engineer could love.
Inside the generator are magnets that require about two tons of rare earth elements blasted out of big open-pit mines, mostly neodymium and praseodymium, elements that create high magnetic force at low weight. We get them from China in big boats that burn tons of Bunker C fuel oil. China produces 97 percent of the world’s rare earth elements with strict export quotas. We’re restarting old mines to get them here, but suicidal environmental restrictions have strangled American mineral production to the point that we have to import most of our titanium, silver, zinc, cobalt, platinum and even aluminum.
But now to the happy ending of our wind turbine story: You take all this stuff you got out of the dirty, filthy earth, put it together, hook it up to the power grid — at $1 million per mile of power transmission line — and wait for the wind to blow.
Then, voila! Clean energy.
Examiner Columnist Ron Arnold is executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.
